This $99 magnetic gaming keyboard puts the big brands like Corsair, SteelSeries and Razer to shame

In the Tom’s Guide reviews team testing lab, Epomaker is a brand we now rely on to deliver keyboards that consistently outperform their price tags. And the one I’m writing about today, the Epomaker HE75 Mag, is no exception.

As you might’ve guessed by the “HE” in its name, this compact 75% deck is a Hall Effect magnetic gaming board. That means it’s packed full of the latest and greatest gaming goodies, like adjustable actuation, Rapid Trigger, Last Key Prioritization (A.K.A ‘Snap Tap’), and dynamic keystrokes. It also packs the zeitgeist’s most snake-oily gaming feature: 8K polling.

Every other manufacturer, in possession of an 8K Hall Effect board, would be charging you upwards of or over $200. Not Epomaker. No. It’s asking just $99. Too good to be true? Nope. This deck is lovely to type on, looks great, and offers bags of customization potential. It isn’t the best sounding board, I’ll grant you, and the companion software is a bit ugly. But for $99, those are pills I can very easily swallow.

Could this be one of the best gaming keyboards on the mid-range market? I think so.

Epomaker HE75 Mag review: Cheat sheet

• What is it? A 75% magnetic gaming keyboard from Epomaker
• Who is it for? Gamers who need a board that’s great to type on, too
• What does it cost? $99 at Amazon
• What’s good? The gaming features, type feel, software customization, styling and price
• What’s not? It sounds a little lackluster, the keycaps are a tad slippy, and the software is kinda crude

Epomaker HE75 Mag review: Specs

Epomaker HE75 Mag review: The ups

The Epomaker offers a respectable slew of cutting-edge magnetic gaming features, while proving great to type on and easy to customize. For $99, it’s very good value for money.

Elite-tier gaming features

The Epomaker HE75 Mag packs a strong array of gaming features, thanks to its Hall Effect switches. Admittedly, there aren’t quite as many features as you’ll find on Keychron and Lemokey boards — like the gamepad analog mode on the Keychron K2 HE ($129); or the custom SOCD resolutions found on most Keychron decks these days. But aside from that, there’s pretty much everything else you could expect from a modern magnetic deck… especially one costing just $99. It leaves pricey and relatively feature-thin boards from ‘big name’ brands, like the Corsair Vanguard Pro 96 ($220), in the dust.

Adjustable actuation

The feature I find most useful day-to-day is adjustable actuation. Mechanical switches have fixed actuation points, so you’re stuck with inputs triggering at, say, 3mm. On the HE75 Mag, you can scale the Gateron Whites’ actuation down to as little as 0.1mm, meaning the keys actuate with just a tiny press. This makes inputs much faster and helps the board feel more responsive in-game than a mechanical deck.

0.1mm is a little too sensitive for me, though, resulting in accidental inputs as a slight nudge triggers actuation. In testing, I played Counter-Strike 2, Hell Let Loose and Isonzo, and backed off to around 0.6mm for most keys, with 0.4mm on WASD. This gave me a nice balance of responsive movement without accidentally chucking a grenade or standing up and giving away my position. As I’ll cover later, I backed off further to 2.6mm for work.

LKP, Rapid Trigger & DKS

The HE75 Mag also features three of today’s must-have gaming features. There’s LKP, or Last Key Prioritization — a simultaneous opposing cardinal direction (SOCD) resolution. This is also known as ‘Snap Tap,’ and facilitates effortless counter strafing in games with movement inertia accuracy penalties, like Counter-Strike 2 and Valorant. It’ll get you swiftly kicked from CS2, though.

Rapid Trigger allows you to repeatedly actuate a key without the switch needing to recycle. In other words, you can spam those keys better! And DKS, or Dynamic Key Stroke, allows you to assign up to two different inputs on each up and down cycle of a keystroke, resulting in four commands per keypress. Effectively, if you wanted to, you could set the W key to trigger walk, run, walk again then crouch, all at different stages of the keypress cycle. I find anything more than two inputs gets frustrating, so stick to a half-press for walk and a full press for run.

Other features

There’s also Mod Tap — also seen on the NuPhy Air60 HE ($139) and NuPhy Field75 HE ($169) — which assigns different inputs based on tapping or holding a key. And a Long Press switch — seen on Keychron/Lemokey decks like the Lemokey L5 HE ($220) and Keychron Q6 HE ($239) — which sets a single keypress to act as a hold. These are both super useful features in specific games. Long Press switch, for example, works great in large map games like Kingdom Come Deliverance II, allowing you to toggle continuous walking. No more walking simulators.

The HE75 Mag also polls at up to 8,000Hz, for ultra-low-latency gameplay. 8K polling is essentially snake oil. 1,000Hz polling is fast enough to reduce perceptible latency altogether. But hey, at least Epomaker isn’t charging $200 purely based on the poll rate (looking at you, oh, every single other keyboard manufacturer around). Good job, Epomaker.

Decent typing experience

As with most Epomaker boards, like the Epomaker TH99 ($82) and Epomaker RT100 ($115), the HE75 Mag is a lovely board to type on. It features Cherry profile keycaps, which are a solid all-rounder — they’re not so ergonomically-shaped that they inhibit speedy movement across the board when gaming, but they’re nice and low, with wide surface areas, making them excellent for fast typing, too.

As you can see in my results below, I was able to put in above average words per minute scores, while maintaining above average accuracy. I always scale back actuation to 2.6mm on Hall Effect boards, as this gets me the fastest and most accurate results. Admittedly, on the HE75 Mag, I wasn’t able to reach the same levels as other HE boards — I failed to break 100WPM while maintaining good accuracy.

