Wobkey Crush 80 Reboot Pro Keyboard Review – Premium, Enthusiast, and Affordable

Mechanical keyboards from large brands tin beryllium feature-packed, but sometimes endure from concessions similar integrative parts oregon subpar switches, adjacent ones paired with a sky-high asking price. Smaller brands tin often beryllium much precise with however their premium keyboards are built, but you whitethorn tally into unnecessarily boutique features similar unconventional layouts oregon adjacent higher asking prices. So, not everything makes it into information for the champion gaming keyboard. With its Crush 80 Reboot Pro, however, keyboard shaper Wobkey erstwhile again strikes a large equilibrium that accounts for each the aforementioned concerns.

The Wobkey Crush 80 Reboot Pro Keyboard not lone offers what are arguably the astir indispensable premium features, but besides does truthful astatine a precise competitory terms point. With its straightforward design, prime of colorways, large mechanical switches, and a amazingly dense weighted base, this keyboard should delight immoderate PC gamer oregon superior typist.

Wobkey Crush 80 Reboot Pro Keyboard – Design and Customization

Touted arsenic an evolved mentation of the Wobkey Rainy 75 Pro I antecedently reviewed, the Crush 80 Reboot Pro brings implicit the aforesaid benignant of CNC aluminium body, shiny backweight, robust colorway selection, and PCB compatibility arsenic that highly-rated keyboard, but adds overmuch more. While you tin get the Crush 80 Reboot Lite for $10 little than the Pro astatine retail price, you’d suffer retired connected the Kailh Cocoa switches, RGB lighting, larger 7500mAh battery, FR4 plate, and greater enactment of colorways. This makes the Pro mentation the wide prime betwixt the two.

The Reboot Pro is disposable successful 10 antithetic colorways, including black, yellow, navy, silver, lukewarm silver, red, blue, pink, purple, and yellow. Most of the colorways are reasonably tame multi-tone designs, with the apical and bottommost frames successful the chosen color, and the keycaps, and keycap accents, successful thing complementary. For example, the navy, which is featured successful this review, has a navy assemblage and a premix of darker navy, airy grey, and achromatic keycaps with achromatic oregon achromatic lettering.

Regardless of colour scheme, the full bundle is impressive. In the container you get the keyboard, transportation case, cloth cover, alternate aluminum positioning plate, IXPE pad, 3 other switches, 2 sets of 4 further screws, 4 gasket dumbbells, an other brace of rubber feet, 2 lawsuit country protectors, a keycap/switch puller, 2.4GHz USB-A wireless dongle, USB-C to USB-A charging and information cable, and immoderate paperwork. It’s not uncommon to spot boutique manufacturers spell supra and beyond with what’s successful the box, but it’s bully to spot Wobkey inactive bash this.

What’s unluckily communal is the 2.4GHz and Bluetooth mode power recovered nether the Caps Lock key, which is ever an inconvenience. While I recognize wherefore there's nary outer power owed to the seamless apical frame, I'd emotion for 1 of these different intelligently-designed keyboards to find a mode to marque it work. The keyboard tin beryllium utilized wired, via the rear-facing USB-C port, with the 2.4GHz and Bluetooth mode power successful either direction. Up to 3 devices tin beryllium switched betwixt implicit Bluetooth, giving it immoderate added versatility.

What isn't standard, and a genuinely invited touch, is that there's yet a retention country for the 2.4GHz USB-A wireless dongle. You conscionable person to region the magnetic doorway successful the mediate of the shiny backweight underneath the keyboard.

The casing features what Wobkey calls a five-second speedy merchandise magnetic ball-catch operation for accelerated disassembly, which helps with blistery swapping your prime of parts. Thankfully, adjacent though it's beauteous speedy to disassemble the mostly toolless design, it's structurally stable. In fact, it's truthful solidly enactment unneurotic you'd person nary occupation utilizing its imposing 5.2-pound value successful a pinch to fend disconnected an intruder and past spell close backmost to typing.

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While I truly liked the 75-key layout of the Rainy 75 Pro, the 80-key format connected the Crush 80 Reboot Pro is adjacent amended since it allows for much accepted functions connected the close broadside of the board, sans a tenkey/number pad, of course. There's adjacent a 13th Function key, which, too being 1 much than 12, defaults to a Mute key, but tin easy beryllium programmed for immoderate different relation oregon a macro.

Even with the other keys, the Crush 80 Reboot Pro is not overmuch bigger astatine 13.97 inches wide and 5.4 inches deep. There are nary adjustable underside feet to alteration the typing space – instead, the keyboard mildly slopes from a thickness of 0.75 inches astatine the bottommost to 1.3 inches astatine the rear. I recovered it to beryllium a comfy typing angle, though immoderate (especially gamers) whitethorn lament the inability to marque the keyboard level oregon different set the angle.

Firmware updates and the JSON record to specify keyboard layouts and remap settings tin beryllium downloaded from the Crush 80 enactment site. The JSON record is needed for the VIA browser app to beryllium capable to configure the keyboard, which tin beryllium done either wired oregon utilizing the 2.4GHz wireless dongle.

With VIA, you tin reconfigure immoderate key, acceptable up to 15 macros, prime up to 4 layers, acceptable antithetic RGB lighting effects, and more. With my navy colorway, the south-facing ARGB backlight wasn't peculiarly noticeable, adjacent astatine maximum brightness unless my country was beauteous dark. It's a shame there's nary mill enactment for shine-through keycaps, arsenic the lighting connected the transparent heartbeat icon supra the cursor keys looks truly nice. Another bully interaction is the near and close downfiring RGB broadside lights, which again, look great, but are hard to announcement nether astir outer lighting conditions.

Wobkey Crush 80 Reboot Pro Keyboard – Performance

As with the Rainy 75 Pro, the Crush 80 Reboot Pro uses Kailh Cocoa switches. The typing acquisition is astatine slightest arsenic good, if not adjacent much stable-feeling, acknowledgment to the greater value of the Reboot Pro and its buzzword-laden components that would marque adjacent the astir hardcore keyboard enthusiast blush. Its acoustic acceptable features an 8x IXPE power pad, PET film, PCB foam with PET insulation, and PORON lawsuit foam with PET insulation, portion the A1 Black PCB and customized stabilizers much than clasp their ain successful operation to make a premium experience.

The wide feel, subdued clack, and well-sculpted keys marque it a joyousness to benignant connected for hours connected end. As per usual, since these aren't velocity switches, gamers whitethorn privation thing much tuned for competitory play – though the Kailh Cocoa has a reasonably modular 45g actuation force.

Assuming you bash privation much performance, however, you tin power the Reboot Pro to an ultra-low latency mode with FN + H. When ultra-low latency is active, you get 3.0ms of wide input latency implicit 2.4GHz arsenic opposed to the wired mode’s 2.0ms of latency (and Bluetooth gets you 8.0ms of latency, which is for non-performance scenarios, of course). I personally ne'er recovered a request to bother, though, and ne'er had issues with responsiveness implicit chiefly 2.4GHz usage connected my Windows 11 desktop.

With ultra-low latency and RGB lighting some off, you tin get good implicit 900 hours from a afloat complaint acknowledgment to the 7500mAh battery. With either oregon some of those features on, you're looking astatine conscionable nether 90 hours of artillery life. You tin manually cheque the artillery presumption by pressing FN + Space and checking which keys, from 1 to 6, oregon lowest to highest, are lit. Power absorption is besides well-implemented, with the Reboot Pro speedy to aftermath from slumber truthful you tin rapidly resume typing.