Wobkey Crush 80 Reboot Pro Keyboard Review – Premium, Enthusiast, and Affordable
Mechanical keyboards from major brands can be feature-packed, but sometimes suffer from concessions like plastic parts or subpar switches, even ones paired with a sky-high asking price. Smaller brands can often be more precise with how their premium keyboards are built, but you may run into unnecessarily boutique features like unconventional layouts or even higher asking prices. So, not everything makes it into consideration for the best gaming keyboard. With its Crush 80 Reboot Pro, however, keyboard maker Wobkey once again strikes a great balance that accounts for all the aforementioned concerns.
The Wobkey Crush 80 Reboot Pro Keyboard not only offers what are arguably the most essential premium features, but also does so at a very competitive price point. With its straightforward design, choice of colorways, great mechanical switches, and a surprisingly heavy weighted base, this keyboard should delight any PC gamer or serious typist.
Wobkey Crush 80 Reboot Pro Keyboard – Design and Customization
Touted as an evolved version of the Wobkey Rainy 75 Pro I previously reviewed, the Crush 80 Reboot Pro brings over the same type of CNC aluminium body, shiny backweight, robust colorway selection, and PCB compatibility as that highly-rated keyboard, but adds much more. While you can get the Crush 80 Reboot Lite for $10 less than the Pro at retail price, you’d lose out on the Kailh Cocoa switches, RGB lighting, larger 7500mAh battery, FR4 plate, and greater selection of colorways. This makes the Pro version the clear choice between the two.
The Reboot Pro is available in 10 different colorways, including black, yellow, navy, silver, warm silver, red, blue, pink, purple, and yellow. Most of the colorways are fairly tame multi-tone designs, with the top and bottom frames in the chosen color, and the keycaps, and keycap accents, in something complementary. For example, the navy, which is featured in this review, has a navy body and a mix of darker navy, light grey, and white keycaps with white or black lettering.
Regardless of color scheme, the total package is impressive. In the box you get the keyboard, carry case, cloth cover, alternative aluminum positioning plate, IXPE pad, three extra switches, two sets of four additional screws, four gasket dumbbells, an extra pair of rubber feet, two case corner protectors, a keycap/switch puller, 2.4GHz USB-A wireless dongle, USB-C to USB-A charging and data cable, and some paperwork. It’s not uncommon to see boutique manufacturers go above and beyond with what’s in the box, but it’s good to see Wobkey still do this.
What’s unfortunately common is the 2.4GHz and Bluetooth mode switch found under the Caps Lock key, which is always an inconvenience. While I understand why there's no external switch due to the seamless top frame, I'd love for one of these otherwise intelligently-designed keyboards to find a way to make it work. The keyboard can be used wired, via the rear-facing USB-C port, with the 2.4GHz and Bluetooth mode switch in either direction. Up to three devices can be switched between over Bluetooth, giving it some added versatility.
What isn't standard, and a genuinely welcome touch, is that there's finally a storage area for the 2.4GHz USB-A wireless dongle. You just have to remove the magnetic door in the middle of the shiny backweight underneath the keyboard.
The casing features what Wobkey calls a five-second quick release magnetic ball-catch structure for fast disassembly, which helps with hot swapping your choice of parts. Thankfully, even though it's pretty quick to disassemble the mostly toolless design, it's structurally stable. In fact, it's so solidly put together you'd have no trouble using its imposing 5.2-pound weight in a pinch to fend off an intruder and then go right back to typing.
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While I really liked the 75-key layout of the Rainy 75 Pro, the 80-key format on the Crush 80 Reboot Pro is even better since it allows for more traditional functions on the right side of the board, sans a tenkey/number pad, of course. There's even a 13th Function key, which, besides being one more than 12, defaults to a Mute key, but can easily be programmed for any other function or a macro.
Even with the extra keys, the Crush 80 Reboot Pro is not much bigger at 13.97 inches wide and 5.4 inches deep. There are no adjustable underside feet to change the typing angle – instead, the keyboard gently slopes from a thickness of 0.75 inches at the bottom to 1.3 inches at the rear. I found it to be a comfortable typing angle, although some (especially gamers) may lament the inability to make the keyboard flat or otherwise adjust the angle.
Firmware updates and the JSON file to define keyboard layouts and remap settings can be downloaded from the Crush 80 support site. The JSON file is needed for the VIA browser app to be able to configure the keyboard, which can be done either wired or using the 2.4GHz wireless dongle.
With VIA, you can reconfigure any key, set up to 15 macros, select up to four layers, set different RGB lighting effects, and more. With my navy colorway, the south-facing ARGB backlight wasn't particularly noticeable, even at maximum brightness unless my room was pretty dark. It's a shame there's no factory option for shine-through keycaps, as the lighting on the transparent heartbeat icon above the cursor keys looks really nice. Another nice touch is the left and right downfiring RGB side lights, which again, look great, but are hard to notice under most external lighting conditions.
Wobkey Crush 80 Reboot Pro Keyboard – Performance
As with the Rainy 75 Pro, the Crush 80 Reboot Pro uses Kailh Cocoa switches. The typing experience is at least as good, if not even more stable-feeling, thanks to the greater weight of the Reboot Pro and its buzzword-laden components that would make even the most hardcore keyboard enthusiast blush. Its acoustic set features an 8x IXPE switch pad, PET film, PCB foam with PET insulation, and PORON case foam with PET insulation, while the A1 Black PCB and customized stabilizers more than hold their own in combination to create a premium experience.
The overall feel, subdued clack, and well-sculpted keys make it a joy to type on for hours on end. As per usual, since these aren't speed switches, gamers may want something more tuned for competitive play – although the Kailh Cocoa has a fairly standard 45g actuation force.
Assuming you do want more performance, however, you can switch the Reboot Pro to an ultra-low latency mode with FN + H. When ultra-low latency is active, you get 3.0ms of overall input latency over 2.4GHz as opposed to the wired mode’s 2.0ms of latency (and Bluetooth gets you 8.0ms of latency, which is for non-performance scenarios, of course). I personally never found a need to bother, though, and never had issues with responsiveness over primarily 2.4GHz usage on my Windows 11 desktop.
With ultra-low latency and RGB lighting both off, you can get well over 900 hours from a full charge thanks to the 7500mAh battery. With either or both of those features on, you're looking at just under 90 hours of battery life. You can manually check the battery status by pressing FN + Space and checking which keys, from 1 to 6, or lowest to highest, are lit. Power management is also well-implemented, with the Reboot Pro quick to wake from sleep so you can quickly resume typing.
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