Turtle Beach Impact 700 Mechanical Keyboard Review

Peter Donnell / 9 years ago

Final Thoughts

Price

The Turtle Beach Impact 700 Mechanical Keyboard is a premium quality product, with the premium price tag to match. It’ll set you back £159.99 directly from Turtle Beach on pre-order. I do expect the price will drop once it launches full in this region, but for now, that’s the price.

Overview

Another great entry to the mechanical keyboard market, with only one minor drawback, which I’ll get to in a moment.

The build quality on this keyboard is as good as it gets. Short of crafting the whole thing out of depleted uranium, it’s not going to get much more durable. The added strength and weight makes a big difference to the typing action too, as it changes how the keys bounce, how stable the keyboard is and the overall feel of the keyboard in general. It feels solid, planted and reliable and that’s no bad thing. The hard-wearing rubber grip coating on the chassis is nice too, it’s easy to clean and it’ll hold up to a few knocks and bumps without many issues.

Cherry MX Switches are popular for a good reason, they’re of an exceptionally high quality and you know exactly what you’re going to get. The inclusion of high-quality switches, LED backlighting, some alternative custom key-caps included in the box and a handy key-cap removal tool are all very welcome bonuses and pretty much what you would hope to find on a keyboard of this value.

Gaming and day-to-day performance is up there with the best, you’ll certainly have no concerns there, I also have no doubt that it’ll still perform just as well after many weeks, months and years of use.

The only problem is the price. At near as makes no difference £160, you’ll have to think, I don’t want the Ducky Shine, I don’t want the Corsair K95 RGB or the Logitech G710, a list which could go on and on. Compared to similarly priced products, the IMPACT 700 performs just as well, but comes with noticeably fewer features than competing brands. Turtle Beach need to get the price down to around £120 to stay competitive. However, if this is just a taste of what we can expect from them, at least they got the most important factors right first, performance and quality. I’m still awarding our editors choice award, as it’s every bit a great keyboard, but the price needs to come down before anyone would actually buy it.

Pros

Exceptional build quality
Customisable LED back-lighting
USB pass-through
Audio pass-through
Braided cable
Extra key-caps and key-cap tool included
Excellent performance

Cons

Expensive

“One of the best mechanical keyboards I’ve used to date, it looks and feels like a premium product and performs like one too. The only downside is the price, which we hope to see come down in the near future.”