deskthority

I recommend a lightly used gaming board from /r/mechmarket or /r/hardwareswap. If you don't mind buying used you can get a lot of board for your money and either stick with it or buy something specific later and not feel like you're stuck with that Coolermaster or Razer board (or whatever you end up with) until it breaks because you spent $120-200 on it.

If you want to spend more on something new it'd probably be worth finding a board with hotswap so you can easily replace the switches if you want to try something new or one of them fails for whatever reason. Being able to work on a board without soldering skills makes everything easier especially when starting out.

Feel free to ask if you need specific recommendations, but most modern gaming boards will be great.

I had a krom kernel TKL that was pretty ok, it had no Cherry original but Outemu (I dont know if its a deal breaker for you) and the RGB was solid and well executed for such a cheap board (I paid 40€). It was my first mechanical keyboard and I gave it to my friend so its his first one as well.

I ended up sanding up the alpha keys so they became translucent and painting the plastic base and looked like this. Arale for scale

Rayndalf wrote: 20 Oct 2020, 09:53 If you want to spend more on something new it'd probably be worth finding a board with hotswap so you can easily replace the switches if you want to try something new or one of them fails for whatever reason. Being able to work on a board without soldering skills makes everything easier especially when starting out.

Note that there are a LOT of Outemu-based keyboards that say that they're hot-swappable. Most of these are hot-swappable only with other Outemu switches, so check the fine print. I've seen the same on some optical-switch ones, too.