Roca t Suora FX

www.roccat.com $140

The Roccat Suora FX is about as stripped-down as mechanical gaming keyboards come, RGB backlighting aside, of course. That said, it will leave plenty of space for your desk and your own third-party wrist rest. The styling isn’t quite as clean as the Razer, thanks to a rather too prominent Roccat logo, but it’s still a big leap up from the likes of the Logitech G910.

The downside to this minimalist approach is you do miss out on a few of the niceties of other keyboards. There’s no volume wheel, no USB passthrough, and no extra gaming keys. You get four extra keys above the numpad for media options and ‘Game Mode’, which disables the Windows key. Otherwise you get fully programmable RGB backlighting and default secondary functions that can be activated by hitting the function key.

Instead of Cherry MX switches this uses ones made by TTC. They still offer good performance, plus they’re compatible with Cherry MX keycaps, so it’s easy to customize this board. Only the Brown TTC switches are available, which have the same action as Cherry MX Red switches, so Brown and Blue fans will have to look elsewhere.

All told, this is a great barebones mechanical RGB keyboard.