It's been a favourite of ours for a long time.

The Royal Kludge RK61 has been one of our favourite 60 percent keyboards for a number of years, having maintained its place in our ranking It's for good reason, too, as the RK61 offers an immense value proposition for a more affordable mechanical keyboard that nails the basics well.

You can currently save a decent amount on this capable value customer as it's just $35 from Woot! - one of the best prices we've seen this keyboard at in quite a while. If you've been after a versatile small form factor mechanical choice for less in the USA, then you may want to take a closer look.

As a 60 percent keyboard, you get a more compact layout that gives you the alphanumeric keys you need and little else - no nav cluster, no function row, or anything else. There are secondary functions accessible on a Function layer, such as pressing Fn and a number key to get the corresponding F key, and pressing Fn and Enter to rebind keys in the bottom right as arrow keys. Beyond that, you don't get any first-party software, so you'll have to rebind and program macros elsewhere. Build quality is decent too.

Inside, this option comes with soft tactile Gateron Brown switches for a pleasing typing experience for either gaming or productivity workloads. Browns have always been my favourite switch for their tactile bump, and the Gaterons in the RK61 are perfectly reasonable for a keyboard at this price. You can swap the switches out with ease though, as the RK61 is hot-swappable with any MX-style 3 or 5 pin options. I'd be swapping in some Pandas or MX Ergo Clears, if it was me, but there are so many switches out there these days, you're spoilt for choice.

In addition, the RK61 can connect over either Bluetooth, 2.4GHz wireless and USB-C wired, too. That's fantastic for a keyboard at this price, and puts more expensive options to shame. The battery life is fine over wireless means, wth up to 360 hours of standby time. However, turn the backlighting on and that drops down to just 13 hours, so I'd advise keeping it off if you don't want to have to keep charging the 'board up.

While it may cut some corners in software and battery life, there's no denying that the RK61 is an excellent value mechanical keyboard, especially with this reduction from Woot! in mind.