Turtle Beach Impact 500 TKL Keyboard Review

Peter Donnell / 10 years ago

Final Thoughts

Price

The Impact 500 is a little expensive, available for pre-order from Turtle Beach for £99.99, especially given that competing products have backlighting and more features for a similar price. However, the Impact 500 does excel in terms of build quality and there’s no harm in paying a premium for something you know will last you a long time. I also suspect the price will drop soon enough, once the keyboard is available at retail; I think somewhere around £75 would be ideal for this keyboard

Overview

I really like this keyboard, although I must admit that it’s nothing special overall, it’s still of a very high quality and Turtle Beach have done a great job in that respect. Given this is their first entry into the keyboard market, it’s a strong start and it fills me with hope that they’ll make something even better in the very near future; they’ve certainly got the market experience and fan base to compete with even the biggest names in this part of the industry.

The Turtle Beach Impact 500 looks great, with a slightly understated design, low set keys, high-quality key caps and a nice braided cable. The slim chassis and the TKL design are great for saving desktop space, but also means that the keyboard is compact enough to pick up and take on the road with you; I can see it being very popular with eSports and LAN gamers, especially due to the robust build quality.

It may not be the cheapest, it may not have the most features, but what it does have is more than enough for most gamers. The premium quality, look, feel and performance of the Impact 500 more than justifies the cost and if Turtle Beach can get the price down just a little more, it could quickly become one of the most popular mechanical brands on the market. Of course, if you can afford it, I highly recommend their full-size Impact 700 which we recently reviewed.

Pros

Compact design
Detachable braided cable
Excellent build quality
Flawless performance
Nice esthetics

Cons

A little expensive
No extra features compared to other keyboards in this price range

“Turtle Beach may have a lot of experience in the audio market, be they’re the new kids in town when it comes to keyboards. They’ve certainly proven that they can make a great quality product for competitive gaming. Let’s hope the Impact 500 is just a taste of even greater things to come.”