Skyloong GK104 Pro Review
Customizable Hardware, Horrible Software
When I first saw this keyboard in a YouTube short, I thought it looked super cool and like it could be the perfect keyboard for me as I was looking for something thocky, full-size, and with a volume wheel. This board seemed to fit the bill thanks to how customizable it is, and it had a lot of other features that I typically don’t see on a keyboard, so I was quite interested in it. Sypnotix reached out to Skyloong to see if they’d be willing to send us a board for review, and here we are a couple months later! However, all of the opinions in this review remain genuine and honest. Let’s see if the Skyloong GK104 Pro lived up to my expectations!
Retail Price: $149.99
Disclaimer: Skyloong sent us a unit of the GK104 Pro 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.
Our Configuration
The board reviewed in this article uses the KTT Rose Sea Blue switches with Twilight keycaps
Look and Feel
While this isn’t one of the prettiest boards I’ve tried, it is pretty neat. We chose the “twilight” keycaps which are a gray gradient and the key legends are front-facing instead of on the top of the keycaps. They’re still plenty easy to read and give the board a sleek look.
The screen is a cool feature that can be used for aesthetic purposes since you can add a photo or a gif, but I don’t personally value that. Overall, I think it’s a nice-looking keyboard, though it isn’t anything extraordinary.
As for the typing experience, I love how this board sounds! It definitely fits into the thocky category, which is my favorite way for keys to sound. For reference, we chose the KTT Rose Sea Blue switches. The keycaps themselves feel okay; they aren’t slippery which is great, but I do wish they had a little more texture to them. Overall, it’s pretty enjoyable to use this keyboard… until it overfires, anyway (more on that later).
Customization
This is easily one of the most customizable keyboards I have tried. The screen is removable and can be replaced with normal keys; you can also choose to put in nobs. The screen can display things like the date and time as well as certain settings, or it can be programmed with a picture or gif that you like.
As cool of a feature as the screen is, I don’t find myself looking at it or using it very often. If I want to see the time, I’ll just look at my monitor. Therefore, I personally prefer to have regular keys on this board, but I do like to replace at least one of them with a nob. The nob defaults to being a volume wheel, which is exactly what I want, but it can be programmed to work as a multimedia control or zoom in and out.
The numberpad on this board has a screen above it which typically shows you the date and time. However, flip a switch alongside the number pad, and now you have a functioning calculator. I don’t use this feature much, but it’s certainly a neat little gimmick. It also comes with different sound effects for typing, but I find all of them very annoying. It was difficult to figure out how to turn them off as the instruction manual doesn’t cover much. I ended up finding the answer on Reddit.
Like many boards on the market, this one is hot-swappable, so you can change your switches at any time. The spacebar is also split and you can choose to program each side differently or you can replace it with a normal, long spacebar.
RGB and Software
The software on this keyboard is egregiously bad. It is possible to customize the RGB using the software, but it was initially so confusing that I had to get help from a Skyloong representative on Reddit to even figure it out. The board does come with some nice presets that are easy to cycle through, but the software is such a pain that even though the RGB can be customized, it doesn’t feel worth the effort.
Skyloong's software
The software is not user-friendly or intuitive, to the extent that I recommend against getting this board if you enjoy doing a lot of hotkey customization. The other issue I have with it is that for whatever reason, my settings will randomly get reset. For example, I put the pause key where the scroll lock is supposed to be, and I put scroll lock where print screen is supposed to be. Then, I edited the keys in the software so that they would function properly as scroll lock and pause. The issue is that seemingly at random they will go back to their default settings. I cannot seem to figure out why this happens. I can fix it by opening the software and re-applying these settings, but I’m guessing this board must not have onboard memory or this wouldn’t keep happening.
Overfiring Issues
One issue I have with this board is that certain keys tend to overfire. However, this happens to me on basically every thocky keyboard I test out, so I wonder if it has to do with the way thocky boards are designed. Perhaps it has something to do with the switches; I really do not know. I only know that all the thocky boards I’ve tried overfire. Maybe I just press down on the keys harder than I realize. Maybe these kinds of boards are built cheaply; it’s hard to say, but I’ve never had such issues with products from Razer. Either way, I often find myself having to go back and erase extra letters. The worst offenders that I have noticed are the letters C, S, T, and spacebar. Again, I have no idea if this is an actual defect or if I just need to pick switches that take more force to fire, but it is very annoying regardless.
final thoughts
In terms of customization, this board has a lot going for it; not only that, it’s a wonderfully thocky experience! However, I can’t say I recommend it. The software is a headache to use, and the board overfires far more often than I would like. Though the concept of this keyboard is really really cool, the cons outweigh the pros for me, especially when you consider the price of this keyboard ($105 - $140).
If you don’t care about good software and you just want something easily customizable that thocks out of the box, maybe this could be for you; I just think there are better boards out there for the price.
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