u/BSGYT

IQUNIX sent me an EV63 for free for my thoughts. They specified that there were no strings attached and they were not looking for an ad, but were ‘hoping’ for a review. We’ll get into that later*.

I went with the EV63 in their black & translucent “Dark Knight” colorway because it would match my desk and mesh nicely with most keycap sets, and opted for the Magnetic X Ultra switches because I’ve never tried a speed-oriented gaming build and I wanted to see what optimal conditions looked like without having to get aftermarket switches.

Some personal preferences and biases:

1. I have never used a Hall Effect keyboard before. I have no sense of what is reasonable and unreasonable on the market* and for this price point, which inherently compromises any verdict of mine based on economics and potentially lacking features. Instead of forming my own opinions which I do not feel confident could be fair to either manufacturer or consumer, I am primarily relying on Eyejoker DB and other independent sources for these considerations in my verdict.
2. I do not play competitive FPS games as much as I used to*, testing this board primarily on games like Ghost Recon Wildlands, Battlefield 4, Cruelty Squad, and other titles. At my prime I primarily played Escape From Tarkov, a primarily tactical game with less emphasis on movement unlike modern games like Valorant or Counter Strike which this board is marketed heavily toward.
3. I am a Linux user. Linux is not officially supported on the EV63, but I got it to work anyway on my devices.

Aesthetics

The “frosted” PC keycaps sound and feel just fine, and polycarbonate as a material is quite sturdy, with higher thicknesses and densities being used for stuff like riot shields and speedboat windshields. Initial impressions are that it is a bit more of a grippy material compared to smoother PBT and ABS materials, which is great for gaming.

The carbon fiber panel is neat. Unless you have very small hands or hold the keyboard at a crazy angle you will never find yourself touching it or resting your fingers/palm on it. It’s a decorative feature and it is a good quality one.

I’m not personally a fan of the exaggerated contouring and proportions of “gamer” hardware, but this entire board is easily one of the more tasteful executions of it I’ve seen, and I mean that genuinely. This goes for the EZ series of boards too, actually. IQUNIX makes some really nice looking boards.

The RGB is fairly lackluster, which is amplified by the default pastel color scheme the board starts with which remains throughout most color schemes but can be adjusted. My prebuilt Keychron TKL board I got for 75 USD comes with lights that are brighter, which is kind of a bummer considering that board is marketed for typists and casual office workers with an old-school beige color scheme and doesn’t even have see-through keycaps. The RGB on that board is practically an afterthought and I only use it to light up one key, my red escape key, and it still stands out and looks much higher quality next to the EV63. Normally I couldn’t care less but for a keyboard designed and marketed specifically for gaming that costs $170-$210, this is completely unreasonable. Literally the first thing you picture when someone says “Gaming Keyboard” is obnoxious rainbow colored lights. The lights do the trick, for the record. I do not find this to be a dealbreaker at all, it’s just a bummer because strong LEDs have become really cheap in recent years and it's a pretty easy off-the-shelf change.

Form Factor & Construction

First and foremost, I like the materials. It’s an aluminium keyboard, quite hefty, and will not move unless you put proper force into it. This can be an upside or a downside depending on the user, personally I do sometimes adjust the position of my keyboard quite a bit under use, but the fact it just doesn’t budge at all when I’ve got a good spot is nice. I imagine this is important in competitive esports where you have a lot of rapid, jerky movements.

Second, there is no stand for adjusting the height. It came with little adhesive rubber pads but I don’t really know how to use them and I can’t imagine they’d do me any favors. This is a genuine downside for me, as I like to keep my keyboards high and at a very specific angle. I get that setting up a reliable stand in a fully CNC’d case with faux-skeletonized detailing isn’t exactly a fun design challenge, but man, it’s something I immediately noticed setting it up and I still miss it. I found myself mostly dailying my Keychron because of it.

