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My history with Hall Effect keyboards + Wooting 60HE v2 Semi-Review

Wooting 60HE v2

enri

# My first experiences with Wooting & first HE keyboard Around late 2022, a now-deleted tweet by osu! player moonpoint (known as Apo11o at the time) completely changed the conversation around gaming keyboards. It claimed that top speed players were secretly using Rapid Trigger on the Wooting Two to achieve better scores while keeping it under wraps. Everyone, me included, was asking the same question: *"What the fuck is Rapid Trigger?"*  As interest in Wooting's keyboards exploded, they began reaching out to several communities by offering pro players and creators a 10% discount along with early shipping, given that they introduced themselves and shared a bit about their background. Curious about all the hype surrounding Rapid Trigger, I also reached out myself. A few days later, I ordered a Wooting 60HE, my first Hall Effect keyboard. From the moment I started using it, the advantages of Rapid Trigger immediately stood out, and its core features completely changed my expectations of what a gaming keyboard could be. Most people already know exactly how and why Rapid Trigger was a complete game changer for competitive gaming as a whole, so I won't go into detail about it here. Performance aside, it still wasn't the best sounding keyboard. It performed great, of course, but the stabilizers were rattly, and the original switches sounded super "chattery." I felt it could use a bit more modding, so that's exactly what I did. Over the next two and a half years, I swapped cases, switches, keycaps, and lubed the stabilizers (to failure 💀) until it felt like my own. It ended up becoming one of the longest-used peripherals I've ever owned thanks to how easily customizable it was. # Switching to other keyboards After nearly two and a half years with the Wooting 60HE, I bought a new Hall Effect keyboard: the Wooting 80HE. I first bought it in March 2025. The advertised 8K polling rate was a compelling upgrade on paper and was personally noticable for me, but I never really enjoyed its PC plate for osu!, my unit had terrible stabilizers, and after years on a 60%, I realized the larger layout mostly took up desk space for keys I rarely used. Later, I was lucky enough to receive a Pulsar PCMK 3 HE 60 for free! It had my preferred 60% layout, 8K polling, and a higher 35 kHz scan rate. The software, however, was buggy as hell, I wasn't a fan of the RGB implementation or brightness, and its limited moddability made it difficult to really consider this my endgame. Wooting then announced the 60HE v2 in May 2025. I remember looking at the specs and just thinking... Holy fuck. Wootility. 8K polling. A 60% layout. Closed-bottom stock switches. Friction-fit mounting. Wooting had taken everything I'd spent years modding into the original 60HE, improved on it, and built it that way from the factory. I didn't buy it immediately, though. My 80HE and PCMK were still more than capable keyboards, and I wanted to spend time with both before deciding whether the upgrade was actually worth it. During that time, I found myself missing different things about each keyboard while using the other. I missed the PCMK's 60% form factor whenever I was on the 80HE, but I also missed Wootility's ease as a whole whenever I was on the PCMK. No matter which keyboard I was using, I always felt like I was giving something up. After more than a year of switching between them, I got tired of compromising. I finally placed my order in late June 2026. # My experiences w/ the Wooting 60HE v2 My 60HE v2 arrived on June 26, 2026, 3 days after my birthday!  None of the individual features were new to me. I was just happy they were finally all on the same keyboard. For over a year, I'd been bouncing between boards because each one excelled at something different. The 80HE gave me Wootility and 8K polling, while the PCMK gave me the 60% layout I kept missing without sacrificing performance, but at the cost of buggy software, washed out RGB, and limited moddability. The 60HE v2 was the first keyboard that let me have all of that without compromise. The stock sound was genuinely impressive! The new Lekker Tikken switches sounded fantastic, and its closed-bottom design produced a much nicer sound profile, while the improved stabilizers made the board feel far more refined out of the box (although still by no means perfect). For the first time, I wasn't immediately thinking about what I wanted to fix or change. Beyond changing a few cosmetic preferences, I pretty much left the keyboard alone, and I never felt the need to replace the switches or re-lube the stabilizers.  This has easily become one of my favorite keyboards. Everything comes together with little compromise, and I finally stopped bouncing between keyboards because I no longer had a reason to. I ended up handing my original 60HE down to my boyfriend, letting him choose the switches, case, and keycaps while I lubed the stabilizers and built it with him. It felt like the perfect way to retire the keyboard that started it all. At $240 for the aluminum version & $175 for the plastic version, it really isn't cheap. There's plenty of great Hall Effect keyboards out there, but with all of them, I always found myself compromising on something. The 60HE v2 was the first keyboard that made me stop doing that, and that's exactly what you're paying for.