Mchose Ace 68 16 kHz gaming keyboard review

Mchose, you’ll be pleased to hear, is not a Scottish garden products company, a new and particularly rubbery burger, or an unintelligible rapper you’ll despair of The Young People liking, but a Chinese manufacturer of computer accessories including keyboards, headphones, and the most enormous wireless mouse receiver I’ve ever seen. Honestly, the mouse that thing pairs with must be MASSIVE.

On to the Ace 68 Turbo, which isn’t particularly big but is a 68-key gaming keyboard with Mount Tai GT HE magnetic switches.

Switches that the Zhishi Intelligent Technology Company, whose name is printed on the back as the manufacturer, has chosen to package in a nicely made but completely unopenable box. If you were the sort of child who tore their presents open on Christmas morning like a xenomorph rampaging through a hapless spaceship crew, then sharpen your claws and prepare to get stuck in. Finding a way to peel the end open will become a priority, and you’ll eventually be able to slide the sheath off and expose the inner packaging, which flips open to unveil a sheet of stickers, a key-puller, a dust cover, some spare keys and switches and eventually a keyboard that’s shrink-wrapped in a layer of plastic. Get that off, and the Ace 68 Turbo is revealed.

This isn’t a website about cardboard boxes, except when it is, so that’s enough about the packaging. This is, as PCG announced to a jubilant world back in November, the world's first keyboard with a 16 kHz polling rate enabled by a 512 MHz dual-core microcontroller, something that reduces latency by a few thousandths of a second (0.02 ms), and which it’s debatable anyone really needs or will ever notice.

What you will notice is that the feel of these magnetic switches is sublime. There's no grittiness, no slight jolt as the switch passes its actuation point, just a smooth and quiet descent, the noise coming if you completely bottom out. Magnetic switches like these use the Hall effect, beloved of the best game controllers, to detect key presses without any of the parts making contact, and they offer higher precision and faster response times as well as wearing out more slowly.

You can usually adjust trigger points to as little as 0.1 mm with software and here that means the Mchose Hub or a web interface. You’ll need to accept some terms that are written only in Chinese to use it (the same is true of every piece of paper in the box, but it’s a keyboard—how complicated can it be?), and you’ll need to download a driver and a firmware update to get the full 16 kHz speed. As well as using the right cable—it recommends the one that’s supplied, as speed is an issue, but seemed fine with a generic USB4 cable.

There are a lot of options to go through: separate tabs for the backlight and lightbar (the former doesn’t offer an always-on option, only different kinds of flashes, but the latter does) and per-key trigger options.

The polling rate is set to 8 kHz by default, and you’ll need to activate the faster setting in the Performance tab. There are pre-set configurations for things like FPS or MOBA games, as well as something called ‘office work’, and you can switch between three saved settings using a button on the board itself. You could spend hours in the settings tweaking response times, macros and key bindings.

Do this, and you can perform the lightest and most beautiful of dances over the keycaps (under which there is of course an RGB LED, offering backlighting but not shining through the keycap) if your fingers are light enough, the faintest of taps coming from contact between digit and plastic. Or you can clatter away on it like a horse that's just discovered Fred Astaire. Your choice.

Despite being a cut-down tenkeyless board without even an F-row, the Ace 68 Turbo is surprisingly heavy. The keyboard case itself is aluminium, with a positioning plate of the same metal directly below the switches and on top of sound-deadening foam and a plastic base pad. It may not be the same as making it out of steel, but this much aluminium in one place adds up, and at 1.36 kg it’s 36% heavier than the MSI Forge GK600 TKL and 56% weightier than the Gamakay x NaughShark NS68.

There are benefits to a heavier keyboard, of course. It’s stiff, it will stay put on the desk more firmly if you decide to bash away at it like a woodpecker coming to the end of a particularly frustrating November. There are some rubber pads on the bottom that aid it in its steadfast refusal to budge. It also gives it an industrial feel, the exposed screws on the edges and the RGB lightbar at the back imbuing it with a near-future design language only helped by the sheer amount of Chinese text that covers it.

For example, there's a strip of plastic film over the lightbar with text across it, which looks rather cool and fits with the general aesthetic thanks to its printed hexagon pattern. It’s only when, as a non-speaker, you wave a phone over it to do a translation that you discover it’s a disclaimer about not accepting returns after the film is removed—something you hadn’t actually considered doing because it looks good. Likewise, the interesting-looking text with a big arrow pointing to the USB-C port is just about which cable to use. Sometimes too much knowledge will spoil the illusion, like finding out how sausages are made.

I’m not sure that the ‘Super Gaming Gear’ and ‘Young’s Choice’ slogans written in English add anything to this mystique, however. The latter made me wonder if it had an endorsement from Angus Young of AC/DC, which sadly it does not.

This is a wired keyboard, all the better to remove the latency introduced by wireless transmission systems, and is available in a range of colours including a rather wonderful Berry Red. The one supplied to PCG for review is white, and this suits its sleekly futuristic look.

Does the increased reaction speed of such a fast keyboard make a difference? Not as much as you might think. The improvement of just a few milliseconds is well within the average ping of online games. Either this is a keyboard made for a tiny minority of LAN gamers having a noticeable problem with keyboard latency, or the psychological effect of knowing you have the best and the fastest—the increased confidence this brings compelling you to attempt precise shots and manoeuvres you wouldn’t have before. It’s also cheaper than PCG’s favourite rapid-trigger Hall effect keyboard, the Wooting 80HE, which may make you feel even better.

For those not kept awake at night by the fear that their inability to turn quickly enough may lose them the match, it’s just a great keyboard to use for games. The weight, the smoothness of the switches, the cut-down size and the multi-function roller wheel. It’s a nice thing to have on your desk. Also more keyboards, and PC peripherals in general, should come with stickers. Fact.