Drift 64 review: cheap, loud, and honest about it

Why this review exists

This board is not good. It is here because “not good” is doing a lot of work in most coverage of cheap keyboards, and it is more useful to say exactly what is wrong and how much it matters.

It costs $22. It works. Plugged in, every key registers, and it has done so for two months of daily use without a single dropped input. At this price that is not guaranteed and it should be counted in its favour.

Everything else is a compromise you can measure.

The noise

66.8 dB, which is 5 dB louder than anything else tested here and roughly 15 dB above the quietest. Decibels are logarithmic, so that gap is much larger than it looks written down.

Some of this is intentional — Outemu Blues are clicky switches and the click is the product. But the click is not the whole reading. The case is thin ABS with nothing inside it, so there is a hollow resonance underneath every keystroke, and the stabilisers rattle on top of that. What you get is a sharp click, a hollow thud, and a metallic tick, all slightly out of alignment with each other.

Practically: this is not a keyboard you can use in a shared room, and it is not one you can use on an unmuted call. If either of those is your situation, stop reading.

The speed

12.4 ms measured, at 125 Hz polling. Both figures are the worst here — the best board on this site measures 3.4 ms.

For writing, this is irrelevant and I want to be clear about that rather than manufacture a problem. Nine milliseconds is well below the threshold at which typing feels disconnected from the screen. I noticed nothing during two months of ordinary use.

In a game where inputs are contested it is a real, if small, disadvantage, and it is the one thing about this board that cannot be improved at any price, because the polling rate is fixed in firmware you cannot change.

Everything else

The keycaps are ABS in OEM profile and they were visibly shiny on the home row within six weeks. Under a desk lamp the difference between the F and J keys and the ones around them is obvious. This is normal for cheap ABS; it happens faster than most people expect.

The switches are soldered. Two of them now sound different from the rest — slightly scratchier, most likely inconsistent factory lubrication — and there is nothing to be done about it short of a desoldering session that costs more in equipment than the board did.

There is no software. No remapping of any kind, no layers beyond what is printed, no firmware to flash. What is on the keycaps is what the board does.

The one genuinely positive structural note: the integrated plate makes it rigid. 0.4 mm of flex, which is the stiffest reading here. It feels solid in the sense that a plank feels solid. Whether you want that from a keyboard is a different question.

Two months in

It has not broken and I do not expect it to. The failure mode of a board like this is not sudden — it is the keycaps wearing, the switches drifting apart in feel, and the whole thing gradually becoming more irritating than it was on day one.

Who should actually buy this

Two people. Someone who needs a working mechanical keyboard today for the least possible money — a spare, a second machine, a travel beater that can be lost without regret. And someone who wants to find out whether they like clicky switches before committing real money to a board built around them.

For everyone else the honest advice is to spend $40 more. The Quarry TKL at $72 is not three times better in any measurable sense; it is better in every single one of them, and the difference between using it and using this is not subtle.