ribbon cables suck can you see all those ribbon cables I've been thinking about
buying a new keyboard because I've been daily driving is 60 recently but I
really still want that numpad and I don't want to buy an extra one but
mountains they've got a new 60 and a
numpad that can connect to it what if you don't know anything about Everest
and Mountain they've been making keyboards I think the company is
actually mountain and the keyboard is Everest um they've been making keyboards for I
think four years or something now I think this company started like 2018.
basically they've got these really cool modular keyboards where you can take a
numpad and you can slot it into it because for any of those of you who
don't know what a 60 keyboard is it's basically a really small layout using 60
of a full keyboard so you're missing stuff like your afro you're missing your
numpad sometimes you're missing arrow keys depending on like the actual layout
of everything you've often got some smaller Keys as well like maybe your tab
and enter are a little shorter than you're used to and it looks something
like this so I've actually taken this
one home a couple days early I really wanted to open it up and take a look
inside because mountain is doing a few or they're claiming to do a few things
uh mostly they're targeting the more Enthusiast Market by adding silicone on
the bottom and foam silicone is
sound dampening but it's also just for weight and then the foam layer is mostly
like a sound thing it does make things feel a bit sturdier but it mostly helps
you absorb some sound and give you that like more thoughty sound that you're
looking for or at least a lot of people are looking for on top of making this
new 60 board they've also got their three switches that have come out
they've got a 45 linear a 45 linear
speed which has a shorter travel distance and then the one I took home
which is a 55 tactile that I actually
really like I think that it's a little too heavy for me personally even though
55 shouldn't be to be honest but it feels great when you actually just sit
here and kind of randomly type on it but my issue is as soon as I took it home
and I started actively like chatting with people or like playing games or
whatever it was just a little bit too much they all come pre-lubed which is
great however Factory lubing isn't always the most uniform you know you'll
have some switches that feel great and then you'll have some that don't quite feel as good I also think that you can
typically do a better job on yours like by yourself if you have crytok's 205 g0
and a lot of time on your hands
um however I think they've done a pretty good job frankly this is the 45 linear
and we'll just take a quick listen to it
but like that sounds pretty good it's not the best sounding keyboard I've ever
had but like it's pretty decent check out the stabilizers
these feel pretty good they're a little too stiff I'm not exactly sure what they
lubed them with or if they're using some kind of um like foam mod up against the
bar uh but they feel pretty good comparatively oh yeah we should probably
look at all the other stuff in the Box um there's more than just a keyboard I
promise uh what else you get in the Box you get a cable it's
um it's sleeved but it's not coiled that's fine see how it comes with this
handy dandy hotkey guide which is really nice because qmk doesn't work with the
board at least not yet this is embargoed so maybe it just wasn't up yet but
either way you've got to use their base camp software oh on the other side
there's a bunch of stuff about it so it's hot swappable which is already a
huge plus like basically any new keyboard coming out that costs more than
a hundred dollars if it's not hot swappable I'm just not really interested to be
honest for sure of course hair this is pretty neat it shows you how the
numpad connects to the main board and then it shows you how oh another huge
feature that I actually love on this thing is it's got three different USB
ports that you can connect to on the front different custom cables are going
to be arranged differently sometimes you want them coiled and going out sometimes
you want them going straight sometimes you want them going left whatever what happens is you have to plug it in and
depending on where the plug is on your keyboard because somewhere in the middle
somewhere on the left somewhere on the right fewer on the side actually even it
can look bad basically I know that seems really minor but when you've paid like
60 to 80 dollars for a cable and you've paid hundreds of dollars for a keyboard
you want everything to line up nice and flush and straight and perfect angles
it's a minor thing but when you care you
really care about it so on top of our cable and our little guide
is great you get a handy dandy keycap
and switch puller these are my favorite I really don't like the tiny plastic
ones I think these are essentially perfect you can get switches out no
problem with this guy and then you can get keycaps off no problem with this guy
here we also get a little extra key cap with the mountain logo and then you get
this foam insert which contains the feet
this is another really cool feature on this board I think it's on their other
ones as well but I haven't really used those I've only used this guy so far so
instead of like a flip down feet which
are convenient I won't deny that these
are just elegant and a really nice solution basically they're all magnetic
and then you got them on the back of your keyboard as well so here's the base pieces
this guy and this guy and these can be taken off if you don't like the base
angle that this is resting on what you can do is you can take these little
pucks and then you can stack them and then you put the end cap on
and now it's taller yeah that's much more comfortable at least for me so on
top of these magnetic feet which is a
super cool design we've got the connections these are also magnetic for
the USBC ports which fit outer
handy dandy numpad so I actually didn't know this but apparently a few people
have been starting to do this modular design that you can like attach multiple
things to the same board and frankly I love it I'm pretty on board so this
actually confused me I haven't used one of these before and when I originally
opened it up I had no idea how you're supposed to connect it because I'm like
well this doesn't go together at all but
if you flip it over there's actually this really cool slider on the bottom
there you go it's a little stiff but it pops out a USBC connector and boom
just like that now you've got a tkl kind
of tcals typically have like your afro and stuff so it's still a 60 plus really
I don't know what I'd call this thing actually but I think I really like it
actually it's great you can just you know use your numpad and then when you
don't like it you take it off slide that pop this cover back on put it away so
that's the other really nice thing is that say you don't like it on this side
for whatever reason it works both ways so now you can just slot it onto the
other side too boom now your numpad's over there I
really like this thing but my one complaint actually does center around
the numpad let's say you don't want to use it on either side
