Cooler Master SK650 review: the most beautiful, intensely frustrating gaming keyboard ever made

I’ve been waiting for Cooler Master’s new range of low profile gaming keyboards to launch since first laying eyes on them at Computex last year. In the sweltering Taipei heat the SK-series keyboards were easily the coolest things on show. Using the latest low-profile Cherry MX mechanical switch, with a beautiful chiclet-style, and some slick RGB LED implementation, they made every other gaming keyboard on show look like some Fisher Price, Baby’s First Keyboard kind of rubbish. But that was June, and it’s taken until well after the CES showpiece in January to get the boards finally out of the factories and into our hands. But has the wait been worth it, do these stylish new gaming boards deliver a new kind of peripheral experience? The answers are no and yes respectively. Neither one a positive response… What we can say is that the style of the SK650 still blows us away. It’s not just me either, the entire PCGamesN office is as enamoured with the clean, simple, stripped-back aesthetic of the latest Cooler Master boards as I. But they are borderline unusable. The keyboards not the rest of our staff.