Any keyboard out there works just fine for playing games, but a great gaming keyboard can make the difference between digital life and death. The tactility of a keyboard’s mechanical switches, its responsiveness to your key presses, and the control schemes it allows you to configure can all help you perform better in your favorite games. Plus, you can immerse yourself in games with a keyboard’s colorful, dynamic lighting.
After hundreds of hours of testing and typing, we found gaming keyboards across a range of budgets that represent the best combinations of comfort, accuracy, and customizability.
Our pick
Keychron doesn’t advertise this model as a gaming keyboard, but it provides most of the features that any gaming keyboard does for a reasonable price. It’s the sturdiest, smoothest keyboard we’ve tested.
| Switches: |
Keychron K Pro Red, Blue, and Brown, or any other three- or five-pin switches |
| Keycap material: | PBT |
| Wired/wireless: | wired via removable USB-C |
| Backlight: | zone RGB |
Among the gaming keyboards we tested, the understated Keychron V3 came out on top with its sturdy build quality, hot-swappable switches, and comfortable layout. Though the V3 is not labeled a “gaming keyboard,” it includes most of the features that you can find in any gaming keyboard, such as RGB backlighting and full programmability. It’s also our top pick for the best mechanical keyboard.
Our pick
This SteelSeries keyboard comes with plenty of premium features, giving you the ability to adjust keystroke pressure, record programmable sequences of keystrokes on the fly, and control media—and you can fine-tune most of these settings straight from its OLED display.
| Switches: | OmniPoint 2.0 Adjustable HyperMagnetic |
| Keycap material: | doubleshot PBT |
| Wired/wireless: | wireless via USB-C dongle or Bluetooth; wired via removable USB-C |
| Backlight: | per-key RGB |
An OLED screen on a keyboard sounds like a gimmick, but we were surprised at how well it works for the SteelSeries Apex Pro TKL Wireless (2023). In addition to good build quality and a satisfying typing experience, this keyboard offers more customizable features than any other keyboard we tested, and it’s easy to configure. With the SteelSeries GG software, you can record macros (programmable sequences of keystrokes), adjust the actuation force (the level of pressure necessary to press down on each key), and reprogram or map two actions to the same key. Conveniently, most of these adjustments are also available on the built-in OLED display.
Also great
This wired keyboard offers all the same fancy features as the Apex Pro TKL Wireless does, but it’s not as stable or sturdy as our other wired pick, and its switches aren’t replaceable.
| Switches: | OmniPoint 2.0 Adjustable HyperMagnetic |
| Keycap material: | doubleshot PBT |
| Wired/wireless: | wired via removable USB-C |
| Backlight: | per-key RGB |
Just like our wireless-keyboard pick, the wired SteelSeries Apex Pro TKL (2023) boasts the same great OLED display and lineup of adjustable features. We liked typing on the Apex Pro TKL, but its stabilizers aren’t quite as sturdy as those of the Keychron V3, it lacks hot-swappable switches, and it’s more expensive than our top pick.
