GMMK Compact Barebones Keyboard

A small, mighty keyboard you can build yourself

COMPARED TO MANY peripheral companies, Glorious PC Gaming Race is the new kid on the block. It has been around for about six years now, and in that time it has made a huge impact on the peripheral scene. The Model O mouse is one of the best-selling mice of recent years, and the GMMK fullsize and TKL are both highly respected, claiming to be the first hot-swappable modular mechanical gaming keyboard.

Today we have the GMMK Compact Barebones. This is a 60 percent keyboard for those who appreciate the smaller things in life, without a numpad, arrow keys, and F-row. To access these you use FN + I,J,K,L for your arrow keys, and FN + numbers for your F keys.

The "Barebones" part of the name is the most interesting thing about the GMMK series for us. This means you can select your components for the keyboard yourself. You have the choice of a fullsize, TKL, or 60 percent board, so if the compact isn’t your thing, then there are other options. As well as being able to choose the size of your keyboard, you also have the option to choose from 14 different switch types. We chose Kailh Pro Purple switches, which are similar to Cherry MX brown but actuate slightly heavier. If Cherry MX switches are your preferred choice, however, you will have to get these separately, as currently there are only Gateron and Kailh variants, which if we’re honest are perfectly fine.

The last selection is the keycaps. Here you can select either the standard black or white caps, or you can have the RGB-loving pudding keycaps, also in black or white variants. You can also select optional o-rings to dampen typing noise if you so wish—we didn’t worry about that. We chose the white pudding keycaps, and we can certainly see why they are garnering popularity in the RGB crowd. They’re very pretty when the light glows through them.

KNEE BONE'S CONNECTED TO… Building the Barebones keyboard is child's play. The GMMK Compact has hot-swappable switches, so no soldering is needed; you simply push the switch into the PCB. It is worth noting that you can bend the copper terminals on the switch if you push them in at an angle, so best practise is to sit directly over the keyboard so you can push straight down. This isn’t an issue with the GMMK itself— it's the same with all hot-swappable keyboards. If you do bend anything, Glorious has included tweezers to help you straighten things up, and you also get spare switches.

We don’t have much space left for how well the keyboard performs, our typing experience, or the software, but honestly we don’t need it. It performs great, the typing experience is as expected because we chose the switches, and the software is simplistic but works.

The only issues we found were nitpicky ones, such as not being able to bind media keys to secondary FN keys. This means you’re very limited on where you can actually use them. The second niggle is that there is no on-board memory. Changing options in software and hitting apply will work, but as soon as you move to a secondary system you’re back to default settings. They’re not major issues, but other keyboards have this area locked down, so it would be nice for Glorious to do the same.

Overall, the GMMK Compact is probably one of the best keyboards we've tested in a while thanks to being so customizable. We can choose the options we want before adding it to the cart, so it's naturally going to fit our personal preference and score higher, as it ticks all our boxes. Usually, to do the same you'd have to delve into the custom keyboard scene and spend far more.

VERDICT 9 GMMK Compact Barebones Keyboard

GLORIOUS Ridiculously customizable; great to type on; beautifullooking pudding keycaps.

SNORIOUS Limited pre-built options; unable to set keys on multiple layers; no on-board memory; no Cherry MX options; software simple but limited.

$120-$138 www.pcgamingrace.com