Performance, pleasant acoustics, and a no-nonsense approach to design are at the heart of theCorsair K65 Pro Mini, and it’s a keyboard we have grown to like over the past few weeks. This year’s K65 Pro Mini is a refresh of the K65 RGB Mini with a slight bump up in size, widening the keyboard from a 60% layout to a 65% layout. This extra real estate has allowedCorsairto integrate a set of arrow keys onto the board along with delete, page up, and page down keys, but the real killer feature of the K65 Pro Mini is its acoustic profile.
In recent years, the 65% keyboard market has seen some stiff competition, with companies like Asus introducing its ROG Falchion compact keyboard,Razer cutting down its Blackwidow V3into a V3 Mini, and industry veterans like Keychron, Ducky, and Drop all continuing to iterate on their previous 65% designs at the $120 price point. While some of these keyboards offer low-latency wireless solutions, Cherry MX switches, or a fully hot-swappable design, the K65 Pro Mini strips back its main feature set and provides a wired keyboard focused exclusively on outstanding performance and a satisfying typing and auditory experience.
RELATED:The Best Gaming Desks You Can Buy in 2023
Corsair K65 Pro Mini: Build Quality and Ergonomics
Much like theK65 RGB Mini, the K65 Pro Mini keeps things simple on its top side. The Pro Mini’s entire key layout is a standard English qwerty set and doesn’t attempt to truncate any keys in order to squeeze them all onto the board’s small form factor. The right side of the keyboard has full-size “Enter,” “Shift,” and “Backspace” keys which most users will instinctively be able to press if they have used any other keyboard. No adjustment or learning is required. Some of the more advanced functions, like the “Print Screen” button or the skip and play buttons, are bound to specific keys and can be activated by holding down the FN button, which also lights up the bound keys—a nice touch on the K65 Pro Mini’s part.
While the K65 Pro Mini’s top side may be simple in layout and rather unremarkable in aesthetics, it still has all the makings of a truly premium keyboard. The K65 Pro Mini includes PBT double-shot keycaps with a textured finish, which some prefer over glossy keycaps that can often get smudged over time or with enough use. Each keycap also has a smooth set of stabilizers that ensure these keys stay upright and always keep inputs crisp and precise. There is a slight wobble to the spacebar at times, but nothing that is too noticeable or any worse than most other keyboards on the market. Underneath everything is a brushed aluminum faceplate that looks great and follows the recent trend of brushed aluminum faceplates finding their way on most premium keyboards. It looks nice, and it keeps the keyboard feeling sturdy.
Notably, this year’s K65 Pro Mini has taken some of the feedback from the K65 RGB Mini and now includes a set of kickstands on the back. While they are a welcome addition, the K65 Pro Mini only includes one set of feet for the kickstands, which means that users only get one height they can adjust the keyboard to. In our experience, the fixed-height kickstands were more than enough to lift the keyboard to a comfortable spot, but some further ergonomic customization is always nice to have. It would have been nice to see a wrist rest included because the keyboard is deceptively tall for such a compact form factor.
RELATED:The Best Gaming PC Builds for $1000
Corsair K65 Pro Mini: Typing and Performance
For the K65 Pro Mini, Corsair has done away with the Cherry MX switches that are still wildly popular among customers and manufacturers alike and instead has decided to use its own proprietary optical-mechanical switches named the “Corsair OPX” switches. Throughout our time with the K65 Pro Mini, we found these switches to be incredibly responsive with a nice tactile feel to them. However, the key switches on the K65 Pro Mini do have a significantly higher actuation point compared to most other keyboards, which makes typing on the K65 both fabulously responsive and also occasionally troublesome.
At times, simply bumping the keyboard or lifting it and placing it down again was enough to activate a key by pure accident. This wasn’t always an issue, but users should take note that the K65 Pro Mini is exceptionally sensitive and may lead to novice typists making a few more mistakes than usual. Inversely, speed typists who need ridiculously short travel times on their keys will find that the Pro Mini is the keyboard for them.
This year’s big feature for the K65 Pro Mini is its two layers of sound-dampening material underneath the top plate. Oftentimes, mechanical keyboard enthusiasts cite the satisfying sound of a switch clicking as one of the reasons they enjoy using mechanical keyboards over anything else; however,Corsair’s keyboardshave always had a rather tinny sound that never rang out very well. The K65 Pro Mini’s sound-dampening layers alleviate this issue while still retaining much of that satisfying clicky sound but without any of the metallic tin. Users who enjoy mechanical keyboards but can’t get behind the loud and, at times, obnoxious sound of mechanical switches as they type away into the night may find the K65 Pro Mini to be suited to their tastes.
For the esports enthusiast, Corsair’s stand-out feature for the K65 Pro Mini is the keyboard’s 8,000 Hz polling rate which is a returning feature from the K65 RGB Mini. By default, the K65 Pro Mini utilizes a standard 1,000 Hz polling rate which users can change in iCue. Throughout our testing, we found that 1,000 Hz polling and 8,000 Hz polling didn’t do much to make the keyboard significantly more responsive, but foresports enthusiastswho need to squeeze every last bit of performance out of their peripherals, the high polling rate should be more than enough. Overall, the optical-mechanical switches and their high actuation points, coupled with the smooth stabilizers, made a bigger impact on how responsive the K65 Pro Mini felt over the hardware polling rate, at least for our use cases.
RELATED:The Best Controllers for Gamers for 2023
Corsair K65 Pro Mini: Software
Thankfully, the Corsair K65 Pro Mini is an excellent plug-and-play keyboard that most users can get a lot out of without ever needing to download an extra piece of software. However, taking advantage of Corsair’s iCue software does grant users a few more tools to get some extra performance and utility out of their K65 Pro Mini. The good news is that Corsair has made great strides in cutting down the iCue software’s bloat and has made the process of setting up a keyboard quick, painless, and easy to understand.
In iCue, users can change the K65 Pro Mini’s lighting, key assignments and create new keyboard profiles. All the usual fancy lighting effects that are typically applied to Corsair memory sticks AIOs, or any otherCorsair peripheralare present here. Most users will likely be interested in setting up new macros to go alongside their new lighting profiles, of which the K65 Pro Mini can store up to 50 profiles on its onboard 8 MB of storage. While we never came close to making 50 profiles, the amount of space that Corsair has allocated for its more creative customers is certainly nice to have.
Most importantly, iCue allows users to save all their settings directly to the K65 Pro Mini’s integrated hardware storage, meaning that users can set up the keyboard how they want, save all those settings directly to the keyboard, and delete iCue if they so desire. Users who prefer not to have tons of extra software on their PCs will find this to be an excellent quality-of-life feature; plus, it’s a very user-friendly feature in case someone finds themselves taking this keyboard to LAN parties or using it across multiple PCs.
The Corsair K65 Pro Mini is undoubtedly one of the best 65% layout keyboards at the $129.99 price point. It has a simple design that saves on tons of desk space, it sounds and feels great, and—best of all—is unmatched in responsiveness and feel. However, that strength in responsiveness can have the drawback of being a little too sensitive at times which could lead to a few incorrect inputs for some users. The K65 Pro Mini is certainly not a beginner keyboard, nor is it well-suited for any keyboard enthusiast who really needs to feel their finger sink into every keystroke before moving on to the next key. Otherwise, the speedy K65 Pro Mini is an excellent refresh and smart iteration of the already superb K65 RGB Mini.
TheCorsair K65 Pro Miniis available now. Game Rant was provided a retail unit for the purposes of this review.
