What Makes A Good Gaming Keyboard or Mouse?

What makes a gaming mouse or keyboard actually good? Like, what exactly should you be looking for both in terms of specs, and what to pay attention to in reviews? Well by the end of this video I hope you’ll know exactly that, so let’s dive straight in, starting with the simpler of the two, keyboards.

Keyboards, generally anyway, are often considered less important for raw gaming performance, yet are one of the two things you actually interact with on a daily basis, and that feel can affect your experience pretty dramatically. A truly bad keyboard can significantly hamper your gaming experience, for sure, but the difference between an average and excellent keyboard for gaming is, at least to me anyway, harder to discern compared to an average versus excellent mouse. Still, how the keyboard feels – and sounds – is by far the most important aspect for your actual user experience. Obviously without being able to try it yourself locally, your only port-of-call there is reviews, and we do tend to harp on about how it feels. A good thock is generally preferred, although the switch type can also have a pretty big impact on your experience. A red style switch is linear, meaning there’s no tactile feedback. It’s just a straight slide – some people prefer that, especially for gaming, although for me I struggle to enjoy them. Brown style switches have a silent tactile bump in them – those are my favourites – and blue style switches are the ASBO option: clicky. Those often have a high pitched and grating click to them – if you can’t tell I can’t stand them anymore. I actually used to love them, my Razer Black Widow 2013 had genuine (pre-patent) Cherry MX Blues, and I enjoyed that when I was 16. Now I’m 28 and everything hurts, so a refined tactile bump is best.

There are actually some technical tests that, with the right equipment (that I’m working on building by the way) you can run to tell you a whole lot about how good the keyboard would be for both typing and gaming, regardless of how good it feels. Just to give you an idea, you could have the best feeling keyboard in the world – the perfect thock to it too – but when you type it takes five full seconds for your system to recognise you’ve pressed a key. That’d be a problem, right? Well let me run you through the sorts of things you want to see tested. The first is all about the switch travel and actuation point. Standard full-height switches tend to have around 4mm of travel, and due to how springs work, the switch tends to have a non-linear force to push it down – as in it gets harder to push the further down you press. You can map that pressure over distance, and while you’re at it you can map the actuation and release points too. Oh yeah, did you know mechanical switches press and release at different heights? That’s kinda wild right? Working out where in the travel the switch actuates is also pretty important. If it’s right at the top, that can be good for gaming, but can make it horribly sensitive to the point that you can’t type on it without a whole bunch of typos, or in game that might mean a whole load of bad inputs that can easily spell the end of your game.

Of course, this new crop of analogue magnetic hall effect keyboards can adjust their actuation point, and for those boards it’s even more important to test them, because they can be wildly off from their set heights. The Steelseries Apex Pro Gen 3 I reviewed a while ago had horribly inconsistent heights. Set it to 0.1mm and it takes over 1mm to actually actuate it. The actual range it could manage was compressed, so even the stock like 1.8mm was actually like 2.2mm or something. Obviously that’s not the end of the world, but it’d be nice to be able to set a height and it actually is that! 

One other feature you’ve likely heard of – especially recently – is polling rate. USB peripherals work by periodically sending packets to your system with, in your keyboard’s case, what keys you’ve pressed. The polling rate is how many times it does that per second. Most keyboards send 1000 packets per second, or 1000Hz, although newer keyboards offer 4,000 or even 8,000 packets per second (or hertz). There is one very important thing to note though, which is that at least on keyboards there’s actually a second polling rate – the internal polling rate – known as the “keyscan” rate. That is how often the microcontroller inside your keyboard checks what keys are pressed. On 1000Hz keyboards the keyscan rate is usually 1000Hz as well, but on the new higher polling rate boards it’s… it’s a mess. Some do match, but many don’t. Corsair tends to have a lower keyscan rate than they do polling rate – for example the K70 RGB PRO TKL hall effect board CAN do 8,000 hertz polling, but only scans the keys at 4,000 hertz, so for all intents and purposes it’s a 4,000 hertz keyboard. 

The reason you might want a higher polling rate on a keyboard really is down to latency which happens to be the biggest thing for keyboards. That’s how long it takes from pressing the key to your system recognising that input. That’s the most crucial metric for gaming, and happily I already have a tool to test that with, the open source latency testing tool (available at OSRTT.com linked the description if you want one). With the newest CS model you stick a bit of tape to a key cap and use a banana plug to tap the key. Tap it enough times to get a representative sample, then you’ve got your answer. Good keyboards only take a handful of milliseconds to respond – the Nuphy Air60 HE 8K is the fastest I’ve tested so far at just 4.6 milliseconds, although really anything up to 10 milliseconds (depending on the travel) isn’t too bad. Anything higher than 10 milliseconds or so on average and I’d call that poor performance. 