As for the layout, the 63% is an interesting interpretation of the classic design challenge “How do you retain as much functionality and comfort whilst shrinking the standard ansi layout into 60 keys or less?”. For me, the answer is without question the HHKB layout, as it addresses a lot of the most pressing issues that present themselves with just cutting off everything surrounding the core 60% of the layout. On the EV63’s layout, a lot of the design decisions address the same issues, mainly the arrow key cluster and an intuitively placed function key. Clearly optimised for gaming and left hand usage above all, on the EV63, the right shift key has been chopped into three 1u keys, and the right-alt & right-meta keys have shrunk down to 1u as well. The result is actually a lot cleaner than I would have thought, and the right shift key being cut up also means you can place a function key in the same place as the HHKB layout, which I really like.

Bizarrely, though, the left shift key seems to be slightly smaller than most standard shift keys. The mounting points are the same, but the width is different, so a standard shift key will work but the other keys around it won’t fit. I don’t know if this is some weird standard or genuinely just a proprietary keycap width, but either way, it’s another unnecessary hurdle in finding a replacement or aftermarket keycap set which you really don’t want in this price range.

Firmware & Software

Initially, I did not manage to set this keyboard up on my Linux PC, and had to plug it into my work laptop I need to run Windows on for my job first to configure it and set it up. After that though, it worked! It is, in fact, Linux compatible, which gets a thumbs up from me, especially as I was convinced it didn’t at first when I tried it and it didn’t work, and had written a whole portion of the review about it. It still takes a second or two to initialise when plugged into a new or older computer, and it has at times been unresponsive when navigating the BIOS, but boot once and this’ll go away.

As for the app itself, like you can expect with most modern boards, it relies on a “web app” accessible via a Chromium browser (Firefox and derivatives, such as Librewolf, will not work). I won’t dwell on the pros and cons of this as it’s industry standard and I generally consider it a good choice, though as someone who mains some variant of Firefox for all my devices, it does mean I have to install a Chromium-based browser just to configure the keyboard, essentially eliminating the perceived benefit of needing dedicated software that takes up space on your PC and overall contributes to bloat. However, you still lose the safety net that comes with having the software installed on your actual PC, where even 10 years from now if the website is defunct and the company is bankrupt, you can still configure your keyboard even if it isn’t necessarily open source.

The app is fine. It’s a familiar, clean and easy to navigate little website with lots of different options. There are all sorts of little niceties like being able to select icons for your custom profiles and other gimmicks. They even let you pick presets supposedly used by professional esports players, though don’t tell you what their actual names are, just kind of like, their likeness. Which is a little weird, but whatever lol.

Switches & Typing

These switches, the Magnetic X Ultra are the nicest linear switches I have ever typed on in my life. They are silk smooth, and whilst my palette as a casual gamer and relatively new keyboard enthusiast is quite limited, having mostly only tried friends’ massive switch testing boards and a few of my own and other people’s boards*, I have no problem saying this is easily one of the nicest typing experiences I’ve had, and the sound is genuinely excellent.

Typing is soft and frictionless, and without much getting used to the board I was gliding through ~100 WPM, marginally surpassing my average of 96 on my favorite typing keyboard. It felt great and the weight/resistance is a nice sweet spot. Stem tolerancing is nice and tight, which is great in general but especially good if you prefer taller keycaps like me. Do be aware though, that I struggled to get a standard shift key from a Keychron OSA profile keycap onto the board for testing, which is a shame, because these switches lend themselves really nicely to a tall, deep keycap with their sound profile.

The customizable actuation distance is crazy with stuff as light as the 0.1mm distance, causing me to register keys just by resting my finger on them while using others. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever tried and playing around with a hair trigger has been really fun. I’m a heavy typer though so I just set mine to the bottom for day-to-day use, but have set it much further up for gaming nights with friends, leaving it somewhere around one-third from the top for important keys like the delete key and caps lock. Being able to switch profiles using a function key shortcut is really nice in this instance.

I will say, with a 0.1mm actuation distance, it does make for literally the only time I’ve been able to tolerate driving with the WASD keys in a racing game, and I did manage to do a little drifting in FH6 without it feeling like I was driving drunk. There’s a lot of phantom double taps though, but I don’t think there’s any way around that at sensitivities like these.

At a little above halfway total actuation distance it starts making a lot more sense for me. I played through quite a few intense moments while gaming with friends and doing some challenge runs on different games, and at no point did I feel the keyboard was in the way, my brain was sending locomotive input that was just translating immediately, and it was really nice. At that moment, I think I really understood the appeal of a board like this. That being said, tactile switches are still my everyday preference, but I still find myself switching to this board whenever I’m playing any kind of FPS just because it’s a lot more intuitive.

