Luminkey Magger68 Plus HE Review: Mechanical Heart

Once the settings are adjusted correctly, though, this keyboard works incredibly well. Each switch’s actuation distance can be manually adjusted, meaning it can register a keypress anywhere from the very top to the very bottom of the keypress, and multiple inputs can even be mapped to different distances. The keyboard is responsive with an 8,000-Hz polling rate, and the low latency rarely produces any significant input lag.

This keyboard is wired only, which may be a dealbreaker for some. It’s a fairly thick, all-metal keyboard with a significant focus on high-speed use, none of which is necessary for a portable keyboard. While wireless would be nice, it would increase the price and complexity of this keyboard.

RGB lighting has over 20 built-in presets and they all work well, but the color isn’t perfect. When adjusting the lighting settings, almost all of them seem heavily skewed towards a cyan/blue color. This is probably due to the light blue housing of the magnetic Z switch, which is unavoidable without using different switches, but without the switch, the LEDs seem a bit cooler than a true neutral white.

These effects combine to create a keyboard that struggles for a pure white color even after serious tweaking, especially since the RGB adjustments are easily overwhelmed and start to lag when moving your cursor over the color wheel. The closest I could get to a pure white was with an RGB setting [255, 60, 90]Which still had a slightly cool glow to it. When set to a low speed “breathe” setting with this color, the light fades out as it fades and gradually turns red as it darkens rather than maintaining the preset color. When set to a faster speed and using a more standard color setting (such as solid blue or green), these quirks disappear.

Internal assembly

Photo: Henry Robbins

The internal assembly is quite simple: the printed circuit board (PCB) and the switch plate are screwed together, sandwiching a sheet of silicon between them. This fills the gap between the silicon plate and the PCB and extends past the outer edge to form a gasket that holds the two halves of the case in place. With this, the internal assembly is done without direct contact with the outer case, reducing vibration and excess noise.