There are other things you might want to consider, namely additional features. That might be as basic as RGB lighting you like, extra knobs for volume control (I love a good knob) or extra keys for macros, but that might also be more game-changing features like hot swappable keyswitches so you can truly customise the feel of your board (and repair it later), or analogue features like multiple inputs per keystroke and rapid-tap instant resetting to get lightning fast movement. Those sorts of things can have a pretty significant impact on your usage or gaming experiences, so keep an eye out for those that you find actually useful to you and your play style.

As for mice, well at least for gaming those are really where it’s at in terms of your in-game performance. The mouse needs to be an extension of your arm in order to work right, not just a thing you’re holding. The biggest factors in that happening, at least on the physical front, are the shape and the weight. Your ideal shape will depend on how you like to grip it. There’s a few main styles. Palm gripping is just plonking your hand right on top, smothering the poor thing. You almost certainly palm grip something like the MX Master, and importantly you tend to actuate the left and right clicks with your whole finger. There’s also claw grip, which is similar to palm, but instead you lift your fingers up so you click with the tip of your fingers. There’s also fingertip, which, much like it sounds, means your only points of contact are your fingertips. The various shapes generally work better for different grips. Because palm and claw are pretty similar, the same shapes generally do a good job for those, but fingertip generally prefers smaller shells. Also your hand size will affect things, although people like RTINGS do an amazing job at telling you what size hands fit what mice. The weight, on the other hand, is pretty universal. The lighter the mouse, the quicker you can flick it around – and the more accurately too – and the less it fatigues your wrist from doing it. For certain genres of games – FPS games mostly – this is extremely important, although for other genres it may be less of a big deal. Still, less weight means less momentum, so it’s more easy to be accurate when you click, be that on an icon or on a head.

Something that might surprise you is that the DPI (or CPI, depending on your preference) doesn’t matter. Mice nowadays are coming out with 20,000 or 26,000 dots per inch (or counts per inch), but, like… who cares? You’re going to use the mouse at, what,. 1600 DPI at most? I generally use like 400, so the max DPI really doesn’t matter. What does are the other sensor measurements like IPS and acceleration. IPS is inches per second, that’s how far you can move the mouse per second and still have it track. A low number here is worse, like that Amazon special thing that was hot garbage at like 20 inches per second (down from like 650 on a good gaming mouse). As for acceleration, that’s how fast you can move it and have it still track. This is another higher-is-better affair, with most good mice these days being 50G’s plus. Actually, one subtle thing you can look for is the light source for the “optical” sensor. If it’s infra-red (and built-in) then it’s likely pretty good. If it’s a plain red LED… run. 

Of course mice also have a polling rate, and they are arguably more important than keyboard’s polling rates, because a mouse doesn’t just send what button you’ve pressed… No it sends your cursor position, and that updating more frequently can mean smoother input matching for better accuracy. It isn’t necessarily the biggest game-changer, but the more data, the better in this case. That does also mean latency can be improved, although in my testing there actually isn’t that much difference between mice running at 1K, 4K and 8K. With that said, all the fastest mice I’ve tested have in fact been high polling rate mice. The fastest mice take less than two milliseconds end-to-end to report, with a good result being at most under 5 milliseconds. Anything more and that’s stretching it. One thing that can actually have a big effect on the mouse’s latency are the switches. The best kind are optical, with Razer’s style being a beam-breaking design, and the close second being Endgame Gear’s SPDT style which use the fact that mice switches actually have contacts for when they’re open and closed, so you can use the removal from the ‘closed’ contact for click, and removal from the ‘open’ pad for release, giving instant action with no debounce delay. Pretty great, right?

There are also extra features mice can have – wireless (and wireless charging), extra buttons, hell even extra scroll wheels and ergonomic design if you go that route – although your options are generally more limited there. One thing that’s prevalent for both keyboards and mice is the software to tweak things. Most softwares are either bloatware (or outright spyware – I’ll let you make your own allegations in the comments below) or are web-only. Web only does make sense, but can be a little annoying to work with sometimes, and often very under-assisted on the UI front. At least the bloatwares have tooltips and instructions! Most of the time you’re just gonna set and forget these things so it isn’t a big deal, although I’ve found with older games you might need to use your mouse’s configurator to change the polling rate back to 1000Hz to avoid stuttering, so keep that in mind.

Of course there is plenty more we could talk about when it comes to mice and keyboards, and how to test them, but I think this is the key bits you need to know to make an informed decision about your next gaming peripheral. As always, check out reviews from trusted sources, and the more testing they do, the better. I’ve mentioned RTINGS as a great example here as their testing methodologies are always spot on, or for more hands-on experience, folk like Rocket Jump Ninja have your back there. Of course if you want to be able to test your own peripherals, you are more than welcome to pick up an open source latency testing tool that I build right here at home in the UK and ship worldwide, from OSRTT.com, link in the description, and if you’re interested in my still-in-the-works peripheral testing tool, let me know in the comments below!