The reason for this is the keycap finish. The HE75 Mag’s caps are noticeably slippery. As such, I had to slow my typing down to below 100WPM to avoid my fingers slipping and accidentally hitting other keys — in other words, I was forced to slow down to maintain accuracy. A bit more texture on those caps would’ve been nice. Maybe Epomaker could take a lesson from the Keychron Q16 HE 8K Ceramic ($220), with its glossy but deceptively high-friction caps.

Otherwise, though, the HE75 Mag is great. The switches themselves are Gateron White magnetic linears. They’re fairly light at 30g initial and 47g bottom out force, making them feel lightweight and responsive, with a hint of elasticity and feedback. The stems are POM and, naturally, they come pre-lubed, for stable, smooth travel. They won’t set the world alight, but I’ve enjoyed using them.

Attractive styling

Epomaker knows how to make a good-looking keyboard — just take a look at the Epomaker DynaTab75 ($89) and you’ll see what I mean — and the HE75 Mag lives up to that reputation.

I think it looks beautiful, with its purple gradient keycaps and jet black case giving a dusky feel. The RGB is beautiful. It’s nice and bright when typing, thanks to the south-facing design. However, it’s also well-diffused due to the FR4 plate, resulting in a soft glow, even at maximum brightness.

Build quality feels fairly good, too, which is sometimes where we see the ramifications of the typical Epomaker affordability. The ABS case feels sturdy and thick; there’s a little case flex but not too much; the milled aluminum volume knob looks and feels premium. It feels like a $99 board ought to, although the Keychron K8 V2 ($79) has the edge here thanks to its aluminum top case.

Fairly customizable

The Epomaker HE75 Mag is about as customizable as it’s possible for HE boards to get right now — at least without dropping an extra hundred dollars on the HE/MX cross compatible Glorious GMMK3 HE ($199) which didn’t blow me away in testing.

The HE75 Mag is hot-swappable, and you should be able to fit other Gateron magnetic switches, such as Jade Pro, using the Epomaker Driver companion software to flash the board accordingly. That said, cross compatibility with magnetic switches is still extremely limited, at least compared to mechanical keyboards.

The aforementioned Epomaker Driver software also gives you lots of scope for customizing the board, including lighting, key binds and macros, not to mention all the gaming features I mentioned above. Sure, this isn’t a board meant entirely for modding, like the Wobkey Zen 65 ($165), but the HE75 Mag still offers a decent amount of control for the money.

Keenly priced

Last but certainly not least, there’s the HE75 Mag’s price. While it isn’t the cheapest board around, $99 is still a very keen price given the magnetic gaming features, pleasant typing and decent build quality.

By contrast, the 75% Keychron K2 HE starts at $129, and we’d consider even that board to be fairly priced. The NuPhy Field75 HE costs $169, although it offers more features, like its eight custom game buttons. Some magnetic decks are priced obscenely high, though, like the Keychron Q1 HE, which costs a whopping $239, and the Corsair Vanguard Pro 96, which costs $229.

Epomaker HE75 Mag review: The downs

Admittedly, the Epomaker HE75 Mag isn’t perfect. The sound is fairly uninspiring and the companion software is rather crude. These are fairly minor issues, though, especially given the affordable MSRP.

Uninspiring sound

Admittedly, I’m spoiled when it comes to lovely sounding keyboards. My daily driver is the thocky NuPhy Halo75 V2 ($129). As I write this, I’ve just finished testing the gloriously poppy sounding Wobkey Crush 80 ($190). I could name drop all day.

The HE75 Mag doesn’t sound bad. It just doesn’t sound nice. The acoustic profile is extremely muted, with dull thuds to bottom outs, but a retro plasticky clack as the switches recycle. It’s fine, and better suited to an office environment (pity it’s a gaming deck) than the loud boards I mentioned above. There’s just nothing about the sound that I enjoy; nothing that makes me want to pick the board up and start typing on it just so I can hear it again.

Crude companion software

As I mentioned above, I really appreciate having the Epomaker Driver companion software at my disposal. I also very much appreciate that it works (more than can be said for many a keyboard companion app). However, there’s no denying the fact that Epomaker Driver is really rather crude.

The app’s design looks like it was homemade… in 1995. The general aesthetic, especially the fonts, is ugly. The interface is a very cluttered in places, and there are numerous instances where the text explaining something doesn't fit in the window it's in — you have to hover over the text to see the whole thing.

You can’t even adjust the window’s size. It can be difficult to find what you’re after or make sense of what a particular setting is or isn’t. And (partially responsible for the previous point) many of the direct Chinese-English translations are a bit… odd: “StrokeSetting” and “Shaft Setting” in particular make me feel a tad uncomfortable — and how come one has a space but the other doesn’t?

I dunno. It works, which is the main thing. But it's so amateur. Every time I use Driver, I find myself longing for the slick web apps of Keychron and NuPhy.

Epomaker HE75 Mag review: Verdict

It’s very easy to overlook minor flaws when a product is fairly priced. So, despite its flaws, I can happily recommend the Epomaker HE75 Mag. Despite what other brands would have you believe, you don’t need to spend $200 to get a magnetic keyboard with all of today’s must-have gaming features. Epomaker’s keyboards prove it!

The HE75 Mag is a fantastic keyboard for the money. It boasts plenty of performance in the gaming department, is great to type on, offers decent scope for customization and looks good, too. For $99, it's a very difficult board to complain about.