The enthusiast mechanical keyboard scene has constantly evolving tastes and trends, and once you order a fancy bespoke board through a limited-run group buy, another one springs up for hyped-up fans to clamor over. Glorious is looking to streamline a touch of that fervor with a pair of new gaming keyboards, each decked out with a boatload of user-selectable customizations, and they may be perfect for the keyboard sicko-curious out there — no tedious group buys necessary.
The new Glorious models consist of two keyboards, the GMMK 3 (starting at $119.99 bare-bones, meaning no switches or keycaps included) and the GMMK 3 Pro (starting at $239.99 bare-bones), with each available now in three sizes (full-size 100 percent, 75 percent, and 65 percent) and with either traditional MX-style hot-swappable switches or magnetic Hall effect (HE) switches. Boards equipped with the latter are also compatible with MX switches, allowing you to use any of your existing collection, but the choices keep going if you want Glorious to build you something more unique through its new Boardsmith configurator site.
Boardsmith is where the real magic for the curious lies. It includes myriad options for all kinds of the GMMK 3’s internal and external components, and tinkering with wild (or ugly) configurations is half the fun of this keyboard. It’s like going to Porsche’s or Lamborghini’s site and seeing how ridiculous a supercar you can put together. You can customize the materials and colors of the top and bottom halves of the board’s chassis, switches, keycaps, cables, knobs, the switch plate (the supportive internal plate base that sits beneath the switches), gasket mounting materials (little swappable pegs that sit low inside the case to give the top deck and keys a firm or pillowy feel), and Glorious’ logo badges.
While there are many aesthetic choices to make based on colors and keycaps, the chosen construction of the board can greatly affect the typing feel and sound. This isn’t new if you already engage in any group buys from companies like Meletrix, Qwertykeys, or Owlab. The difference here is that Glorious has a greater focus on gaming and will build and ship your configured keyboard without making you wait the better part of a year. Plus, the keyboard arrives fully built, as opposed to a DIY kit.
The process is also much more novice-friendly, as choices on Boardsmith have brief tooltips to help you weigh minutiae like switch plate material and Glorious’ various switches. It should be helpful for those without tons of prior mechanical keyboard experience. And if you end up with a bit of FOMO after your board arrives, you can order additional parts to easily swap out yourself (including the whole top and bottom frames).
Glorious aimed to make the new GMMK generation fairly easy to open up and tinker around inside, with case screws accessible beneath rubber feet that pop on and off. It’s a promise Glorious really delivered on, as the GMMK 3 is one of the simplest keyboards I’ve ever disassembled. Once you remove those case screws, the chassis simply separates in half, and you instantly have full access to just about everything without having to remove a single keycap or switch.
Lots of keyboards out there require you to remove all the keycaps every time you want to dive into it, and that’s a huge pain point if you’re a little lazy like me or don’t want to spend a chunk of time to test out one small tweak, like seeing how your keyboard sounds with less foam. Here, you can try out mods or different gaskets in mere minutes.
1/7
1/7 Much of what Glorious is tapping into with the GMMK 3 and 3 Pro are the trappings of the enthusiast mechanical keyboard community, where feel, aesthetics, and sound are top priorities on boards used for typing and productivity. But Glorious’ pedigree comes from PC gaming (the brand’s name used to be the cringe-inducing “Glorious PC Gaming Race”), and the new GMMK boards maintain a gaming angle, particularly the Hall effect models. If you opt for HE versions of the GMMK 3 or GMMK 3 Pro, you gain all kinds of unique tricks through the Glorious Core software. You can customize the actuation point from a range of a super shallow 0.1mm to bottoming out at 4mm (the default is set to 2mm), which can be set across the whole board or on a per-key basis. You can also set up to four bindings to a single key travel — two on the way down and two on the way up — with selectable actuation points for each. There are a lot of fine-grained settings you can tweak and customize here, though Glorious Core is incredibly clunky and poorly designed (which is sadly par for the course among Glorious’ competitors like Razer and SteelSeries, too). You can likely hammer your way through it with a bunch of trial-and-error testing, but it’s a far cry from the beginner-friendly intuitiveness of Boardsmith. I’ve been testing a full-size 100 percent GMMK 3 Pro in a highly specced configuration with an all-metal case (it weighs a hefty 5.6 pounds), HE Fox switches (Glorious’ go-to for linears), 2.4GHz wireless, firm silicone gaskets, and an FR4 switch plate. I usually prefer a deeper, punchier typing sound on much smaller boards, but this config has a half-throated clacky tone that’s softly deep upon bottoming out but brighter when each key is released. It’s not quite the “raindrops on a window” sound that some people covet, but it’s playing in that ballpark. I may personally loathe full-size keyboards (I’ve grown accustomed to the number pad-free life), but it’s cool to see a 100 percent board with so many customizable options and aesthetics. Most other “gaming” keyboards this size are ugly all-black or all-white monstrosities, where RGB lighting is the only aesthetic color choice. I’m coming away mostly impressed by the GMMK 3 Pro, but going all out with the Glorious Boardsmith is going to cost you. This board soared up in price to $490.99 once fully configured, which is a far cry from the starting kit price of $149.99 for a wired GMMK 3 complete with MX switches and keycaps and is getting dangerously close to Angry Miao territory. At least, if you go a little wild with the configurator and spend a lot on your dream GMMK 3, it seems like you’re getting a quality keyboard with a smattering of the latest innovations in the mech keyboard space as well as a two-year warranty and actual customer service — not just a Discord server and a GitHub repository to sort through for DIY troubleshooting. You may come to the GMMK 3 for the specs and aesthetics, but you might want to stay for the simplicity and peace of mind. Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge https://www.theverge.com/24240747/glorious-gmmk3-pro-modular-mechanical-keyboard-custom-impressions-specs-price