Castor 65 review: a gasket mount at this price

The one that stayed on the desk

Of the ten boards on this site, this is the one I kept using when testing did not require me to. That is the most useful single sentence in this review, and everything below is an attempt to explain it.

The gasket mount is the reason. Budget boards advertise gasket mounting constantly and mostly mean a strip of foam somewhere near the plate. This one measured 2.9 mm of deflection at the centre under a 5 kg load — roughly triple what the tray-mounted boards here manage, and enough that you feel the plate move under a hard keystroke rather than hitting a floor. The effect is a bottom-out that arrives softly instead of stopping dead, and after a full day of typing the difference shows up in your hands rather than your ears.

The sound is the other half of it. 53.1 dB is the quietest reading here except the Tessera, and unlike a lot of quiet boards it does not sound muted or dead. Akko’s V3 Cream Blues are a tactile switch with a rounded bump rather than a sharp one, and the polycarbonate plate takes the edge off the higher frequencies. It sounds like a considered object. On a $79 keyboard that is unexpected.

What it is like to type on

Consistent, which is the thing budget boards usually are not. The tactile bump is in the same place on every key, the big keys do not feel different from the alphas, and the stabilisers were done properly at the factory — no tick on the space bar, no rattle on shift, nothing on enter.

The 65% layout is, for most people, the right compromise. You get dedicated arrow keys and a navigation column for one extra unit of width over a 60%, and after a fortnight I stopped noticing the missing function row entirely. Fn+number covers it, and unless you live in an IDE or a video editor you press F-keys far less often than you think.

The steel weight in the base is a genuine addition rather than a spec-sheet line. At 890 g the board does not move when you type on it, and the extra mass audibly lowers the pitch.

Then you try to remap something

This is where the review turns.

The Castor ships with vendor software. It is Windows-only, it is a 90 MB installer, it wants admin rights, and its interface is a skinned rectangle that takes several seconds to acknowledge a click. There is no VIA support, no QMK, no browser configurator, and no community firmware.

For a board that gets almost everything else right, this is disproportionately annoying. If you have ever moved control to caps lock — a change many people make once and then rely on permanently — you either accept the software or accept the default layout. On macOS or Linux there is no option at all beyond OS-level remapping, which does not travel with the board.

I want to be precise about the weight of this. It does not make the Castor a bad keyboard. It makes it a keyboard with one closed door, and whether that matters depends entirely on whether you were going to walk through it. Plenty of people set a layout once and never touch it again. For them this paragraph is noise.

Five months in

The gaskets have compressed slightly on the left side. It is not audible and I would not have noticed it typing, but a straight edge across the plate shows the flex is now marginally uneven — more give on the right than the left. This is the sort of thing that either stabilises or slowly continues, and I will know by month ten.

Battery has dropped from about nine days to about seven, which is normal degradation. Nothing else has changed: the stabilisers are still clean, the sound measured 53.4 dB on a re-test, and the case has developed no creaks.

Who this is for

Buy it if typing feel is the thing you actually care about and you are happy with the layout you are given. Nothing here under $80 types better, and against boards at twice the price it holds up respectably.

Skip it if you remap constantly, or if you are on macOS or Linux. The Ferrule 75 gives up a little of the typing feel and gives you VIA back, which for most people is the better trade — and the comparison between them is the most useful page on this site if you are choosing between the two.