*So why send it to me? No marketing decision, even in a niche hobby space, is unintentional. IQUNIX has diverted resources to distributing these keyboards to other reddit keyboard enthusiasts (at least two others by my account), and one of them was me. The reviews I did find were done by experienced, but not full-time, reviewers. However, *I* had very little posting history at the time, only one “build”, a prebuilt Keychron which I had just received at the time. So why send it to a plebian like me? I have two theories:

1. Their standards for who gets a free review copy are quite low. For the record, there is nothing wrong with this, but it does cultivate a very specific situation in which an audience that is potentially easily impressed are put in a context in which the product is shown in the most ideal of circumstances and are incentivized to speak more positively about the product. If you are an inexperienced or first-time reviewer especially, there is a (natural, non-explicit) pressure to write positively about the product, in hopes of signalling to other brands that you are an eligible candidate for more free products for review. Of course, you are less likely to have the wider range of experience that professional reviewers have, another inclination toward representing the board positively. If such a marketing practice does not align with your values, the circumstances in which I received this board is worth being aware of.

Or

1. I was not really supposed to receive this keyboard, and I was flagged for review by mistake. This would be completely understandable and if it’s the case, they followed through and let me pick up a board with basically the most expensive set of options regardless, which is cool of them.

Verdict: The board is obviously great in a vacuum, but if you are serious about HE you will inevitably be looking at it compared to its competitors, which is where the board begins to potentially fall short in the price range it’s in. With the new V3 firmware, the performance of this board on a purely technical level has allegedly increased drastically, but I could not find independent and proper testing sources that could confirm this at the time of writing. Eyejoker DB, an experienced and trusted review site, have not taken a look at the EV63 yet, but their thoughts on the EZ60/63/80 have been less than stellar, choosing not to recommend it because of its price to performance ratio. If you are reading this in the future, check if they have taken another look at the board(s) and what kind of numbers they (and others, like Laobaozi, which I’m told is another good source for information on HE) have managed to produce.

Firmware can make or break a HE keyboard and even if initial specs are underwhelming, updates can fix it, as we’ve seen with ATK gear. I am not an expert on this by any means, and I apologise for not being able to produce my own assessment, but I would rather admit my limitations in the interest of transparency.

Personally, if TMR technologies made economic sense, I’d easily prefer that over HE for the fact you can use bog standard conventional MX style switches if your fancy stuff ever dies, which is important for someone like me who prioritises long-term economics and reusability, but they just don’t seem to be up to snuff with HE boards in terms of the kind of performance you look for in a TMR/HE board, where that compromise is worth it yet. HE still reigns supreme if the things it offers are genuinely important for you.

Anyway, If you can get it for a more reasonable price on sale or used, absolutely go for it. The build is nice, the materials are nice, it looks fine, sounds good and does everything it’s marketed to do. It is by no means a bad keyboard, in fact, it’s a great keyboard, but price-wise its cost-to-performance ratio is too uncertain compared to its competitors.

I am very grateful to IQUNIX for sending me this board. Testing it and using it has been an absolute pleasure.

Installed KDE, ended up not liking it at all, so I ran a command to remove it. Rebooted and now cinnamon doesn't load. How do I fix this?

Nicest sounding keyboard I've ever heard with my own ears. Here's to my new daily driver for years to come!

On April 7th I ordered a Keychron C1 Pro from InputGear, formerly CandyKeys, a company which I have found out has a consistent history of failing to deliver their products and being terrible with support, not answering emails, dodging refund requests, etc. Had I known this, I would not have placed my order, and after my package was returned due to an "incorrect shipping address", it is now May 1st and my keyboard is nowhere to be found. Last I heard from their support, their CEO, David, told me 4 days ago (a Tuesday) that they would send me my Keyboard and provide a tracking link. They have been active on social media and updated their website since then, so they just straight up are not answering my emails asking where the board is.

Beware of this company. I do not recommend buying from them.

Update: Have done a chargeback after a lot of comments recommending it. Bought the same keyboard but directly from www.keychron.co.nl and it's significantly cheaper. I should've just done so in the first place.