FUN60 Pro vs FUN60 Ultra – HE vs TMR – MonsGeek FUN 60 Keyboard Review

This is a £30 Hall Effect keyboard, and this is a £75 TMR 8KHz wireless keyboard, and amazingly, both are really pretty good. In this video I’m going to run through each, and do a bit of a comparison between HE and TMR, at least as best as I can right now. This is the MonsGeek FUN60 Pro – specifically the new ISO version. This starts at just £25, although if you want an 8KHz polling rate and wireless you’ll need to splash out a whole… £42… for the ‘Max’ version. Shocking, I know. (satire). To say this is an incredibly budget keyboard would be an understatement, and yet on the face of it they haven’t cut any major corners. This uses AKKO branded magnetic switches, although for the life of me I can’t find any listings on AKKO’s website for these switches, despite their software depicting quite the range of options. They look like Gateron’s Jade switches, although even Gateron doesn’t have the full set their software lists, so I’m a little lost there. What I can say is that this does have hot-swap switches, and clearly has the ability to use a wide range of options, much like the Glorious GMMK 3 HE I reviewed recently. The frame and base are plastic here, making the board pretty light, and despite some foam inside it isn’t the most rigid, nor the best sound. Have a listen.

The typing feel is pretty mid. The switches are linear, and a little light for my taste. The actuation point feels consistent, and of course being a hall effect keyboard you can adjust that – although we’ll come back to this later. It’s a little too smooth for me, using the Glorious Panda HE Silent’s on my GMMK 3 HE, although if you like linear switches this is perfectly good. It has a cheap sound to it, and the typing feel definitely isn’t what I’d describe as premium, but it’s also nowhere near bad. As I said, it’s mid, and that’s fine especially for this price tag. This specific model is USB C only, although if you look inside you’ll see the missing microcontroller that’d let this be a tri-mode board – that being Bluetooth, 2.4GHz and wired. That’s the Max version. You can see the hall effect sensors under each switch, along with of course the RGB LEDs. Actually, that’s an interesting one, mostly because of the ninja-printed keycaps – except they are shine-though! That’s a first for me, but actually pretty cool. I normally don’t like ninja-printing, it feels very ‘leet’ to me, but having it actually backlit is pretty cool and retains most of the functionality of having what each key does listed on it – even the secondary functions (ie shift 7 for ampersand). One thing neither of these keyboards do is show FN functions which drives me mad – considering these are 60 percent boards meaning they are missing everything including the arrow keys, delete, and the function row, it’d be real nice to know, for example, what I need to press to use the arrow keys or print screen. You’d think you can find that out with the customisation software, but that wasn’t much help as it doesn’t show you what’s mapped to the various keys, just that they are in fact mapped to something. That software is online only, although you do need to download the QMK IoT driver to use it, and it’s a little frustrating. The layout isn’t super intuitive, although you can do most everything you’d expect here, save for seemingly controlling the polling rate. You’ve got the actuation point settings, including rapid trigger, as well as snap key, dynamic keystrokes, and even a toggle key feature, along with ‘mod-tap’. They’ve thought of everything.

As for this, the FUN60 Ultra, this is quite different – yet remarkably similar. This is the tri-mode version, meaning this has a 4000mAh battery inside, a wireless microcontroller alongside the main chip, and a tiny little dongle included in the box. It also makes the unexplainable decision to position the power switch for this thing… UNDER THE CAPS LOCK KEY. Seriously, to use this board wirelessly – be that via Bluetooth or via the dongle – you need to pull the CAPS lock key off and flick the switch – although that isn’t all either! The switch is a three-position switch, where up seems to be wireless for Mac, and down is wireless for Windows, and middle is USB C only. I cannot fathom why in hell you’d put this switch… here? Like, what? I’m… I’m speechless. I.. No I have no idea, I’m just gonna move on and accept the reality as it is. Why this has a Mac mode when it doesn’t come with Mac keys, I don’t really know, but there you go. It also defaults to Bluetooth, so you’ll need to know to press FN plus I think Y to get it to work with the dongle. 

This is a much nicer and more premium board than the Pro, being made of a full metal body making it hefty. It doesn’t have adjustable feet, unlike the pro which actually has two levels, both with nice rubber pads to stop it slipping, although this Ultra has a much higher profile, so really doesn’t need any height options. You get the same AKKO Glare mag switches, although with a much more solid chassis you get a more premium sound to it. Have a listen.

Typing does feel a little better here, although since it’s the same switches there isn’t really much of a difference. There’s a subtle change, I think mostly from the much more solid feel. The impressive thing here is that if you decide these Glare switches aren’t for you, and the like five other options aren’t for you either, this board has mechanical switch hotswap sockets built in, so you can use mechanical switches too if you want to. God knows why you would, but you certainly can, and that’s pretty sweet. You can see the TMR sensors here too, the tiny square package next to the hole in the middle, that’s it. In theory these are considerably more accurate than hall effect sensors – and more power efficient too – although since these are two different keyboards and this one has a battery too it’s basically impossible to compare the two properly on that front. On the accuracy front I’m working on a new latency tool that’ll let me test that, but that’s a while away so I’ll have to come back once that’s made and find out. To the finger though, I can’t say I can notice much of a difference. 

I did of course test both boards for latency, and I’m pretty happy with the results. As with all these adjustable actuation point boards, like tap latency is pretty determined by the actuation point, so the higher the action point (ie the less travel needed) the quicker the latency, but on the whole it’s nicely lined up with the Nuphy Air60 HE – and there isn’t much in it between the TMR and HE boards – that makes sense especially as it’s the same chip running them both. For gaming both feel pretty good – of course the nicer feeling Ultra has the edge, but interestingly not because it’s a TMR board. While I can’t wait to build a tool to quantify any minute difference there may be, I can’t say there’s a noticeable difference between the two to me, and considering any power savings don’t exactly matter here, my only conclusion is that there isn’t much of a difference between the two in the real world. Luckily MonsGeek will sell you an HE version of the Ultra for £59, down from £75 for the TMR version, and for that price this thing is practically unbeatable. While some might be better overall quality, you’re likely spending twice or quadruple the price to get a noticeable difference in quality, so this definitely gets a recommendation from me. The pro is still decent, and for as little as £25 – or £30 for this one – is an absolute steal. Seriously, considering either of these for your next keyboard. What a deal.