I have $70+ in credits at Dell for buying my PC there and i keep looking at what they sell and I don’t really need anything. The credit is expiring this month. I see that people like mechanical keyboards. What is the benefit?
I’ve got speakers and headphones. They sell crap for PC games. Their USB drives are small. Any ideas what else maybe worth while there? I’m kinda at a loss after browsing around.
In addition to those benefits mentioned above - and to expand on those bullet points, I love the feel and sound of a mechanical keyboard and it’s great when playing/working in a dim room to easily see keys at a glance - but also they tend to be really durable and long lasting. For example, you won’t have painted letters that wear off over time, and the two keyboards I bought 5 years ago are still in as good a shape as the day I bought them - just excellent stuff.
You need to get specific keycaps so they don’t wear down and get smooth. Like PBT doubleshot or whatever. There’s a scary deep rabbit hole you can fall down here. Some people spend thousands on their custom keyboards to get the sound just right. So far I’ve managed to avoid that.
I can’t speak to this - I’ve never heard of such a thing - but I’ve had an RGB mechanical keyboard at the office where I type literally thousands of words per day and have had this thing since 2018 and it’s still just as it was when I unboxed it. At home the one I have there is from 2017 and while I don’t type as much by far, I do use that keyboard for gaming and the WASD keys are identical to the tilde key (as an example) - maybe what you are referencing refers to a certain type of mechanical key I’ve never had? I think mine are Cherry in both cases.
Not the switches, the keycaps. It’s a specific type of plastic that lasts longer. Rabbit-hole, dude, slowly back away like you’re encountering a grizzly bear and it wants your sausage and peppers sandwich.
At some of these sites you can pay an extra $100 to get each individual switch in a set “pre-lubed”, but the keyboardnoscenti look down upon this as they feel the companies do an inferior job and they lube their own switches with special tools and tiny little brushes. This takes hours.
They often spend up to a hundred dollars on a special keyboard cable coiled in a certain way with “aviator connectors”. Completely cosmetic, has nothing to do with the keyboard performance or anything. There are YouTube tutorials on how to make these cables yourself, wrapping the cord in a special mesh, heating it, and painstakingly coiling around a wooden dowel.
Thanks for the responses. Maybe I’ll pick that keyboard up. I’ve always just used the cheap keyboards that came with the pc, even when I was a software developer and typed a lot. My computer room is always well lit, so I don’t need lights on the keyboard - but maybe it would come in handy in certain games to easily identify the right key.
I think it’s safe to say I’m not someone that will get wrapped up in the keyboard blink rabbit hole :-)
You’ll enjoy the hell out of it. I’m old enough that I learned on IBM typewriters and PCs, back then most keyboards were mechanical and great. They feel so much better, but you’re probably going to have an adjustment phase for the sound, it’s quite loud.
I have to say, I can’t say I’ve ever head Dell’s keyboards ever come up in reviews of mechanical keyboards. I wouldn’t buy one, but if it’s free, then it will almost certainly be better than most non-mechanicals, so why not.
