GoKawiilis a reviewer covering laptops and the occasional gadget. He spent over 15 years in the photography industry before joining The Verge as a deals writer in 2021.
Razer has insisted that optical keyboard switches are the best choice for competitive esports stars and the sweatiest of try-hards, but it’s now relenting slightly by offering cheaper keyboards with magnetic switches and a similar array of gaming features. The $120 Razer Huntsman V3 HE Magnetic Mini and $140 Huntsman V3 HE Magnetic Tenkeyless, both launching today, are the company’s first keyboards to use Hall effect switches. They’re wired-only boards loaded with gaming-first features, and I’ve had a brief chance to test both and take them for a spin.
The new Huntsman boards offer the hallmarks found in many other Hall effect mechanical keyboards, like programmable actuation points, faster key releases with Rapid Trigger, and an 8KHz polling rate. Their linear switches have an average latency of 0.6ms, which is of course very fast but ever-so-slightly slower than the 0.48ms of optical Huntsman boards like the V3 Pro. Razer can stand by its claim that optical analog boards are faster, but we’re really splitting hairs here.
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1 / 2 Full name: Razer Huntsman V3 HE Magnetic Tenkeyless 8kHz.
The new magnetic models offer plenty of speed at significantly lower prices, as the optical Huntsman Pro boards start at $220, and they have Razer’s full arsenal of deeply customizable gaming features. This includes things like Snap Tap, which prioritizes your last movement input on the A or W keys and makes for easier counter-strafing (considered cheating by some and banned by Valve); Snap Flex, for setting up keys to trigger specific actions upon release; and Dual-Keypress Priority, preventing an accidental movement input from interrupting two previously held keys (like diagonal movement). Those last two features are also available on the mid-range optical Huntsman V3 Tenkeyless 8KHz, and coming to the higher-end Huntsman V3 Pros via firmware update.
Do these all sound like pretty niche features for specialized use cases? They are. While these cheaper keyboards are designed to appeal to a wider audience, these kinds of features are designed for the most competitive of online shooters — specifically, games with nuances to their movement techniques, like Counter-Strike 2. Razer is primarily competing with Wooting, Asus, and SteelSeries in this space, going feature-for-feature to cater to this hardcore subset of gamers. Wooting’s 80HE and 60HE v2 are some of the most praised gaming keyboards around, but Razer’s new HE boards undercut them by about $60.
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