The board offers a very stylish coral aesthetic with a satisfying typing experience
Get the XVX MK84 on Amazon
The XVX MK84 is a keyboard that places emphasis on style, a refreshing departure from the generic black or white prebuilt. This keyboard features the Coral Sea keycaps with matching artwork on the case. But it’s not only about aesthetics here, as this board has some appealing features that include hot-swap and 2.4Ghz connectivity. All of this at under $100, so it looks very promising.
I have used the Coral Sea keycaps before and it’s probably my favourite themed set, featuring a beautiful combination of coral-inspired colours with some artwork tastefully spread around the board. The quality is absolutely superb, and the keycaps are dye sublimated PBT with walls of 1.5mm. The legends look really crisp and the same goes for the artwork. This is a completely new profile to me, and these caps come in the XVX profile, which is very similar to MDA. It almost feels like Cherry, but with spherical tops as opposed to cylindrical tops. If you’re accustomed to a more mainstream profile like Cherry or OEM, it might just take some time getting used to the bigger surface area of the XVX keycaps, but once you’ve adjusted they’re very comfortable and ergonomic.
It’s not often that you see a customised case on a prebuilt, and the MK84 boasts beautiful coral sea artwork on the bottom, which extends to the sides of the case. The base colour is a light blue which complements the keycaps and overall theme. The board looks absolutely stunning, and saves you the time and money of having to do your own customisation. I did find some imperfections on the case, for example there are a few marks on the front corners. Then there is also a diagonal line on the front where the artwork is joined, so it kind of interrupts the flow. But definitely not dealbreakers and it’s not readily apparent when looking at the case from a normal distance. This could be unique to my unit as well, and I’m sure this is something XVX will address on future batches.
The MK84 is currently available with Gateron Red or Black switches on Amazon, and we have the Reds on here. Barring some metal ping, the stock typing experience was good. I immediately liked the sound of the board and it isn’t overly loud like most tray mount prebuilts. The stabilisers come prelubed and I have to give props to XVX here: these stabs were almost perfect. There was virtually no rattle on the bigger keys and it’s extremely rare to find a prebuilt with such good stock performance. The thicker walls on these XVX keycaps also ensure a rich and deep sound, while not having that thin and tinny quality of some boards in this price class. I did find these Gateron Reds quite pingy, so I’d recommend lubing the switches. Even just lubing the springs will be sufficient here, as the board has a nice stock sound. I applied some of my Krytox 205g0 and 105 mix and was very happy with the end result.
It’s great to see this board come with 2.4Ghz connectivity, a rarity on 75% boards. You’ll find the receiver in a magnetic slot underneath the keyboard. Setting up the 2.4Ghz connection was as easy as toggling the keyboard switch and plugging in the USB receiver. No manual pairing is necessary and the keyboard was instantly recognised on Windows. The wireless connection felt very snappy when playing CSGO and Call of Duty Warzone and I didn’t experience any issues with input lag or connection drops. The backlighting will automatically go off after a minute of idle time, but the keyboard will immediately be responsive. Would’ve been nice to have an option of extending the time before standby, as a minute is quite short. The MK84 comes with a 1850 mAh battery and XVX promises up to 10 hours of continuous use on a charge, so it should last around 2-4 days. You will of course get longer than that if you leave the backlighting off. The Fn key will start flashing red when the battery life is low, and there is a charging indicator on the left area of space bar.
This is a 75% board with 84 keys, and what I like about this form factor is that it has a slightly smaller footprint than the exploded 75% layout, for example the GMMK Pro. This is about as small as you can go without sacrificing the function row and arrow keys. There is a full Nav cluster in the top right corner, and I like the top right positioning of Delete, as some 65% and 75% boards curiously put a tilde key in that position. Keys like Home and End are easily accessible. Most of the Fn layer is on the F-Row keys, and here you have some useful shortcuts as well as media controls. Nice to see the Volume Controls on F10 and F11, as they can be used with one hand. It doesn’t get any better than this in terms of small form factor and robust functionality. If your use case involves a lot of work, I’d definitely recommend this over the 65% layout.
The MK84 has full RGB with a total of 19 backlighting modes. The Fn layer allows for mode cycling (Fn + Prt), brightness and speed control (Fn + Arrows), and single colour selection (Fn + Pause). The keycaps have some good thickness so there is pretty much no light bleed, giving the board a really clean looking underglow effect.
The software can be downloaded on XVX’s website, and as always just remember that the keyboard has to be plugged in for the software to work. Before you start using the software, make sure to select a language, otherwise no text will be displayed. The software is fairly comprehensive. There is single key remapping on the standard layer, and in addition to the options given you can assign your own macros. Then you have your usual backlighting controls, and you can also create your own static colour mode. There is an extra RGB tab that has reactive backlighting modes for sound, and you can use your speakers or microphone here.
Build quality is decent. The assembly is connected to the case via six standoffs, and there is a battery and daughterboard on the inside. The case doesn’t have any ribbing but doesn’t feel too flexible. We have a front height of 1.9cm on this case and the weight is 738g. The MK84 comes with a detachable USB-C cable that is 1.5m in length.
Overall I was very impressed with the XVX MK84. The board offers a very stylish coral aesthetic with a satisfying typing experience that becomes even better when lubed. Definitely a viable option if you’re in the market for a sub $100 75% mech.
headtr1p 