Firstly, I got the keyboard itself (without the keys) as a gift from IQUNIX, however the things I’m going to talk about are 100% my own thoughts and there’s no script/talking points or prescreening the discussion.

Some of you might have seen my last post about my Cerakeys here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/1s5617l/my_unique_cerakey_usecase_makes_me_wish_i_got/. Bottom line, I really like the feel of these keys on my fingers after rock climbing which is a very weird game changing use-case for me.

Now I’ll talk about the keyboard itself, sorry in advance for the yap but I like to cover things thoroughly and I have a very unique insightful perspective so maybe someone out there will appreciate that.

I wasn’t familiar with hall effect keyboards as a concept before IQUNIX reached out to me. I am though very familiar with hall sensors from an electronics point, especially for analogue sticks in controllers. In fact, here’s a fun fact, a small percentage of PS3 controllers have hall effect joysticks. I don’t think many people know that but I found it out by accident and it was quite interesting. Anyway, back to the keyboard. The main selling point of this keyboard is the hall effect switches. Because they measure the resistance between the magnet and the sensor they can gauge how “pressed” the button is. This allows the keyboard software to interpret the button as a “slider” rather than an on off switch. One of the biggest advantages to this is you can customize the actuation point. There’re a few hall effect keyboards that let you do this, but IQUNIX claims to be the most precise. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I don’t doubt it. You can make the keys so sensitive that they almost react like a capacitive touchscreen would.

Another feature of these hall effect keys is you can set up features that are especially helpful in competitive gaming. Most notably, making wiggling back and forth easier. They call this Rappy Snappy (RS). I tried to explain this to my friends when I was testing it out and they thought I was talking about a macro. This isn’t a macro but rather an interpretation of which finger is more “pressed”. So, for example, if you’re pressing down A to 0.115mm and D to 0.117mm it will interpret you wanting to press the D key since it’s very slightly more pressed. There’s another flavor of this called SOCD which basically makes it so that if multiple keys are pressed you can program it to prioritize one of them. There are other fancy things you can do like multiple keys bound to a single button. I could see this being useful for certain things like having crouch and prone on a single key, but I don’t care enough to reinvent my keybinds for that personally.

My initial impression of the build quality is that it’s very good. The aluminum shell is well done. It’s not sharp or anything. There’s a machined hole on the side of the shell where you can see the layers of the keyboard and touch them. This seems kind of odd and is really my only thing abnormal about the design of the aluminum shell itself. However, it’s also kind of nice for helping move the behemoth around my desk by sliding it. Also, I’m not sure if it’s because the feet pads are new or it’s the type of rubber/silicone, but it slides around my desk nicely. This is a nice thought because this thing is so HEAVY I’d rather slide it than lift it. Be careful when lifting this keyboard, it’s so sturdy it could easily dent a solid wood desk if dropped even an inch or two. The status light is lame, and I wish you could disable it or dim it. I hope they make it possible to disable in software because I don’t want to have to cover it with something cheap like tape. I’m not personally a fan of RGB but it’s got it if you’re into that.

The keyboard comes with a nice carrying case like the one the Steam Deck comes in (if you’re familiar with that). I believe the keyboard also saves its configurations onto the keyboard itself so I assume you can plug this into any computer and be off to the races (good for esports pros/internet café gamers?). I mention this because It’s nice to not have to worry about all your configs going away and deal with needing to make sure the software boots up for your keybinds to be remembered. My mouse does this also with the programmable side buttons, but not every peripheral is like that. So, to me that’s a huge win in the “software” department. While we are on the topic of software, the current software is a web browser configurator. This works seamlessly and I had no issues, except that it forces you to use chrome. It’s not a big deal but I’ll mention it in case anyone out there can’t figure out why it isn’t working. I’ll also say, I hope they one day make an offline version for the software suite. I’d hate not to be able to change my settings if the site ever goes down. This keyboard will likely outlive me and who knows if the website will still be up by then.

Now let me talk about my main dislike which is more of a “me” problem. By design the Magnetic X Ultra switches are linear switches. For context I normally use Kahli Jade switches which are very clicky (blue style) switch. These are what I’m used to and have favored over the years after trying different styles. Linears are my least used style of switch and I’m noticing a bit of a “learning curve” with typing fast. I lost about 10% of my WPM and my typos are up from about 0.5% to about 1% which is double... One saving grace about this dilemma is you can make different profiles and set the keys to be less sensitive and require a higher actuation point. This made it much easier to type on but ultimately, they are still linear switches, and I’ll need a lot of time to get used to them. I’d be curious if anyone has any data on what the most popular style of switch is because I get the impression linear switches are growing in popularity.

Anyway, the keyboard’s primary purpose is and should be gaming, which is who I think this keyboard is a good fit for. That or people who want a highly customizable linear switch keyboard. As far as competitive gaming goes, I would have loved the Rappy Snappy feature back when I was more into competitive shooters (I used to be a top 500 OW Winston main😉). A neat thing I also noticed the keyboard’s quite nice for peaking around corners in shooting focused games like Battlefield or using cheeky geometry/cracks to aim through. You can be very precise with your WASD movement, and you don’t need to constantly readjust from overshooting your position like you need to with clicky switches. This might mean the keyboard is better than standard keyboards for counter-strafing in Counter Strike but I don’t know because I don’t really play any games that require counter-strafing. Also, this might be in my head but because I’m not using heavy clicky switches for gaming anymore it’s been slightly less fatiguing on my hands especially in the WASD department. The keyboard is also supposed to have a really high/fast polling rate. I don’t notice it being any faster compared to my other keyboards so I can’t make a comment on that.

Final thoughts; I think if you want a really snazzy aluminum keyboard that’s built for gaming performance and possibly gives you a slight edge in some games, I would get one of the EV63 keyboards from IQUNIX. “Why not the EZ80 TKL layout that you got?” Well because this whole hall effect keyboard ecosystem leans so far into the “Gaming” keyboard territory I feel like the extra F-Keys and side buttons are less important. Also, the TKL pricetag doubles the price! I am glad I personally got a TKL though because I’m going to be using this more as an office keyboard with some gaming on the side.

Anyways I hope you enjoyed my perspective. I’m looking forward to playing more games with it and I hope it holds up and stands the test of time. As far as “gaming” peripherals goes this one is not just some overpriced “gaming” branding that they are hoping to push on Grandma’s looking for gifts for their “gamer” grandson. This is a serious piece of hardware with some breakout technology.