Review: Luminkey Magger68 Plus HE

As Hall effect keyboards improve, they inch closer toward custom-built mechanical keyboards: Metal cases, gasket-mounting, and acoustic engineering are becoming far more common, even in relatively affordable options. Now, cosmetic details like badges, weights, and engravings are appearing in mass-produced Hall effect keyboards.

All of these details not only make a keyboard feel better to use, but also make it a statement piece on your desk. Much like how mechanical keyboards are not only functional, but personal and expressive, the same extends to Hall effect keyboards. The $140 Luminkey Magger68 Plus HE is a Hall effect keyboard with a 65% layout, an aluminum case, and a gasket-mount assembly. It uses Gateron Magnetic Jade Pro linear switches, and it finds a great middle ground: Stylish without being too much, and high-performance without being clinical.

Typing Experience

Photograph: Henri Robbins

The typing experience of this keyboard is crisp and poppy without being excessive—the switches are smooth to press, with relatively-light springs requiring 36 grams of force to press fully (compared to a Cherry MX Red’s 50-gram springs) and a 3.5-millimeter travel distance (just a bit shorter than the standard 4.0 mm).

The switches snap back quickly after being pressed, and have a satisfying, full sound when typing that I find preferable to the lighter, more “thin” sound of most Hall effect keyboards. The sound is fairly deep and slightly marbly, with a good amount of midrange and no extraneous clicks, crunches, or rattles. It is slightly muted but not enough to be considered “silent” by any means.

The plate-mount stabilizers here come lubed and tuned from the factory. This means they don’t rattle or stick, nor do they have any other issues that draw attention. Like any well-tuned stabilizer, they’re easily forgotten about. While plate-mount stabilizers aren’t the best option for a keyboard (PCB-mounting offers more stability), these are still more than functional.

Photograph: Henri Robbins

Sound improvements come from the keyboard’s gasket-mount assembly and extensive use of silicone sound-dampening. This provides a good amount of vibration dampening and some bounce without being overly flexible. There is still some bounce when typing, but the gaskets are stiff enough (when combined with the aluminum plate) that pressing down on any of the keys only creates a minor amount of movement. For a Hall effect keyboard with precise and customizable switches, this level of stiffness is an optimal middle-ground between comfort and performance: It keeps key-presses consistent while still creating an enjoyable user experience.

The keycaps are largely made from PBT plastic with reverse dye-sublimation printing. The print is crisp and has a consistent color across the top surface, although a few of the characters have strange proportions. The PBT keycaps have a matte finish on top, which is smooth without being slick. These keycaps are seemingly-identical to the standard Cherry profile that most keyboards sport today, a shape that’s comfortable and familiar. In the top left and bottom right corners, the keyboard uses glossy ABS keycaps with UV printing on top. While these may look purely cosmetic, I found them practical as well: The smooth texture makes it easy to find the Escape or Arrow keys without needing to look down.

Performance and Usability

Photograph: Henri Robbins

The largest issue this keyboard has is the software: The Magger68 uses Luminkey’s in-browser customization software, Luminkey.club, which functions wonderfully—customizations are easy, extensive, and instantaneous. However, the software isn’t translated very well. A lot of the wording, which describes technical aspects of keyboard functionality, reads in a way that’s clunky and hard to follow. This isn’t a major issue if you’re experienced with Hall effect keyboards, but if you’re new to the hobby or trying to learn, it can make these settings harder to figure out.

Once the settings are properly adjusted, though, this keyboard performs incredibly well. The actuation distance of each switch can be manually adjusted, meaning it can register a key-press anywhere from the very top of the key-press to the very bottom, and multiple inputs can even be mapped at different distances. The keyboard is responsive, with an 8,000-Hz polling rate, and the low latency barely produces any significant input lag.

This keyboard is wired-only, which might be a dealbreaker for some. It’s a fairly dense, all-metal keyboard that has a significant focus on high-speed use, none of which is necessary for a portable keyboard. While wireless would be nice, it would increase the price of this keyboard and its complexity.

The RGB lighting has over 20 built-in presets, and all of them work well, but the color isn’t perfect. When adjusting the lighting settings, nearly all of them seem to skew heavily toward a cyan/blue tint. This is presumably because of the Magnetic Jade switches’ light blue housing, which is unavoidable without using different switches, but even without switches, the LED diodes seem to be slightly cooler than a true neutral white.

These effects combine to make a keyboard that struggles to have a pure white color even with serious tweaking, especially since the RGB adjustments easily get overwhelmed and start to lag when moving your cursor around on the color wheel. The closest I could get to a pure white was with an RGB setting of [255, 60, 90], which still had a slightly cool tint to it. When set to the “breathe” setting at a low speed with this color, the lighting was choppy as it faded out, and slowly shifted to be red as it became darker instead of maintaining the preset color. When set to a faster speed and using a more standard color setting (like solid blue or green), these quirks disappeared.

Internal Assembly

Photograph: Henri Robbins

The internal assembly is rather simple: The printed circuit board (PCB) and switch plate are screwed together, sandwiching a sheet of silicone between them. This silicone fills the empty space between the plate and PCB, and extends past on the outside edge to create gaskets that the two halves of the case hold in place. With this, the internal assembly is held in place without making direct contact with the outside case, reducing vibration and excess noise.

The keyboard only has one PCB, with a USB-C port directly attached to the main assembly. I would have preferred a separate daughterboard to contain the USB-C port, since it allows for lower placement of the port and avoids the potential stress of flexing, but this isn’t a huge issue on a stiffer keyboard like this one.

With off-the-shelf switches that can be replaced without any soldering, and straightforward disassembly, this keyboard is easy for the average person to repair. The case can be taken apart entirely with eight screws, none of which are hidden, and the PCB and plate can be separated with just a few more.

Like most Hall effect keyboards, there is one issue with the switches. Because there are multiple standards that exist for Hall effect switches, none of which are very well-documented, it can be difficult to find aftermarket options that work with your keyboard. From my testing, the Magger68 uses the same type of HE switches as Wooting’s newer models, the KS-20 style, which is the most popular type of magnetic switch. However, these are not cross-compatible with Keychron’s double-rail Nebula switches, or with older HE switches. This can present issues with customization, since nearly every type of HE switch uses the same Cherry MX-style design.

Compared to other Hall effect keyboards, the Magger68 Plus has one key advantage: The user experience is incredibly refined. Typing feels great and has a full, deep sound. The switches are responsive and snappy. Disassembly and customization is easy. Overall, it’s a well-built keyboard. As long as you’re willing to contend with a less-than-perfect software.