Keychron K4 HE Review – Excellent Quality Hall Effect Keyboard 

Keychron are no strangers to making high quality keyboards – the Q3 Max I use up here for testing is an excellent example – and this, the K4 HE, is no different. It’s a high quality, fully-featured hall effect keyboard at a pretty reasonable price tag, so let’s take a look around it, test it out, and see why I am more than happy to recommend this thing. This is actually the special edition version with the very nice rosewood sides and rosewood coloured escape and enter keycaps. The standard version is ten bucks cheaper, but I’d go for this one for the unique look and fresh design. Either way the main shell is plastic, but the wood adds an air of quality that just plastic on its own can’t match. 

The K4 HE follows Keychron’s usual design rules – the same slightly rounded keycap faces with clear markings, including secondary and FN functions which is great. This is a 96% board, so it has basically all the keys but in a slightly condensed layout. You’ve got arrow keys wedged in between the num pad and a shortened right shift, and delete, home, end, page up, page down and RGB keys extending out from the function row. By default it comes with the Mac keys on the bottom row, although this being Keychron you of course get the Windows versions, and plain enter and escape keys too, in the box, along with a screwdriver and allen key – should you want to disassemble the board – a key and switch puller, the USB dongle and female C to female A adapter, plus a very nice quality right angle USB C cable (albeit a short one). 

On the left hand side you’ll find the USB C port that’s recessed to match the cable giving it a very solid and well supported grip – so much so it’s a little difficult to remove sometimes – plus the Mac/Windows switch, and the three position power switch. Away from you is 2.4GHz, middle is off/cable, and towards you is Bluetooth. To go along with that wireless functionality you’ve got a 4000mAh battery inside which Keychron claims is good for over 100 hours of usage – at least with the backlight off anyway. It does cap out at 1000 Hz – both wirelessly and wired – although considering this isn’t exactly a pro-esports marketed board, that isn’t exactly the end of the world. It’d be a nice-to-have, although as you’ll see from the latency results it isn’t the biggest deal anyway. Oh and in terms of adjustability you’ve got two stages of height adjust feet, both have rubber tips so the board won’t move while lifted.

Switch wise this comes with Gateron Nebula double-rail switches. Of course being an HE board these are basically just a magnet and a spring, but these are pre-lubed with a double rail for better stability, 40g starting force and peaking at 60g towards the end, with 0.2 to 3.8mm travel and supposedly 0.1mm sensitivity. Naturally, being hall effect, you get a whole host of features with these switches. Of course you can pick your actuation point – the default is 2mm – and enable rapid trigger, although one feature I’ve not seen done this way before is a take on Razer’s “Snap Tap” where opposing directional changes cancel each other out for faster movement in games like CS and Valorant. Everyone generally offers “Last Key Priority”, where whichever key was pressed most recently is the one that gets triggered, but Keychron have also offered a unique take they call “Snap Click”. Basically it’s whichever switch is pressed lower gets triggered. While neither of these features are really for me, it’s cool to have that as an option for sure. You’ve also got DKS – multiple actions per keypress – analog mode to use the switches as a joystick, and curve adjustment which is really cool to see. For the most part Keychron’s web UI configurator is well designed, intuitive and pretty easy to use. You do have to connect the keyboard via USB C though, you can’t configure it wirelessly which is a little annoying, but there you go. 

Something I genuinely appreciate here is the quality. Keychron’s OSA profile keycaps feel great – they are doubleshot PBT – and despite being a plastic shell this feels genuinely premium. Typing feels great on this, even to a tactile switch lover these linears feel pretty good. The sound is actually really nice too, have a listen.

Genuinely, I think this thing punches well above its weight in typing experience. While the MonsGeek FUN60 boards I checked out recently are considerably cheaper – even the metal bodied FUN60 Ultra – there is definitely something to be said for the quality. This plastic board feels noticeably better to type on – and listen to – than the metal FUN60 Ultra, and hell even the included accessories tell the story. Keychron pack it really well, they include a really nice quality and huge quick start guide card that has everything you’d need to know printed right on it so you don’t need to spend time working out what everything does or how to do basic stuff, they include a damn screwdriver to take the board apart if you want to. Everything here is just more quality, and to me that’s worth the extra cash.

I mentioned latency testing, and according to my very own open source latency testing tool (available at OSRTT.com, link in the description), this is definitely slower than the other boards I’ve tested, although it’s almost identical – if not a touch faster – than the Glorious GMMK 3 HE, and that’s what I use as my primary board, so clearly I’m ok with that. Sure, for the most pro of esports gamers that might maybe possibly be a problem, but as you can see you can drop the latency by reducing the actuation point, which can be worth a good couple milliseconds if you include wired vs wireless in there too, so there’s that. Of course for actually gaming this is a great time. The feel is spot on making it really enjoyable to game on. It’s smooth, responsive enough, and is fairly quiet too which means you can focus on the game, although what you can hear is definitely quality. 

The K4 HE is either $135 or $145 depending on if you get the special wood trim edition or not, which I think is a pretty decent price. Now the $30 and $75 FUN60 boards I mentioned already do raise a few questions – is this really twice to five times as good? Well, kinda? Quality is something that’s a lot harder to quantify and value. Considering most normal people (keyboard nerds are free to make any implications they want from that) don’t change their keyboards very often – generally years at a time, normally when the old one starts to fail or it stops fulfilling their needs – if you’ve got the cash I think you’ll get more enjoyment in the long run out of this than you will those cheaper FUN60 boards. That doesn’t mean they are a bad choice, far from it, but if your priorities are quality over outright price, you’ll love this. If you value the money more than the qualitative experience then get one of the FUN60 boards. Oh and since they sent it I should mention the silicone wrist rest. It’s nice enough, made of a honeycomb pattern, and a nice mix of supportive and soft. I can’t give you much on the longevity of course, but it sure feels nice for now.