Nuphy Air60 HE Review – AMAZING Low Profile Magnetic Mechanical Keyboard

This is the Nuphy Air60 HE, a low profile magneto-mechanical keyboard that honestly blew me away. For less than half the price of Razer’s analog switch board, the Huntsman V3 Pro, this bad boy offers even more features, a frankly immaculate sound, and a well-above-average build quality and feel. If I didn’t desperately love full size boards, I’d swap to this in a heartbeat. Let me show you around and explain why that is. 

This is one of my first proper low profile mechanical keyboards. I have had one in before, the Corsair K70 MK2 Low Profile, back when I was a literal child, so this is the first in a while at least, and damn what a good one to come back on. The Air60 HE looks stunning, with an obviously condensed layout, some rather cool looking transparent science related keycaps on the right hand side, and overall a pretty low profile, obviously. The case itself is plastic, but it’s the good stuff for sure. It feels well built, and one look on the bottom at the semi-transparent case, and mirror finish plaque, shows you Nuphy means business here. You do get two sets of flip out feet if you do want to make it a little less low profile, but looking at it from the side, it isn’t exactly massive. 

Oh, and if you aren’t in love with the purple caps on the right, or you want to use this with a Mac, they’ve included a bunch of keycaps in the box that can replace those purple ones, and the Windows specific keys at the bottom, plus a cap and switch puller in the box too. And, speaking of the switches, you have two choices when buying this board, Gateron Jades, or Jade Pros. The switches are hot-swappable, although only between Jade and Jade Pros. Interestingly these switches are literally just a magnet and a spring, the PCB has the hall effect sensor on the bottom, hence why it’s only the Jade family that work here. Nuphy opted for the fancier Jade Pros for me, which is a $20 upcharge on their site, although really the main difference seems to be the actuation force, which is a touch heavier on the Jade Pros – something I do prefer. These definitely strike the right balance for me, as I think I find most linear switches just too light, so these are perfect.

In fact, the overall typing experience on these is fantastic. I wrote this very script on the board, and found it beautifully quiet and refined. It’s the right balance of soft, tactile (despite the linear switches) and damn these keycaps feel good to tap away on. Have a listen..

Because these are hall effect switches, you get a whole suite of fancy features that you couldn’t even dream of with a normal mechanical switch. Because the keyboard knows how far down the travel the switch is, that opens a lot of doors. The most obvious feature, and the one that almost all programmable analog boards offer is an adjustable actuation point. That means for, say, gaming, you can set the actuation point to as little as 0.1mm – basically just breathing on it – for those instant reaction times, but for typing where you might want a more deliberate stroke to be the only thing that registers, you can set it as low as 3.3mm – which remarkably is how much travel the full size Gateron Jade switches offer too. 

You’ve also got some more advanced features, like Rapid Trigger. That’s of course not to be confused with Razer’s Rapid Trigger, although it’s a pretty similar thing. Basically this lets you have an instant shutoff to the keystroke as soon as you start lifting off. The benefit there is again in the latency, as it means it more instantly reacts to your movements and actions. You can strafe quicker and more accurately, for example in something like CS2. They’ve also got something called Hyper Tap, which seems remarkably close in principle to the Snap Tap feature Razer just had banned from CS2, where when you lift say the A key, it’ll actually press D for you. That’s different to Snap Tap which just cuts the key signal when you start pressing a conflicting one, so that might be a little closer to actually cheating – I mean if Valve considers Snap Tap cheating, god knows what they’d think of this!

There’s also Dynamic Keystroke. This is something Wooting has offered for years, but in short you have multiple actions bound to a single keystroke – seemingly up to four options in fact. Two on the way down and two on the way up. This can be useful when you have actions in game that would normally take multiple key presses – like building in Fortnite, or even just binding the bottom of W to be Shift + W so lightly holding the key walks, and holding it fully down sprints. Something like that is really cool, and again feels remarkably close to cheating. All of these features are really cool, and to have them in such a premium feeling board is really nice. 

And, as if this couldn’t get any better, this is also an 8000 Hz board. While that is something I’m less excited about being in a keyboard than a mouse, it is still pretty cool to have it available, and again helps reduce latency. Seeing as I now have the new OSLTT CS board – available at OSRTT.com by the way – I can use the peripherals testing key to measure this bad boy. Now for the sake of realism I’ve left the actuation point at 1.2mm, so that does mean this includes some pre-travel time. For keyboards that can be a handful of milliseconds, and it does depend on how quickly you are tapping the key, but still. At 8,000 Hz you’re looking at just 4.6 milliseconds of latency on average, which again includes pre-travel time, making this one of the fastest keyboards on the market. If you were to up the actuation point you can expect that to be even lower, so yeah safe to say it’s fast. 

For actually gaming on it, well that’s a great time. The feel is already great, and add in all the gaming features, you end up with honestly one of the best gaming keyboards on the market. It’s smooth, responsive, fast, feels amazing, and gives you MULTIPLE competitive advantages over your opponents. What’s not to love? I would say that most of the fancy features end up being quite game specific, and you’ll need to set them up accordingly. Happily they do provide a toggle switch at the top of the board with three mode options. By default it’s set to Gaming, Windows and MacOS, but you can remap that to, say, CS2, Valorant and PUBG, or whatever your main games are, that way you can switch between the modes easily. 

The real cherry on top here is the price tag. This thing, even with the stiffer “Pro” switches, is still only £105 – or $140. Razer’s Huntsman V3 PRo TKL is over £200, and even Wooting’s 60HE+ is £160 to £170, making this bad boy an absolute bargain. The only downside I’ve had so far is that the software you use to customise the board is a web-UI which has been pretty buggy for me. It took a couple of attempts to do a firmware update, it took a few tries to get the keyboard lighting to change, and it outright wouldn’t connect to the board on my desktop. Compared to dedicated desktop software, this is considerably more janky for sure, but it does also make it considerably more cross platform, so I guess you win some you lose some there. Either way, this is an incredible board, and if Nuphy offered a full size version of this I think I’d swap to it in a heartbeat. At least then I wouldn’t need to memorise the second layer functions and I can just hang the poster they include face out! Actually I’m not 13 so I’d rather not, but you’ll have the option if you do pick one up! I’ll leave a link in the description if you do want to check it out – that’s not an affiliate link or anything, I’m just being helpful!