Endgame Gear KB65HE Review – Really Promising Analog Keyboard!

The Endgame Gear KB65HE is Endgame’s first foray into the keyboard space, and just on the face of it, they’ve clearly taken this seriously. This 65% board is heavy enough to be used as a lethal weapon, or a boat anchor, and the “HE” part of the name is in reference to the Gateron Hall-Effect switches that it uses. This isn’t just a slapped-together “quick get a product out” jobby, this is a legitimately premium product, and for a not-so-premium price tag too. There are quite a few things I think you should know before buying one just yet, so let me explain. 

First, let’s take a look at the board itself. This is a CNC milled aluminium chassis that is truly solid. It’s actually one solid block, where they’ve hogged the middle out, drilled a hole for the USB C port at the top left, and milled a few features in the bottom – namely the interchangeable rubber feet that give you the option of having it basically flat on your desk, or pretty moderately elevated. It doesn’t end up getting as high as I think I’d prefer, especially as it’s an already fairly thick board. It’s certainly manageable though, and if gaming is your primary use-case, it’s possibly better. It would be nice to have the option for a higher position though. Anyway, the fit-and-finish here is top notch. It’s easily on par with the Keychron Q1 I reviewed last year, and being a solid, milled block of aluminium, it is remarkably planted and rigid. Interestingly, inside you’ll find two separate silicone rubber mats, one under the board and one between the PCB and the faceplate the switches are mounted to. This gives the board a very soft, quite muted tone. Have a listen…

Personally, I really like this more understated sound. It feels very premium, and makes it a lot more suitable for professional environments, as well as personal but sound-sensitive spaces. It feels like the opposite end of the mechanical keyboard spectrum from the ostentatious clicky, light-of-a-thousand-suns RGB lit boards from, say, someone like Razer or Corsair. The KB65HE does have RGB lighting, and it’s reasonably bright too, but it’s a touch more subtle than your average gaming keyboard. Since we are talking about the typing experience, I should mention that the Gateron KS-37B white switches Endgame have opted for here feel pretty premium too. They are linear switches, meaning there is no tactile bump or click. This makes sense, seeing as they are hall effect switches and you can change the actuation point. It’d be a bit pointless to have a tactile bump in the middle of the travel when you’ve set the actuation point to the very top or bottom! Still, the mix of the padding inside and the relatively light 30gf pressure required to move the key feels pretty nice – both for typing, and for gaming. 

It’s worth highlighting the switches in particular, because they are both rather unique in what possibilities this style of switch can offer, and because of the specific implementation in this board. As I mentioned, these are Gateron KS-37B white switches. These are hall effect switches, although it’s arguably a bit of a stretch to call these “switches”, because these don’t actually switch anything. That’s not just me being pedantic – although I do like doing that – these are nothing more than a magnet embedded in the stem, a spring, and a housing. There are no electrical components here. These don’t solder into the PCB as a self-contained unit, these require a hall effect sensor soldered to the PCB nearby to function. What surprised me about Endgame’s implementation is that, as far as I can tell anyway, the IC on the top of the board that very much is the RGB LED, I think is ALSO the hall effect sensor… I can’t find any other chips nearby that could be the sensor, and as I mentioned, the switch sure isn’t it, so I have to assume the LED is also the hall effect sensor. If anyone has any information on this package, or if you know that I’m wrong here, please do let me know in the comments down below, because I’m fascinated with this design. 

Anyway, that means that the switches are hot-swappable, so as long as you can find a compatible replacement, you can just pop them in. That’s pretty cool. The possibilities I mentioned all revolve around the complete paradigm shift in how these switches work. See, traditional mechanical switches are pretty binary. The switch is either off, or on. There’s a bit of noise when it switches state which means you have to delay the signal by a few milliseconds to debounce it, but otherwise like I said it’s just on or off. Analogue switches like this, if I may be a little pedantic, aren’t actually switches anymore. They are more like joysticks on a controller, because there’s now no fixed point that the switch actuates. The keyboard can keep track of exactly where every single switch is in its travel with sub-millimetre precision. Much like a joystick knows how far you’ve pushed it, the keyboard knows how far down a key has been pressed. That means that instead of having a singular point where the switch goes from off to on, these switches can be set to “register” that keypress at any point that works for you. You can do different points for up and down, and with a board like the Wooting Two I love so much, you can do a whole load of amazing features like use it like an analogue input, actually like a joystick, or even have multiple actions assigned to different press heights, so you walk slowly when you lightly press W but sprint when you hold it fully down. 

