Redragon K673 Pro Review – Crazy Cheap Wireless Mechanical Keyboard

This is the Redragon K673 Pro, an insanely cheap wireless mechanical gaming keyboard, and I’m a little torn about it. I’ll get this out the way first – I don’t think this is an amazing keyboard, I’ll explain why in this video of course, but it just isn’t exactly premium. With that said, you can pick this bad boy up on Amazon (linked in the description too) for just £65. For a wireless, mechanical keyboard that you can hotswap the switches on, that really isn’t bad, and goes a long way to negating any negatives I might have about this board. So, now we’ve done the conclusion, let’s explain why I think that.

This is an all plastic board, both plastic upper and lower cases, with no metal inner plate either, making it remarkably light, and remarkably flexible. This has enough deck flex to re-sink the titanic, at least when you’ve got it up on either of the two flick out feet you’ll find on the otherwise perfectly flat base. That does affect the typing feel, although I’d argue it affects the sound profile even more – have a listen.

While I’ve definitely been spoiled by a myriad of premium keyboards recently that all fit this sort of description, I can’t ignore the fact that this sounds, and to some degree feels, cheap. Even with the “gasket design” they’re real proud of, this just isn’t a premium board. Of course, they aren’t pricing it as one either, so you can definitely go the extra mile yourself and stick some more foam, rubber or metal in here if it bothers you. The keycaps do actually feel pretty nice – they aren’t shine-through caps which I’d much prefer, but they have a nice texture to them and have a pretty legible font too. They’ve got all the second layer functions l as hard to see icons, I’d have preferred clearer designs and printing on those personally, but at least they are there on the board for you rather than having to look them up in a manual and memorise them! 

As for the switches, those are Redragon’s own mx style red switches, which feel about the same as any other red switch – that is to say kinda naff for me – although I could swear they have a slighter higher actuation point than normal, something I actually found a little annoying while gaming – ironically as that’s meant to be a gaming focused feature. They feel smooth enough, although the enter and backspace keys’ stabilisers do make them feel almost like a membrane key, rather than mechanical. Interestingly, they include four spare switches in the box, I guess as replacements in case any of the preinstalled ones fail – I don’t know whether that’s a good thing, or a warning sign that they expect some to fail, but at least they are hot swappable, meaning you can switch them all out for something more your taste. Oh and of course you do have RGB lighting – specifically north-facing LEDs. Because the caps aren’t shine through you don’t get much useful lighting, but it’s there if you want it. 

Layout wise it’s all pretty sensible. You’ve got insert, delete, page up and page down as physical keys in a row on the right, while end, home, print screen and scroll lock are second layer actions to the right of the main section. You do get a full set of arrow keys which I like to see, and of course you have the knob. The big, green knob. It’s actually pretty nice, the rotary encoder under it is notchy enough, and by default it’ll control volume, but if you hold it for three seconds it swaps to controlling the RGB brightness, then hold it again to swap back. That’s pretty cool. 

If you were wondering about customisation, sadly you can’t use VIA, you have to use Redragon’s own software tool, which frankly is even cheaper than the keyboard itself. It’s just an image of the keyboard with a grid of ill-fitting squares over each key (roughly aligned anyway), which you can then assign new functions. The problem is it doesn’t show you what is already assigned to a key, and it also weirdly flashes the options part of the screen for every new key you click on – like the bottom part of the window flickers. It’s weird. The rest of the app is pretty basic, plus it doesn’t seem like you can update the firmware through this app either, which is one of the key reasons I normally look for manufacturer-provided software like this. The app does work, but it’s far from great, or really even good to be honest. 

The good news is, assuming you don’t need to remap any keys, the board works pretty well, both wirelessly with the include 2.4GHz dongle – which does have a little home on the right hand side of the board – and wired via the USB C port on the left side of the board, and with the included USB C cable which has a built in C to A adapter. You can use this with bluetooth with up to three paired devices should you fancy it. The one downside to running wirelessly is the latency. My open source latency testing tool reported that, while using the included 2.4GHz dongle, inputs took upwards of 24 milliseconds to report. That’s really slow, and while keyboards generally aren’t super latency sensitive devices, 24 milliseconds is really bad, and can mean you feel a little disconnected from your gaming experience, or worse lose out because the board took too long to, say crouch, or sprint, or reload. When connected via the USB C cable though it’s all fine and the latency is down in the one millisecond range. If you do use it wirelessly, you’ll be eating into the 3000mAh battery inside – and Redragon is pretty excited to tell you about that 3,000 mAh cell, but I find that kind of funny because the other wireless keyboards I’ve reviewed fairly recently all have 4,000 or 4,200 mAh cells, so 3,000 is a bit of an undersell. Either way it’s plenty for a keyboard, especially with the lights off.

As for actually gaming on the thing, well it’s safe to say that I was playing wired, and on the whole it’s decent enough. The deck flex wasn’t an issue on WASD, and while the more hair-trigger switch annoyed me on the space bar, for WASD it felt great. It was responsive, smooth and easy to use. The only thing I’ll note is that especially the A key seemed to stick sometimes – as in, as if it was being held down when it wasn’t. Perhaps that’s why they give you four spare switches in the box then – to replace the faulty ones they put on! Other than that, there weren’t any problems and it actually felt pretty good.

As I said at the start, for £65 I’d have a really hard time arguing this isn’t a good deal. It is not a premium or super quality keyboard, but for that price you can get your toes wet in the mechanical keyboard world and just upgrade this over time. If you’re willing to splash more cash up front, boards from Keychron are my go-to (and I’ve actually got a review of another one coming up very soon) but if you just want something cheap to get started that you can upgrade later, this isn’t too bad. Like I said, links in the description if you want one.