I haven’t heard of it before, but now you have. The Melgeek Cyber01 keyboard is brand new to the brand’s lineup of gaming hardware. If you are unfamiliar, this device specializes specifically in excelling in gaming performance particularly in actuation speeds through its magnetic key switches. Magnetic keyboards allow the user to customize actuation points to tailor their experience and reaction times. Although the magnetic feature works well worth the price of this device at $159.99, with sales seen at $139.99, the keyboard seems to have made trade offs in other areas.
Performance and User Experience With Melgeek’s Magnetic Switches
There is some other charm to the Melgeek Cyber01 that we will discuss later, but to stay attentive, the primary reason you would purchase this product is for its excellence in magnetic switch performance.
Software Customization and How It Affects Your Gameplay
After downloading Melgeek’s Hive software, you can begin taking advantage of the selling points of the Cyber01. You can change your RGB, Rapid Trigger, Macro, Function, and dynamic key settings here, but let’s focus on the magnetic keys.
I have personally never used a magnetic keyboard with customizable keys to this level, and my initial thoughts were, how different can this system really be from a normal mechanical keyboard. I was wrong for sure, as the pure level of sensitivity you can achieve out of the Cyber01 is impressive.
The Melgeek Cyber01 is competitively priced as one of the cheapest magnetic keyboards I can find, while offering a perfected system down to the sweet spot of .1mm actuation distance. This little distance makes it so the slightest touch of the keys sets it off, thus making this level of speed great for spammers confident with their fingers. For those with twitchy hands and more sensory movement, you can find the distance that suits your brain the most.
For someone like myself, I like to rest my hands on the keys with a slight amount of force, but this will set off the keys if programmed too close to .1mm. You can even make the actuation distance extremely low for those who want to hit each key with force leaving less room for mistakes.
Testing .1mm Actuation, 1mm, and 2mm
During a specific test I ran on the Cyber 01, Although still very sensitive on both actuation distances, the .1mm and 1mm had a decent amount of contrasting speeds when clicking, where as diminishing returns can be found between 1mm and 2mm.
At around 3mm, you basically have to fully depress the keys to input, thus leaving a lot of room for definitive pressing, or leaning heavily on the keys. Good luck leaning on the keys when under 1mm actuation distance as the reactivity of your fingers are amplified. 1mm – 2mm leaves a bit of room for heavy hands.
Surprisingly, anything under 1mm could potentially make a big difference is your input speeds when comparing to non-magnetic keyboards, as long as you do some yoga to remove those shaky hands before gaming.
On top of all of this, I found it also greatly important to be aware of how fast you press the key, or how high your fingers hover the board. When testing, I was almost able to get a faster input speed when on 3mm vs 2mm simply by pressing the key more swiftly, so keep in mind your pressing habits might affect these numbers.
Other Melgeek Hive Software Features, RGB, Rapid Trigger, and More
In the Melgeek Hive, other than changing your hardware’s settings, you can also test keystrokes and mouse polling via the tools panel. A useful visualization for even these types of Youtube reviews. Side note about the tools panel keystroke tester, they have very loud piano noises as you press keys, which scared me tremendously. Although you can turn these noises off, be prepared to be startled if your volume is cranked.
The RGB delivery of the Melgeek Cyber01 is stellar, allowing the user to customize the sweet looking border and body lights. Not to mention, the colors truly pop with hue saturation and brightness showing a little love and care went into this feature. You can also change individual key lights to make your own original look, or to highlight your favorite keys’ contrasting tones.
I wanted to save this for further into the review, but being we are on the topic of RGB, must I say that the biggest downfall of this device is the lack of backlit RGB keys. There is absolutely no illumination or transparency to the green painted on the keys, so typing at night is a nightmare. Melgeek really wasn’t kidding when they said this device is for the gamers, because those gaming have no need to really look down at the keyboard.
Rapid trigger is for those that love to rapidly spam keys, which this keyboard happily offers, providing less effort to actuate keys over and over again. This is beneficial to fighting games in particular to get your combo off a little easier. I don’t see too much of a difference here personally, and find way more practical use out of simply changing actuation distance, but to each their own.
At this time, keyboard profiles are in development by Melgeek, so until I can make presets for different games or situations, I will leave Rapid Trigger off.
