Welcome back to nearlucid. Today we’ll be reviewing the gamakay K77,
a budget friendly and very very bright keyboard. This board was provided by banggood,
but as always, that will not influence our opinion or statements in any way.
Let's start with unboxing. There's nothing special. The board is inside a plastic bag here,
and included is also a USB to USBC cable, keycap and switch puller, and a brush of some sort.
These are going into the trash immediately, I would always recommend using your own tools
and cable. And here is the board itself. For a prebuilt of this size, the weight is fair,
and it looks really interesting with its unusual layout and stacked acrylic case.
So onto some basic specs. The k77 comes with your choice of gateron black,
blue, brown, red, or yellow switches, and is hotswappable,
but unfortunately with north facing sockets. I’ll get to why this is an issue later.
It uses USBC on the right side, which is always good to see. The plate is acrylic
and only supports plate mounted stabilizers. Every configuration is roughly 80 dollars.
Today our k77 has gateron yellows, and before we get into the review and modding,
let’s perform a stock sound test, right out of the box, unmodified.
Honestly, I don’t think it’s too bad. I find that stacked acrylic cases sound
very muted, since it’s just plastic on plastic. The stabilizers are very rattly,
but since they’re plate mounted, they’re easy enough to swap out. And the feel of stock gateron
yellows isn’t too bad, and I would say they’re decently smoother than some other stock switches.
Before we start modding, let's do a quick review of the features,
starting with the exterior design and layout. The board itself is four pieces of acrylic,
all screwed together with these screws on the bottom. It’s slightly angled, but only due to
the massive rear bumpers that look kinda weird from the side. I would definitely prefer for
these to be acrylic, like on the gentleman, so it would match with the rest of the board better.
And with this semi transparent case, RGB is diffused incredibly well, allowing for extremely
bright lighting effects. These can be controlled through gamakay’s own lighting software,
which is linked in the description below. This didn’t install correctly for me, and I
ended up just having to use the key combinations found in the manual to change the lighting.
This layout is very unique, and I actually quite like it. I’ve always liked the look of
the function row-less boards, just because of how wide they look, and this board takes that
up a notch and replaces the nav cluster with a full on number pad. For practicality purposes
I guess this varies a lot, and since it still retains the arrow keys I ultimately don’t mind.
Typing feel is fairly stiff because of the rigidness of the stacked acrylic,
but not super solid like a metal plate. Like all stacked acrylic boards, there’s no room for flex,
so soft board enjoyers may feel disappointed, but if you’re coming from a prebuilt with a
very solid plate, the step down in stiffness may be a welcome change.
The included keycaps are OEM profile ABS shine through, and are pretty thin and
cheap feeling. I would definitely swap these out for a set of your preference. The issue
with the hotswap socket being north facing is that if you want to use cherry profile keycaps,
which I recommend for the most optimal sound, you will have to find a switch with a long pole,
which is a switch that doesn’t go all the way down when fully pressed.
Otherwise, you’ll run into keycap and switch interference, and it’ll sound and feel awful.
And with that we can start modding. We’re going to ditch both the plate mounted stabilizers and
stock gateron yellows and replace them with tuned everglide pandas. For switches I’m going
to use holy bobas, which do have a long pole so I am free to use any cherry profile set I want.
I'm going to be using GMK white on black, just because I want a neutral set that can match with
any RGB setting the board is set to. Now, let’s take the screws out
And do the tempest tape mod on the PCB. This is a great mod for improving sound on beginner boards,
and we did make an in-depth video explaining how to perform the mod and how it affects sound,
so be sure to watch that first if you want more information. I’m going to use around 3 layers.
The PE foam mod doesn’t really work on this board since the plate is extra thick and the switches
will just pop out, but I did manually PE foam by cutting tiny foam squares for every switch socket.
Now here’s a sound test with tape mod, PE foam mod, tuned everglide pandas, Holy Bobas, and GMK.
Not sure if I entirely like it. The sound seems super inconsistent across each row,
which is quite interesting. Black keycaps on polycarbonate looks alright, but I think I would still rather have something light gray like modern dolch light,
or better yet, ascii. And because of the LED placement, even though the keycaps aren't
shine through, the lighting still looks great. So with this board having a thick plate and
north facing switches, it’s not the easiest in the world to mod. But if the extreme RGB
of the k77 is something you’re into, I would definitely not knock it as a budget option.
And that’s all I have for you today. Thanks for watching this episode of nearlucid. If you liked
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