So most of you who are looking at mechanical keyboards have heard the name Cherry. They are the name brand in mechanical switches, coming out with their MX switch back in the 80’s. It was later used with other brands especially in recent years with the push back into mechanical keyboards. Recently there have been a lot of other switches from companies making clones and a few new designs as well, but Cherry is the classic go-to. Well, it might be a surprise for some of you that Cherry also makes keyboards as well, not just the switches used in them. I’ve covered a few like the MX Board 6.0 and the MX Board 3.0. Well, they also came out with the MX Board 5.0, sporting their Cherry MX Silent Reds. I loved the 3.0 and the 6.0, so I’m curious what sets this one apart.

Product Name: Cherry MX Board 5.0

Review Sample Provided by: Cherry

Written by: Wes Compton

Pictures by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

 


Packaging

The box for the MX Board 5.0 looks exactly like the original MX Board 6.0, yeah the 6 came before the 5 lol. Ours specifically came in looking a little used and abused, but the all-black design is there with just the Cherry branding and the model name on the other side. The box is a little smaller than the 6.0, but I like the consistency between the models for the box. Plus it is right to the point and simple. The back has a picture of the keyboard as well, so you get simple but still know what is inside. There isn’t any other important information though, I figured they might highlight one or two key features like they did on the 6.0.

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Inside the box is well, another box. It is a bright red box, just like the 6.0 did as well. Inside the keyboard comes wrapped up in plastic. It sits in a cardboard tray with the cord tucked into the area behind it. Then up under that tray, you will find the documentation and the included wrist rest. The manual is basic but does have the same black and red theme on the outside to match the box. 

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Photos and Features

What I loved about both the other Cherry MX Boards was their clean look at the MX Board 5.0 is no different. When a lot of companies are focusing on a “gaming” look it is nice to have something you wouldn’t be embarrassed to bring into work. No big surprise though, Cherry makes a lot of commercially focused products. The MX Board 5.0 has a black case with a silver trim around the outside edge and it has a relatively thin bezel. They didn’t go crazy with extra knobs and keys. For branding, they slipped in the Cherry logo down at the bottom edge in the middle of the board.

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As far as the layout goes they went with a completely standard layout. That is a full sized keyboard with number pad, F keys along the top, and direction pad in between. Now the gap between the F keys and things like between the direction pad and number pad are very thin, almost as close as between standard keys. This helps keep the size down, especially with the outside bezel not being too large. I really like this because as much as I like a tenkeyless or a 60% keyboard, when it comes to my main PC I still have to have a number pad to input numbers. But I hate having a huge board that takes up all of my desk.

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Cherry did still slip in some media controls, even without adding a bunch of extra keys. They did this with a function layer with the F keys. So the F1-F3 keys allow you to mute an change the volume. The F5-F7 keys are for backlighting controls, you can turn it off or go up and down in brightness. Then over above the number pad, they did add a few keys. You get play/pause, forward, and back but these aren’t function layer. Personally, I would prefer these to be the volume controls without the need for a function layer, but I love the use of pace slipping in keys above the number pad.

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It’s a small detail but I do like the ramped area around the number pad. The keyboards case drops down at the number pad and ramps up to the keys above it. There isn’t really any functional use for this, but it looks good and adds a little style while not going overboard.

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The red we saw in the packaging does show up on the bottom of the board. I’m really glad it is hidden up under everything because it is really bright and goes away from the clean look that the rest of the MX Board 5.0 has. In the middle of the bottom, they have a large sticker with all of the normal certification logos along with model and serial number info. With a lot of keyboards that would be the only thing of interest on the bottom but there is a lot more going on here. So for feet, there are six ¾ inch wide cylindrical shaped feet, all bright red as well. There are four along the bottom and two up top. Cherry didn’t go with as many up top because they also have the flip out feet to angle the keyboard up so the bottom row is needed more. The flip out feet were the most unique thing going on here, they both have two tabs. They actually stick out the side of the keyboard and let you flip the feet up without flipping the keyboard over, not something I would have ever thought I needed but we will see how they work in testing.

Also down here, you can see the USB cable is removable. I use the word removable because I wouldn’t really consider this replaceable, unless Cherry starts selling them later. The connection isn’t going to fit any standard cable. The cord does have a cable track that lets you output the cord in three different locations (left, right, and almost center). 

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Speaking of the cord, the MX Board 5.0 comes with a nice long cord at 1.8 meters. It has a thick black sleeving on it and a unique angled USB connection that you should be able to differentiate when looking at the connections on the back of your PC.

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So getting a lower profile look at the front and back of the MX Board 5.0 you can see that there isn’t too much going on. The back has the three cord exit points that I already mentioned but nothing else going on. Then on the front, there are two recessed areas where the included wrist rest attaches.