Style / Feel / Build / Hardware
The Melgeek Cyber01 offers quite the unique take on styling with one of a kind key imprints. These images creatively consist of a skull for the end key, or using common sense keys like “Shift” for a digital upload graphic. The escape key even has an infected symbol.
I do appreciate the design decisions as a designer myself, but for something like a keyboard with an uncommon layout, I found the design to be a bit confusing in some areas, where in other areas it works, leaving me to double check the user manual to feed my memory.
Anyway, the Melgeek Cyber01 does live up to originality everywhere you look across the front and back, with interesting cuts, grooves, beveling and the use of depth, and more. It definitely shows that the developers of this product cares about visual presentation apart from the norm, which is a benefit to me overall.
The keyboard, although primarily made of plastic, does not feel cheap or poorly put together. The overall structure of the aluminum face integrates well with the material around it, leaving durability where the Cyber01 needs.
The keys feel a little spongy from what I am used to being that this is a magnetic switch build, but it grew on me after using it for an hour or two. These keys still maintain some level of tactile feedback. The Cyber01 is very satisfying to type with, with nicely sized keys and spacing between for fast input with less errors.
Next, Melgeek sneaks in a debossed logo at the top left of the board, and I am for the movement of discrete log placement, rather than loud branding. You should be able to look at a product and know who makes it without seeing a logo, and Melgeek does well in this category.
Lastly, the keys are transparent yet tinted throughout the sides, with more of an opaque face.
They do look stylish nonetheless, as transparency sometimes screams cheaply made, but you don’t get that vibe with the Melgeek Cyber01.
Other Talking Points
A downfall of the Melgeek Cyber01, and other magnetic keyboards, is to say goodbye to heavy hitting computer speakers on or close by your desk, because this device recommends loud sounds and sound waves at least 30 cm away. Although most of us use headsets, those who like speakers can’t enjoy this product.
Next, the Melgeek Cyber01 luckily has no built-in cable for easier travel, and if the 2 meter wire breaks, you aren’t out of luck. It’s the little things that matter. Speaking of, the user manual is also very simple and easy to understand, helping inform the user as to what features are available through dynamic keystrokes and what the image keys mean.
Referring to the USB-C cable above, this device is only wired, so keep that in mind when making your purchase. Next to the USB-C cable connector, you will see an RGB strip that acts as an indicator light for Caps Lock. At first I thought they did not provide a visual aid for this toggle, but luckily I was wrong as this was a much needed discovery.
If you are someone who likes to use an adjacent wrist rest with your keyboard, something that might annoy you about the Cyber 01’s design is a jetting edge in the front, making adjacent objects sit lobsided. Little things like this will irritate me enough to make a stink out of it.
Lastly, they give you different switches with a more clicky, tactile feel, but they don’t provide a switch removal tool. Rather strange but I digress.
Conclusion
The Melgeek Cyber01 is definitely worth looking at, as it strides to make magnetic keyboards a bit more affordable, while still providing a sense of original design and practicality. The usefulness of magnetic key switches is really for anyone that gives it a try, as you never know how much speed you are missing out on, and your gameplay skills can improve with hardware of this kind.
It might sound weird, but despite all of the positive notes the Cyber01 has to offer, it remains extremely hard to recommend to anyone who isn’t gaming exclusively with their time on the computer.
Why you may ask? The Melgeek Cyber01 has no keyboard backlighting! It is so difficult to use this product at night unless you are fully accustomed to not looking at the keyboard to type. I don’t need to look to type successfully, but I am not perfect, and I have to squint, even with my monitor’s ambient light, to see the keyboard. A major miss for most people, as I would imagine most others feel the same way about keyboards with no backlighting.
This is probably the biggest negative about this product, so
Noisy Pixel is giving the Melgeek Cyber01 Gaming Keyboard, a B.
I want to rank this higher, but I simply cannot get over how specifically tailored this product is to only gaming, as if gamers don’t ever need to type or see the keyboard at night. It lacks common sense with a product at this price, and it seems Melgeek made too many trade offs when managing the manufacturing cost of this lowkey gaming tech gem.
Cool brand, cool product, but a miss in the practicality realm in relation to the product’s price point. I would spend a little more and find something with backlighting.
