We all know Amazon, and how huge they’ve become, and they have a range of Amazon branded
stuff.
And I had some credit to use on their said own branded products, so I decided to quickly
check this out, the AmazonBasics gaming mechanical keyboard.
Alright so straight away we can tell that it’s pretty generic, and is the sort of
design that we’ve seen a lot, made famous by Corsair.
It has an aluminium plate, so there’s no real flex to it, but there is a lot of creecking.
And that plate is also the mounting plate for the keyswitches, so it has a floating
key design, with said switches exposed from the sides.
And yeh, it is quite an aggressive aesthetic, and is one of the main reasons I’ve avoided
Corsair boards, purely just because I personally don’t really like how they look.
But as always looks are subjective.
It does include a wrist rest, or palm rest.
And to remove it, you have to unscrew 2 Phillips head screws.
A little inconvenient, but at least it is more secure.
And it has this dimpled finish, which is slightly rubberised.
Also on the bottom, there’s some rubber feet for non-slip, and 2 flip up feet that
are unfortunately not rubber tipped.
On the back there’s a non-removable USB cable, but it is braided and not to thick
which is nice.
Amazon only offer this full sized option, and this has a completely standard ANSI layout,
so you could easily replace the keycaps if you wanted to.
But we also have the addition of the programmable macro keys on the left hand side.
Always super useful if you do have a use for them.
And it doesn’t need to be just gaming, they’re useful for like shortcuts in programs and
stuff like that.
To do that you need to download the software.
They did include the CD in the box, but I don’t have that on my laptop.
So then they give a link inside the box, which just goes to the product page, and it’s
right there.
Okay, so we have 5 profiles that we can customise.
If we look back at the keyboard this M button here changes between those profiles.
And by the way this is the worst button I’ve come across on like anything.
There’s no click or real tactile feedback.
Super shallow and super mushy.
Quite impressive actually.
Back to the software, and it isn’t as straightforward as most other keyboard software suites.
So you can’t just click on a key and change the function of it.
Instead you have to use the macro manager and then go ahead and do whatever you want,
which includes delays and all that stuff.
In the sensitivity section we can change the polling and repeat rates.
And then this does of course have RGB backlighting, so we have a bunch of effects and patterns
available, and we can even customise each key which is pretty cool.
The keycaps are made from pretty thin 1mm ABS plastic, and are the coated and laser
etched kind, so pretty much the bottom of the pack, as they’ll get shiny and legends
will fade overtime.
And underneath the caps we have the good old Outemu Blue keyswitches.
So just a Cherry MX clone, and pretty close to a Cherry MX Blue, being clicky.
The stabs are pretty rattly, but since they only come in Blue switches, they pretty much
mask most of that sound.
Other little things.
There’s a bunch of media controls up top, and is accessible via the FN key.
The lock indicator LEDs are super weird.
They look like buttons, but they’re not, so yeh.
And that’s pretty much it.
Just a quick review on it.
It comes in at $59.89USD, and I’d say that’s a fairish price for what you get.
You still have RGB backlighting, it does have software which allows for a bit of customisation.
There’s the extra macro keys which can be useful.
And I guess the wrist rest adds a bit of value.
But Amazon being Amazon, there is so much more available on their website, and also
other keyswitch choices with other brands.
And I just feel that it’s quite generic and Amazon just slapped their brand on.
But I guess if you like the look if it, then sure it is a decent option, as it does have
quite a few features that some other budget alternatives do not.
Probably not a board that most of you are interested in, but I just wanted to cover
it, since I feel that it’s something newbies will come across on Amazon and don’t know
about all this stuff.
So yeh, something a bit different for this video.
As I’ve said before, I just want to get information out there for people to make more
informed decisions.