gaming keyboards don't have to look like this or this or oh God not that.
what if I told you gaming keyboards could look something like wait enhance like this?
meet huhi a pro League of Legends player hi guys oh and his dogs Dandy and Haru don't worry they're
important later this story starts with a tweet and a howdy hey I'm hippiotech and in this video
I'm going to be showing you that gaming keyboards don't have to look like this by building huhi not
one not two oh God but four keyboards I'll explain why it's four it'll make a lot of sense later oh
yeah did I mention it cost almost three grand also I can hear you thinking hip yo keyboards
have gaming things like macros and and latency and stuff I'll talk about that in a bit if you want to
see how I built these keyboards and how you can build one of your own then stick around speaking
of building if I build a million subscribers this year I'll dye my hair blue so the 69 of you that
haven't subscribed go ahead and hit that oh yeah now as I mentioned before this Story begins with
a tweet who he tweeted out that he was looking to build a custom keyboard and I said howdy hey
and sliding his DMS he's a pro League of Legends player and what can I say I really like League
of Legends unfortunately but there's a catch it's November right now and he needs them by
January which is a very tight schedule for custom keyboards with the goal of building him a keyboard
it was time to set out on a journey what keyboard what switches what keycaps oh my God it's anything
first it was time to start with the keyboard with keyboards there's a variety of layouts
that you can go with and who he wanted a tkl layout next he wanted a custom engraving of his
dogs so I needed a board that I could actually get custom engraved now because custom engraving is so
ridiculous this actually narrowed things down a lot for me so I ended up going with the promise
87. now you're still probably wondering why he wanted four of them well the simple explanation
is that he needed two for the League of Legends offices one for home and one for his own office
yeah that only covers one of the three parts but don't worry we'll get into the other two
parts later first let's talk about how we got the keyboards so wuche Studios has been a sponsor of
mine in the past so I reached out to them and said hey I'm building a keyboard for a pro player can
you help me customize it and they were like yeah sure one keyboard yeah that's fine and
then I was like can you do four and they were like oh yeah sure that's fine and I was like wow okay
that was way easier than I was expecting now this keyboard comes in at a whopping 540 dollars for
the bespoke Edition that I'll leave down below you can actually get it customized yourself they do it
in very small batches though so keep an eye out for restocks now if you want a custom keyboard of
your own but are on a budget then I recommend you check out the video in the top right after this
video where I talk about my favorite keyboards of all of the ones I tried last year but with
this keyboard we are going absolutely all out speaking of all out there were a lot of extras
in every keyboard also as you watch this imagine me doing this four times this I was definitely in
over my head for this one way in over my head so this journey started back in November when
we started picking out keyboard parts and such and I had these boards in my hand the roughly
mid-December now the promise 87 is definitely one of the most beautiful keyboards that I've
ever built and yes that is a real grown Crystal like one of the conflict-free ones that doesn't
involve murder and overall the design of this board is absolutely stunning I figured if I was
building a keyboard for a pro player this keyboard better step up to the bat and look Pro you know
if you're trying to think of why the diamond makes sense you know I was gonna say oh he's
diamond in League of Legends but he's way better than Diamond so I kind of lost that speaking of
things that are lost you might lose yourself if you look into this keyboard's back plate as it's
a beautiful beautiful mirror one massive request from huhi is that he wanted his dogs Dandy and
Haru on his keyboards so we took the pictures of his dogs and we had the designers over at wuche
Studios do up a nice little vectorized rendering now this combined with the PVD mirror gold finish
means that the back of these keyboards is apps absolutely gorgeous and definitely a fingerprint
magnet speaking of fingerprints well this is kind of a stamp print all of the accessories
on this board were sealed with a wax seal which is a very luxurious touch but now it's time to
talk about an arduous part of the build lubing the stabilizers which I'm gonna magically do Why
didn't it happen oh no no don't teleport me to the Lube Dimension no no okay so really fast I'm
gonna teach you how to Loop keyboard stabilizers if you don't know what's going on here trust me
you'll want to know what's going on here all I do is take a light layer of cry talks to a five grade
zero I brush it on the inside of a stabilizer housing and then I brush a really thick layer
on the little wires you're probably wondering why am I doing this why are you doing this hip yo well
these stabilizers are the most important part of any keyboard build properly Lube stabilizers mean
that your big Keys like your space bar shift Etc do not Rattle and remain really consistent
I genuinely spent a whole entire day lubing and tuning the stabilizers for
every one of these boards a whole day but that's just because I wanted them to feel
exactly identical for you it would only take about 30 minutes now it's time for part two
switches now switches are one of the most important parts of any keyboard and honestly a lot
of gaming keyboards do have decent switches like take a look at some of the Asus boards or looting
now who he had clicky switches and just honestly claky switches or tactile switches aren't really
the best for gaming but it is totally subjective But ultimately we decided on a mid-weight linear
