Maybe it was the past few months of RAMnarök hacking away at my optimism, but my first thoughts upon handling the fifty-buck Epomaker HE68 Lite fixated on how it might not just be cheap in the good way. Surrounded by a bezel of hollow, slightly scratchy plastic, it certainly lacks the reassuringly brick-like heft that most mech boards have over their membraned cousins, to an extent that’s only partially accounted for by its compact 65% form factor.

However, keyboard bodywork – as the saying goes – can be deceiving. Get the HE68 Lite onto a desk and under some fingers, and it actually feels perfectly adequate. Pleasantly smooth, even. The linear key switches are swift to work and not too loud, and the PBT keycaps have a decent solidity, making them dutiful typing tools as well as nimble game inputs. These caps do have a slight wobble to them, but the lack of any rattling or resonant pinging noises – so often the death wail of a doomed budget keyboard – helps redeem the build quality. As do the rubbery feet, which aren’t adjustable, but do prevent slippage in spite of the HE68 Lite’s lite-ness.

If you can’t live without function keys and numpads, you can still get the full-size, fully mechanical Logitech G413 SE for not much more, though in tech terms the HE68 Lite is generations ahead. For all its thriftiness, Epomaker’s little peripheral still crams in magnetic Hall Effect switches (so you can adjust the actuation and reset depths to your liking), rapid trigger/SOCD support, and a faster 8K polling rate for better responsivity than the 1K G413 SE. Maybe only marginally better, admittedly. But still, that’s an awful lot of top-end tech for something that costs less than… well, most sticks of RAM, for starters.

Quick Kits is a hardware review series about pouring as much fully-tested PC gear knowledge down your eyes as we can – within two or three paragraphs.