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Now the side profile, on the other hand, better shows what I was talking about with the flip up feet on the bottom of the keyboard. You can see that when the board is sitting flat you can reach the feet on the sides and turn them to flip the feet out. The downside to this is the red handles on both sides of the keyboard. It takes away from the clean styling and I think maybe going with black would have been more subtle, but it is a cool idea.

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So the included wrist rest has a rubber finish across the top and a plastic base and is all black other than the red slip out feet (I’ll talk about those in a minute). The rubber on the top isn’t just a painted on coating, Cherry went with an actual rubber layer up top. They also slipped in branding with a large MX logo embossed into the rubber over on the right side. Given the discrete branding on the keyboard, this feels a little weird. The MX Board 6.0 also had a rubber wrist rest but it had tiny MX’s over the entire thing.

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When you flip the wrist rest over things get interesting though. So Cherry took the flip out feet from the keyboard and went a little crazy on the wrist rest. The bottom has four large flip-out feet. Like the keyboard, they can be reached from the sides, though the top does overhang a little more on the wrist rest hiding the bright red handles. I’ve never seen feet like this on a wrist rest before. Basically, you can angle it forward or back or run it flat like normal. The wrist rest attaches to the keyboard with two 3 inch wide plastic hooks that slip up into the latch built into the keyboard. Being plastic they are still vulnerable to breaking, especially the small tab in the middle. But I don’t see the entire thing breaking. The small tab in the middle, from what I can tell, helps keep it latched into place.

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With the wrist rest attached, you can see that it is ¾ to an inch wider than the keyboard on each side. I was a little torn with this. It looks really out of place so initially, I really didn’t like it. But then I remembered that I normally slide my wrist rest over a little on other keyboards because of the angle that my arms come in when I have my hand near the gaming keys like QWER and WASD. So with that in mind, I can see why they might want the wrist rest to be wider.

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I kind of played around with the flip out feet as well to give a few examples of how it might work. You can lift the entire keyboard up, including the wrist rest if needed. You can have the keyboard and rear wrist rest feet up and have a more angled wrist rest. Or if you want you could angle the wrist rest up but the rear of the keyboard down for a more ergonomic angle.

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Now I didn’t forget to take a look up under the keycaps. But with this being a Cherry keyboard I knew what I would find up under them. Well, I thought I would. They were Cherry switches, but I was surprised with a different switch than expected lol. So the MX Board 5.0 is only available with Cherry MX Silent Reds but apparently, the press samples have regular Cherry MX Reds, close but no padding at the bottom. So don’t expect the switches to be this bright red, they will be that marron or off red that the Silent switches have. Beyond that for stabilizers the MX Board 5.0 uses Cherry stabilizers (duh), that is the hidden style so there is no visible stabilizer bar to get caught on and it makes it easy to remove and reinstall the keycaps in the future because there are no plastic stabs to worry about.

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As for the keycaps themselves. Well, the 5.0 has double shot PBT keycaps, you really can’t ask for much better than that. The PBT means it will hold up and not get glossy in the future from wear and the double shot means they aren’t painted and the transparent legend goes all the way through the keycap, so if you were to wear the top you would still be able to read it just fine. The caps are about twice as thick as a cheap OEM cap, I wouldn’t mind them being a touch thicker but that isn’t much of an issue.

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Performance

For performance testing, I have been using the MX Board 5.0 off and on over the past month. In that time I’ve done a lot of writing (obviously) and some gaming just about nightly. I was able to test the board in a variety of situations so let's run through how it performs. First let me say that while I like the 5.0, it is way different than the MX Board 6.0. The 6.0 had an aluminum housing and a steel backplate where the 5.0 has a plastic housing and an aluminum backplate. Both make a big difference in the quality and how it feels/sounds when typing. There isn’t anything overly wrong with the plastic case and aluminum backplate, it is just more in line with what most companies sell, not a crazy high-end board like the MX Board 6.0 was.

But even with the 6.0 sitting higher than the 5.0 in the food chain, I did love typing on the MX Board 5.0. Being a traditional layout, I was about to pick up the 5.0 and come and go from it as needed. The only thing I needed to figure out was the function layer stuff like the lighting controls. So the MC Board 5.0 has all white backlighting, while this stands out with everyone running RGB I do like the white backlighting. It is easier to see and a better white than when you do RGB in white. The lighting controls were easy to reach. You have a button to turn the lighting on and off and then next to it two controls. What I was surprised with though was the F12 key over away from the others. This lets you flip between a few different lighting modes like reactive, a breathing effect, and always on. From there the F6 and F7 keys let you change how that mode reacts. So with always on you can change the brightness between 10 levels. Then with the breathing effect, they change how fast it breaths. Whenever you press a function layer key the LED right above the Cherry branded key also flashes red to show that it was pressed. This is nice because it stops lighting up when you hit full brightness for example. The lighting overall looks good, the function legends and stuff like $#@ on the number row aren’t lit up very well because they are on the bottom of the key so they will be hard to see in the dark.