let's say you want your keyboard here and then you want your numpad up here
that's kind of what I have right now at home I've got my keyboard here and then
I've got my numpad up here and then I've got my mouse right here so that I can just go whatever whatever I need numbers
right there and then go back to my mouse you can't do that with this thing
there's no front USBC port and I get it
you can just hook it up to this guy that's fine but it is a small minor
complaint that I kind of wish they would resolve now that we've talked about some
of the features we should probably mention the actual quality of the keyboard itself it's a little flexi it's
a brushed aluminum top plate but aside from that it's pretty much plastic I'm
pretty sure it's a polycarb plate underneath and then there's also this
like layer of RGB around the edge so we talk a lot of time about like what's
inside a keyboard but we don't usually look inside them um just honestly don't typically have
enough time on ShortCircuit but I really want to take the time to do that with this one because these guys are
claiming a bunch of like foam inserts so for this guy I've actually taken a off
all of the keycaps ahead of time and all we really have to do are take out these
I think there's eight uh little screws to do that we're going to use our iFixit
kit who was happy enough to sponsor this video I fix it makes it affordable to
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so there's one problem and I found this
at home pretty quickly and it's actually the reason why I didn't take the whole
thing completely stripped apart is because when you open it can you see all
those ribbon cables typically you've got these tiny ribbon cables for daughter
boards so you'll have often have the PCB up top and then you'll have the USBC
connector on its own daughter board a lot of the time not every board some
pcbs have them soldered on and that's fine but this because it's got those two
extra sides that's like three daughter boards this thing is hooked up to you
honestly as a normal consumer you probably don't want to open this
keyboard that's I guess my other I had the one complaint about the numpad this
is my one real complaint about the keyboard itself is that ribbon cables
suck they're not that hard you know you get some tweezers you unplug them you plug
them back in it's not that big of a deal but they're easy to break and they are a
bit of a pain in the ass to actually put them back in So for the average person
using this guy um I don't know if they're going to want
to do much upgrading to the case itself the switches yeah you should probably
Lube them but other than that I would leave it as is so
what we've got though is this really nice silicone on the bottom and it's
heavy stuff too because silicone is super dense and you end up with this
like pretty nice kind of foam layer I've put foam down here before
um but like thick neoprene foam not silicone so this is actually my first
time using silicone and I think it's done a fine job my other kind of issue
is that the like the foam that goes under the switches and under the PCB is
it's not the most expensive foam it's not neoprene
um or even anything better than that it's basically just like packing foam
kind of it's a little nicer than what you get in the box but it's not Stellar
so we cleaned up a little bit and then I grabbed the keyboard that I took home uh
the other night and one thing we didn't really mention is that this comes with a
ton of keycaps like so they send all of these and they're
great we're not going to open every single box we'll have like some visual
on screen but basically there's something like five or six different
different types and then each of those you can get the B variant which is the
inverse so instead of this like
um what turquoise with white you can get white with turquoise pretty much
everything for Cherry cross stems will
work on these guys but these specifically from Mountain are PBT
double shot you can see through them the RGB shines through nicely I it's it's
not like the best keycaps I've ever seen some of the stuff could be a little
nicer mostly the things with small holes
in them like the A and the B on like Tab and caps lock and stuff it just the
light doesn't shine perfectly through that ring super Minor Detail they feel
fine they look nice and I actually really like them and yeah it's super
simple I love how quickly it just works like you just plug in the numpad and it
just instantly lights up and starts working it's awesome so yeah as you can
see the double shot PBT so you can see like right through it shines it shines
through really nicely you've got this whole diffusion layer layer around the
outside as well I'm a really big fan of that personally it's taking forever to
load don't know why it let me go to the lighting effects and
then it's just like actually hold on a second we got some
stuff to figure out
no device connected all right it's like the software's running but there's like
a weird like loading uh Circle
change yeah like it's trying to do stuff
cool so we actually really wanted to show you base camp but it the overall
look of it looks great I'm sure it does everything that you want it to I can see
all the effects and stuff they're just kind of grayed out you can make a bunch
of profiles uh the problem is we're getting this loading spinner icon and I
don't know why it only happens once I go into like a sub menu this product isn't
out yet this is embargoed so it's probably just in beta it'll probably be
updated I'm sure at launch it'll work great for us for now
can't really try it all that much sorry
the overall price of this thing is pretty decent as well I think it's 140
if you want just the keyboard with any of the switches and then if you want the
keyboard with your own keycap set from their selection it's an extra twenty
dollars so 160 for a board plus keycaps
and then if you want to buy them separately I think it's like 35 bucks for the keycaps and then
because you don't have to buy it with the numpad you can then get the numpad
for I think 40 or 50 bucks after that as well so it does add up to a little over
two hundred dollars if you want to buy this full setup with a custom set of
keycaps but I think by itself like this is a half decent 60 board Like It's Hot
swap it's got arrow keys on it still you've got three different USBC ports to
choose from for where you want to plug your cable in which is like it's such a
minor feature but I can't get over how much I like it
because it's just nice it'll fit both
um five and three pin switches so don't worry too much about that should be
basically compatible with whatever you want to put on this thing I don't know
if I would buy it simply because I'm not crazy about 60 full price I personally
wouldn't but if you're looking to buy a
new keyboard and you can't decide between 60 or tkl but you're okay with
like something kind of in between that then this is actually a really solid
option so there you have it that's the mountain 60 it's pretty sweet if you
like this video make sure to check out our other videos if you want to see one
where I didn't like the keyboard so much maybe check out the Corsair k70 it's
just kind of a little bit behind the times at this point not this guy though