THE MOST MODDABLE KEYBOARD EVER! Glorious GMMK 3 HE Review

This is the most customisable keyboard ever – while that’s what the box says, I can confirm that Glorious has put their money where their mouth is here. The GMMK 3 HE is absolutely insane for quite a few reasons, so let me explain. This looks like a pretty ordinary mechanical keyboard, right? I mean it’s pretty plain, with just an accent LED and a knob to spice things up, because otherwise it’s just any other keyboard, right? Well, you’d be wrong. First, this is an HE board – that stands for Hall Effect – meaning these switches are magnetic. But there are already a bunch of HE boards, that’s not the only special thing. No this thing is actually designed to be disassembled and customised. The 8 screws (and no clips) that hold this thing together reside under the rubber feet on the bottom, except unlike most boards these feet aren’t held down with tape or glue, these are specially designed to be a press-fit, so you can remove and install them as many times as you like without issue. They even include a phillips head screwdriver which happens to be the only tool you need to fully disassemble the board.

Inside you’ll find two layers of foam, silicone inserts that form a perimeter gasket (and spare inserts in the box), and here’s the real kicker. Take a look at the PCB – do you notice anything unusual here? Well that little black chip is the hall effect sensor – that’s normal for HE boards – but that orange thing? That’s a mechanical switch hotswap connector! Yeah, this HE board can use both magnetic and mechanical switches! How insane is that?? You can mix and match, not only between the four magnetic switches they offer, but between HE and mechanical too. That is just incredible. 

Speaking of the switch options, luckily they include one of each in the box as spares. First, the switches that come on the board. Those are their Fox HE switches. They are red switches, meaning linear, with 45g of actuation force. You’ve also got the light blue Lynx HE switches, which are also linear, but have a lighter 40 grams of actuation force. Those come in both regular and silent variants – as do the incredibly unique option, the Panda HEs. Those are tactile brown style switches, complete with a visible tactile bump mechanism, while still retaining their magnetic benefits. While I’m sure it seems strange to have an adjustable actuation point on a switch with a fixed tactile bump, I actually really like it – although I’ll get back to my thoughts on them later on. There is one more switch here, the green clicky bugger – the Raptor HE switch. If you are that way inclined – and yes I am judging – you can have an audible click to your magnetic switches. Those don’t come in a silent variant, funnily enough. 

Honestly, the GMMK 3’s ecosystem is expansive. Everything you can imagine to change, Glorious have available. Want new top plates? No problem. Want a metal knob instead of the somewhat cheap feeling plastic one that comes included? No problem! Want a fancy coiled USB cable instead of the basic but nice enough USB C cable included? They’ve got ya covered. Oh, and over course a nice collection of keycaps. This amount of customizability – and repairability too – is really nice. So much so that Glorious decided to let you spec your dream keyboard in a configurator, they call it “Boardsmith”, and it basically lets you spec all of the options you could want all in one go. This actually gives you access to a lot more options for your board too – metal baseplates and uppers, polycarbonate switch plates, upgraded PORON gaskets. All of that does come at a cost though. The regular GMMK 3 HE is £200, but at least my config with metal parts everywhere is a whopping £490.99! That is a hell of a lot to spend on a keyboard, but for a fully custom board with this much functionality… Well clearly that’s a compelling option because Glorious are apparently fully booked on Boardsmith orders right now. 

But, let’s say you don’t spend £500 on a keyboard, what do you get for £200 off-the-shelf? Well, a pretty nice board. Personally I feel like the knob, and the stock keycaps, are a little cheap feeling. I have a hard time describing my feelings so please excuse the vagueness here, but they just don’t feel great to me. The red Fox switches equally don’t feel amazing, and have a pretty loud clack to them, have a listen.

They do feel nice enough, but as a tactile switch fan, these just don’t do it for me. Luckily Glorious sent over some of their silent Panda HE switches, so let me swap them over – oh and their Polychroma keycaps too.

Now with the silent Panda’s in the middle, here’s what that sounds like to type on. 

The Panda’s feel amazing, and coupled with the nicer feeling Polychroma keycaps, man this is an amazing typing experience. It’s quiet, with a nice bit of kinesthetic feedback, and even though you can adjust the actuation point, for typing at least it makes a difference to the feel, and for me that is a must-have for an everyday use board. Of course for gaming you might prefer the linear options, although it really isn’t that hard to swap them out should you really want to. For me though, gaming on these is fantastic. The joys of hall effect switches is that they can offer a whole range of extra features – not just an adjustable actuation point. Glorious offers a rapid trigger feature for fast reactions and better strafing, and a 4:1 dynamic keystroke feature which lets you map multiple actions to a single stroke, say for building in fortnite or even just walking versus sprinting. Those add up to an excellent gaming experience. 

The one thing I would add is that the keyboard isn’t quite as fast as other HE boards I’ve tested, even at 8,000 hertz, and with the input latency set to 0 milliseconds. It ran anywhere between 10 and 12 milliseconds on average depending on the actuation point setting, whereas for example the nuphy Air60HE ran more like 5 milliseconds on average. That isn’t a massive problem, but I guess if you are looking for the most competitive keyboard for gaming, maybe this one isn’t quite it. For a layman like me though, I had no problem with the tiny increase in latency. I did find it strange that the “input delay” feature didn’t seem to do anything. By default the board is set to 1,000 hertz and 16 milliseconds of delay. I changed that, saved it, but it seemed to reset itself back to defaults, and the two tests showed very little difference, so maybe it didn’t reset, or maybe that feature is a little buggy. Either way, I’m happy enough with the board – and the configuration software too.

On the whole I really like the GMMK 3 HE. It is easily the most feature packed board I’ve tested – and the fact you can use both magnetic and mechanical switches is incredibly cool, plus the six total options for mag switches is super unique. If you’ve got the cash, their Boardsmith option lets you spec your dream board, or failing that you can get this regular one and upgrade it yourself over time. The repairability and customizability is unmatched, and while it does come at a considerably premium price compared to other HE boards, I can see where that value goes, at least for the most part. I’d prefer the metal shell and knob out the gate, especially at £200, but still, this is an amazing board and I think it’s going to find its way onto my desk (replacing my original GMMK) real soon…