Royal Kludge RK M75 Mechanical Keyboard Review
A Jam-Packed Compact Keyboard
Recently, I’ve been much more interested in full-size keyboards, so I wasn’t super excited to say goodbye to my number pad and volume wheel in exchange for a compact board without those features. Luckily, the Royal Kludge M75 does have my precious volume wheel! In fact, it ended up being such a great keyboard that I don’t even miss the full-size layout. Instead, I’m happily living in the land of thocky keys and wireless bliss. If you’re looking for a compact keyboard that can do it all, then keep reading, because the Royal Kludge M75 might just be exactly what you need.
Retail Price: $99.99
Disclaimer: Royal Kludge sent us a unit of the M75 free of charge to review, but all thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are our own and were not discussed with the company prior to publishing.
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Hot-swappable cloud switches
Front-facing key legends on PBT keycaps
Volume knob
Compatible with Windows or Mac
Wired & wireless connectivity
OLED Screen
Customizable RGB
USB-C Passthrough
Design
The RK M75 model we received to test is listed as “blue” and uses Royal Kludge’s cloud switches. I would say the color of the board is more of a greenish-gray than a blue, but I do appreciate the gradient and front-facing key legends. You’d think front-facing might be harder to read, but it isn’t at all. There’s also the added benefit that should the plastic on top of the keys wear down with use, the legends will remain pristine since they’re on the sides. Not to mention, this board uses PBT for the keycaps, which tends to be more durable and long-lasting to begin with.
Volume Wheel
The look of the keyboard isn’t anything that blows me out of the water, though it is nice enough. What really impresses me is the volume wheel! I am a sucker for any kind of volume knob on a keyboard as I find them incredibly useful and convenient. I rarely ever see volume wheels on compact boards, so this earns the RK M75 a lot of brownie points from me. I only wish that pressing down on the volume wheel would work as a mute button, but instead, pressing the button works to either turn the keyboard off or swap between connectivity modes. This doesn’t seem to be a function I can reprogram, either.
OLED Screen & Connectivity Modes
The RK M75 has a small screen which I surprisingly love. Most of the time, I find screens on keyboards to be honestly quite useless and more of a gimmick and waste of space than anything, but this screen is useful. This is because it displays what connection mode your keyboard is in (did I mention you can connect the board via USB, Bluetooth, or 2.4GHz wireless?), whether you’ve got it set to Windows or Mac compatibility, and the battery life! A super cool feature they’ve added with the Bluetooth is three separate Bluetooth profiles. If I press the knob and then turn it to BT1, it will connect to my desktop and only work with my desktop. If I select BT2 from the list, however, it connects to my laptop. I find this incredibly convenient and I wish companies who made earbuds would do this! I don’t tend to use my keyboard with more than one device, but it’s always a pain in the butt when you have to turn the Bluetooth off on one device in order to get a peripheral to connect to a different device. With this keyboard, that is not a problem!
RGB
I was also surprised by the RGB on this board. Like most other RGB boards, there are a bunch of RGB presets to pick from. But, what I found most exciting was the customization you can do within the software. The software actually allows you to click and drag your mouse to select as many keys as you want and then set them to be whatever effect you like in any color you like. Though the customization still isn’t as good as Razer or Corsair, it’s definitely much closer than any other affordable keyboard I’ve tried. You actually have the freedom to use multiple effects on the board at the same time, and that’s really cool!
USB-C Hub
Finally, this keyboard has two USB-C ports on it. One of them has a little monitor icon next to it and this is what you use to connect the board to your computer. The other is labeled as a “Type-C hub interface” which seems to mean it is a USB-C passthrough. I personally don’t find this very useful because none of my peripherals connect via USB-C, only USB-A. I tried plugging my smartphone into it, but nothing happened. Maybe someday if I get a wired mouse that connects via USB-C, this could be a great feature, but for now it is not very useful to me. Overall, this board has a ton of great features packed into its small frame.
The Thock
Now to the most important part: the way this keyboard sounds. “Thocky” keyboards are all the rage these days, and up until recent years, you had to build a custom board to get this kind of sound. Luckily, those days are over. I absolutely adore the sound of the RK M75. It definitely fits in that thock category, but I consider it a more high-pitched, clacky kind of thock (we’ve included a sound byte of the typing for you to listen to). Our particular model uses the cloud switches, but they can be hot-swapped out for any 3-pin or 5-pin switch you prefer so you can better customize the typing sounds to your liking.
Gaming Features & Performance
The RK M75 is marketed as a gaming keyboard, as many mechanical keyboards are. The cloud switches on our board are described as a linear type switch, and they are very responsive without overfiring, lagging, or ghosting. As mentioned before, this board is hot-swappable, so you can use any kind of switches you prefer.
Like most gaming keyboards, the RK M75 has macro capabilities. It also has onboard memory, and you can create up to three different profiles. I can’t seem to find any way to swap between the profiles without connecting to the software, but whichever profile you used last will be the one that functions should you use the keyboard with a different device.
You can also remap your keys to have any function you like. You can even remap a key to be a second FN key and create a secondary set of FN shortcuts. The customization in terms of key remapping doesn’t seem to have any particular limitations and seems like it really allows you to create the exact layout you want to make. Overall, this board seems to be a great option for gaming as not only is it responsive (even when connected wirelessly), but it has all of the features one would expect from a gaming board.
final thoughts
I’m honestly so impressed by this keyboard. It’s jam-packed with features that are actually useful rather than gimmicky, and everything seems to work as intended. Most of the thocky keyboards I’ve tried in the past, no matter how expensive (talking to you, $200 KiiBoom 98), eventually end up overfiring. I’ve had this Royal Kludge board for about a month and it still types like a dream, with no overfiring in sight. Now, it could always happen later, but it doesn’t seem like it will.
This keyboard is just a phenomenal experience. Though I’ve been more into full-sized boards recently, I do love the form factor of this one, especially since they included a volume wheel! The OLED display is small enough not to feel like an annoying gimmick yet still provides useful information about the operation of the board. The board itself is hot-swappable, has macro-capabilities, and even has customizable RGB backlights! I honestly struggle to come up with something bad to say about this keyboard, which is frankly very rare. The board is listed at $110 MSRP, which is certainly a bit expensive, but Amazon frequently offers a $30 coupon and Royal Kludge also has sales. I’d say this board is actually worth the price, especially if you can get it on sale.
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