switch when picking switches yourself things to look for are spring weight so it's how heavy it
is to press travel distance which means it would actuate faster Etc now I'm going to be perfectly
honest with you I didn't feel like looping 348 switches myself so I went with the best possible
Factory Lube switch I think of that I've tried okay there might be better switches these are WS
yellows and I'll have them linked down below they come in a bunch of different spring weights and
they also have tactiles and stuff as well also you're probably wondering what I'm doing right
now well I'm attaching the gaskets and there's a cat foot this board is a gasket mounted keyboard
and there's a variety idea of mounting Styles and keyboards but gasket Mount basically means that
it's going to be a little bit more dampened and oh here comes the cap but yeah it'll be a little
bit more dampened and a little bit softer to type on additionally to dampen the keyboard so
it's not too loud because nobody wants to be the guy in a gaming group that's too loud looking at
you so I'll be adding some foam to the keyboard just to give it that semi dampen sound but not
too much foam so that I take away the gasket performance it's still relatively flexible now
fine-tuning custom keyboard sounds is one of the things that I enjoy the most about custom
keyboards and you could do this to a standard gaming keyboard if you take it apart and fill
it with foam and stuff but it's just a little bit easier when you're already building it anyways now
again I don't hate gaming keyboards there are some very good gaming keyboards out there but you know
wouldn't you rather have your gaming keyboard look like this with a diamond or something else
I mean just being able to customize it at all is relatively cool yeah and that brings us to part
three keycaps keycaps are where this video gets a little bit more difficult so we went through a ton
of different keycaps at Aesthetics to pick two of huhi's favorites first we have gmk godspeed which
is from drop and second we have polycaps hippo which I swear this was not an industry plant he
picked this from the keycap sets that I showed him of course I did show him this I mean come
on it's my keycap set keycap sets come in a bunch of different profiles and two main materials now
these are cherry profile keycaps and the hippo keycaps are in PBT whereas the gmk keycaps are
in ABS there is a minuscule feel difference and a kind of substantial sound difference between abs
and PBT But ultimately after testing out both of them I didn't feel like it was a very big issue
and I don't think who he did either and neither did NOLA who had a great time helping me build
the keyboards if you want a whole video of Nola helping me build a keyboard I'll put it in the
top right also a bonus fact about this keyboard it uses a 7u space spacebar which is just a little
bit bigger than your standard space bar I thought that would be kind of helpful for having an easier
reach to the spacebar also the deadline of January 19th was coming up very very fast I got very sick
over Christmas time so I kind of just lost two weeks of build time but I did manage to scrounge
together the builds the first build well the Haru build is a beautiful blue and tan and the second
build the Dandy build is a lovely lovely lavender now you're probably thinking hippo that's that's
only two boards and he built him four well I did build two identical copies of each set as
I mentioned before he's a pro League of Legends player and the LCS which is their league requires
them to have two of the same keyboard constantly on hand and of course because he wants to practice
on the same keyboard when he's not playing professionally he also needs one of the same
keyboard at his offices and one at home that did take like eight minutes to explain my bad
I probably should have explained that earlier but look at the squishy keyboard it's kind of squishy
one of the strongest arguments against using a custom keyboard is that the input lack is too
high now while it is true that some keyboards have less input lag than others this keyboard compared
to something like the Razer black widow mini is actually better I'm really oversimplifying this
here but most mechanical keyboards will have a similar enough latency it's not the same for
every keyboard but on average you're looking at a difference of 10 milliseconds or so the biggest
exception being switches like the hall effect switches that'll have a meaningful impact now
obviously with each of these keyboards costing roughly 700 each do I necessarily recommend
everybody go out and build the 700 keyboard no but what you can do is use some of these
techniques and apply them to more budget boards for example these keyboards offer the finest
materials impeccable sound quality a great typing experience but you can also get just good enough
and all of that for significantly cheaper but you just might not get a custom engraved dog on
the back now one thing you can get for relatively cheap is my line of desk mats at kineticlabs.com
I've got three different desk mats that ship right now for only 23.99 check them out and now
it's time for part four what's huhi's thoughts on all of the keyboards hi guys I'm Hui and I
just got my custom build keyboard and I'm really excited how it looks I think this one I got two
version and this one and damn this looks so good oh my God it's so heavy and then wow actually so
it's my first custom keyboard so it's Dandy it is purple so I got basically two same boards big
[Applause]
people made it work so [Applause] thank you
so what did we learn today gaming keyboards don't have to look like gaming keyboards and
thankfully who he really likes them now listen if you like the look of your gaming keyboard
that's fine keep liking it that's totally okay but leave a comment as to why you like it I'd
love to know why is it the RGB next I'm going to leave you with a sound test of what the two
different keyboards sound like let me know if you can spot any difference between them
[Applause]