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Overall performance was good, sadly without the MX Silent Red switches on our sample I didn’t get the full experience. But I have used them in the past, they would make a big difference as this is already a quiet board. A few things I did notice in testing, the bezel while not thick does sit up a little higher around the keys. So it did take a little adjusting when hitting the number pad enter key. I also had an issue with the 5 key in the number row, not in the number pad, where it liked to double and triple report sometimes. That is a rare switch issue, not specific to the MX Board 5.0, but it was especially noticeable when typing this review considering it has 5 in the product name lol.

As I expected, having the keys above the number pad was nice. I hate using a function layer, so having a few keys that don’t require holding the function button to use was nice. Especially without taking up any extra space. I personally would still have preferred the volume controls be over there not the media keys. But that is because I never use media keys. The Cherry branded key, when pressed lights up the LED above it red to signify that it is in its gaming mode. This just turns off the windows key so you don’t get kicked out of game. I know a lot of people love that feature and I’m glad they have it on the 5.0 but I’ve still yet to ever accidentally click the windows key in game. The Cherry stabilizers worked out well and didn’t have any rattling issues, in fact, they were quiet.

Now I played around with the flip out feet and I love the feature for the keyboard. I normally type flat, but it was nice to be able to change it up without flipping the board over or blindly looking for the feet. The same functionality on the wrist rest wasn’t as useful to me personally, but I think people looking for a more ergonomic layout will really like being able to prop the wrist rest up and angle the keyboard down. The wrist rest itself was okay, the rubber finish quickly collected a lot of dead skin nasties but I think the rubber will hold up in the long term better than some of my softer pads.

 


Overall and Final Verdict

Well, I haven’t had a Cherry branded keyboard in the office for a while and I was happy to have another coming in. I always love their quality and Cherry always seems to do something completely unique to the market. The MX Board 5.0 in a lot of ways seems like a reaction to the MX Board 6.0, it was a very expensive board because of its all-aluminum bezel construction, steel backplate, and their introduction to RealKey. What it was missing though were nice quality PBT keycaps and stuff like the 1000 tiny MX logos across the wrist rest took away from the look. Cherry cut that back to one large logo on the wrist rest this time around and they added nice double shot PBT keycaps. That alone is worth a lot of praise, at best in the market we see cheap doubleshot keycaps with most companies using the thin painted keycaps. The few boards with PBT keycaps that will hold up don’t have backlighting at all. But was that enough?

Well the MX Board 5.0 does have a clean look with a thin bezel. I miss the aluminum bezel from the 6.0 but I do like the smaller size that the small bezel offers, especially with them keeping the F keys and everything a little closer together. Then, of course, there is Cherry’s quality, I prefer their switches over most of what you will find on the market (at least the traditional market) and their boards always feel a step above some of the cheaply imported boards. That said I did have a switch issue on my number row 5 key. Beyond that, I ended up really liking being able to reach the flip out feet without looking and the weird but very functional flip-out feet on the front and rear of the wrist rest.

Now I’m a little torn on the white backlighting. Personally, I love it and don’t NEED to have RGB, even if most of my hardware has it. The bright white looks better than an RGB made white and I think a lot of people are going to like it. But with RGB being the standard, there will be people who are upset they can’t set the lighting to the color they prefer. It is better than the red that the 6.0 went with though. Having just the Cherry MX Silent Red as the only switch available may be an issue as well, especially for people who want a tactile or clicky feel. You can’t ask for a better switch if you want to use the MX Board 5.0 around other people, like in an office. The board is quiet with the regular Red switches of our sample, adding the silent variation should really help things along there.

But the two biggest issues with the MX Board 5.0 come down to what happens when you try to by one. For starters, right now it isn’t available in the states. The other half of that is when they do become available the price should be around $189 going off Cherry’s initial announcement and the current EU pricing. Now that price for a quality board isn’t really out of the question and it is a lot less than the MX Board 6.0 was, but when you start to look at the general public and not just the enthusiasts there will be a lot of people wondering why it costs so much. The nice PBT doubleshot keycaps play a big part and that is justified. You also get real Cherry switches and backlighting. But not having RGB at this price point isn’t helping things.  Is the Cherry MX Board 5.0 a good keyboard? Hell yes, it is, but I think this one is going to be locked in with the enthusiast crowd once again. The simple styling is perfect for a more subtle setup or someone taking it into work, but the price is going to scare off all but us crazy keyboard enthusiasts.  

fv5

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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