Now on the KB65HE, Endgame have only got the up/down trigger adjustment, where either on the keyboard by pressing FN + TAB then using page up and page down to adjust the 20 different steps and press FN to exit, or via their software with 40 steps instead, you can control how far you have to press the keys for it to register, and separately, at least in the software, how high you have to lift before it stops registering. I’m not entirely sure why you have 20 steps on the keyboard but 40 in the desktop software, and there is at least currently a bug where if you do adjust the settings on the keyboard – which you can actually do per-key too if you want say WASD to be a hair-trigger, but everything else to need a deeper thwack – that doesn’t get synced to the software. I’d also argue that while I assume the 40 steps they have available correlate to 0.1mm steps as these keys have 4.1mm of total travel, framing at as a more arbitrary number, just anything from 1 to 40, is less intuitive. I’d prefer this to read as 0.1mm steps, so 10 would read as 1mm. It’s a little easier to understand what you’re adjusting, and visualise what might work best for you. That way you can also set it to whatever measurement you are already comfortable with, and then try adjusting from there to see if a different value is better for you. That’s literally just a UI change – you don’t need to change any of the backend, but I think it would go a long way to making it a better experience. I do also hope that Endgame puts in the effort to add some of those extra features I mentioned, like analogue input and multiple actions per stroke. As I said, one of the most exciting things about switches like this are the numerous possibilities for features you could never get with a regular board, so it’d be great to see that here.

Moving back inside the board, my inquisitive electrical engineering brain got the better of me and I wanted to understand how the hall effect sensors actually worked. Namely, where the digital sensors – which would make the most sense – or were they analogue and just output a variable voltage. Seeing as I couldn’t actually find the sensors, I thought I’d look up the two microcontrollers on the back. The one by the brilliantly reinforced USB C port is an NSP 11U35, a pretty standard Arm M0 microcontroller that does the USB interfacing. The other chip, marked as GTRY52, I have no idea what it is. I can’t find a datasheet, a manufacturer, a product listing on sites like Mouser, nothing. Well, if you Google that part number, one thing does return that exact part. It’s a Chinese language review of a keyboard called ATK 68 and… oh… it’s the same board. It’s literally an exact copy – the same keycaps, the same layout (I have the UK ISO version so it is slightly different, but it has the same setup otherwise), and looking at the picture of the USB C port really solidifies it. Interestingly the silk screen the article displays lists KG68U-GR as the model number, whereas this Endgame board has KB65U-GR, so it is purpose made, just not made wholly by Endgame Gear. The date code is also nearly three months later. Interesting! There is one very significant difference between the ATK 68 and the KB65HE though, which helps justify the 150% price increase, which is that the ATK board has a plastic base, whereas the Endgame board has the beautifully machined billet ali block. That really does make up for the difference, in shear weight alone. 

Now, back to the board itself, it occurs to me that I haven’t spoken much about what it’s like to game on. The short answer is it’s fantastic. I set the trigger point to 10/10, making it a lot closer to being a hair-trigger, making it feel super responsive and fast. The linear travel makes a lot of sense here, and feels great while gaming. It really does have a premium feel to it, something I really enjoyed using. My only fairly minor gripe is just with how tall the profile of the board is, and how little the feet let you tilt the board upwards. I think with a wrist rest I’d be a lot more comfortable. The keycaps feel super premium too, they’re doubleshot PBT, with a nice slight roughness to them which makes them the perfect amount of grippy yet easy to switch between. 

One final complaint I have is that, while the FN key does give you access to an almost complete second layer of functions, including the ability to adjust the actuation point on the fly, you have to rely on a (at the time of filming, not publicly available) PDF guide to know what to hit. The number keys acting as F keys makes sense, but the number pad or volume controls will be difficult to memorise when there’s no other cues on the board itself. Most other capsets include sub-printing, or hell even ninja printing for those sorts of functions, so it’d be great if future boards could come with that. Equally, media controls more than just volume would be great too – I can’t tell you how often I use play/pause on my keyboard. It’s a must for me.

In short then, while this is clearly a design Endgame bought in, they’ve picked an incredible platform to build on. The addition of the ali housing adds so much quality to the already pretty premium design, so that’s fantastic. The software does still leave something to be desired, both in terms of bugs and tweaks, and outright features I think would bring a lot of value to the board. Endgame were pretty responsive to my questions and bug reports prior to this review going out, so I’m incredibly hopeful that they can take what is already a pretty great board and elevate it to an incredible one. I should also note that the price tag, £139 at launch, is also pretty exceptional for a board that is this hefty. It genuinely matches the Keychron Q1 for quality and heft, so for that to be £60 cheaper is excellent. All in all this is a great board, with a lot of potential. As a proposition today, it still gets a recommendation from me, and if knowing that it might get even better helps you justify the purchase, then that’s great.