If you're like me, when considering the best gaming keyboards you might have an affinity for those white and grey, IBM Model M-esque mechanical keyboards befitting of the clicky-clacky sound often associated with legacy keyboards. The Vortex Race 3 comes to mind, and of course there's the Model M and its lookalikes, but we recently stumbled across this beautiful Ajazz AK510 mechanical gaming keyboard.
This keyboard is currently 20% ($20) off on Amazon's US site, putting the price down from $99.99 to $79.99. (It's available for full price on Amazon UK for £79.99.) If you're in it for the retro aesthetic, this clacker has all the off-white under- and overtones to make you gush. It's by far the best-looking retro-style keyboard we’ve come across, apart from the Model M and similar legacy or brand-rebooted keyboards.
Its grey, white, and brown colour scheme is executed artfully, with the perfect amount of colour added to the setup in the single brown stripe that makes its way down the side of the keyboard. The keys themselves look beautiful, too, because the keycaps are what the company calls 'spherical', meaning they're taller and plumper. These keycaps supposedly make for a better fit for your fingers, but all we can say is that they help make for a gloriously chunky, retro-looking keyboard.
The AK510 uses Zorro key switches which are, for all intents and purposes, off-brand replicas of Cherry MX switches. These aren’t the best switches on the market, but for a keyboard that looks so good at this price there has to be some give, and it looks like this comes from the switches that are lower-quality than Cherry MX switches. This isn’t to say they’re bad, though – they just can’t hold a candle to the flagship Cherry MX switches that we’re used to.
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Apart from the beautiful colour scheme, fantastic PBT double-shot spherical keycaps (a rarity for stock keycaps), and mechanical key switches, if you decide you want to ruin its beautiful muted colour scheme with some vibrant RGB backlighting, you can do that, too – only God can judge you there. In all seriousness, though, yellow, white, or deep red backlighting might actually look quite nice on this keyboard, and you have a whole array of RGB lighting options that can be chosen through the software.
Ultimately, for this discounted price you’re getting a gorgeous retro-style keyboard that’s well worth the money. The only downside is that it doesn’t come with Cherry MX key switches, but the Zorro switches are more than adequate for the price, and the spherical PBT keycaps mean you should be getting a keyboard that feels as good to type on as it looks. There are other AK510 options than this one with Zorro Brown switches, but we’ve linked the Zorro Brown keyboard here as these switches offer a great blend of tactile but non-audible feedback just like MX Browns.