CHERRY XTRFY K63W Pro Compact Ultra-Wideband gaming keyboard review

Looking to upgrade your keyboard to a more responsive, gaming-friendly model? The CHERRY XTRFY K63W Pro Compact Ultra-Wideband keyboard is a comfortable and well-specced option, though it does come with a caveat or two.

With a 70% form factor, it boasts ultra-wideband 8000Hz wireless polling to reduce latency and interference. That’s a 0.125ms polling interval, which is impressive on paper and potential peace of mind for esports players. Certainly, I encountered zero timing issues when I put the K63W Pro in 8000Hz mode, tackling everything from DOOM 2016 through the keyboard-centric Typing of the Dead: Overkill, connecting via the wireless receiver.

However, my experience was equally smooth after dialling the polling rate down to 4000Hz. 8000Hz is also faster than your average human reaction time, and there are other factors involved in response time, so I suspect it was a case of CHERRY wanting to really push the bar. Still, you can’t say it’s not future proof.

On a cosmetic level, the USB receiver is a little chunky, and significantly less stylish than the keyboard itself, though given how many dongles I’ve got squirreled away, I’d sooner have something I can’t easily lose. The default RGB lighting pattern is seriously striking but there are multiple different lighting schemes. My favourite by far was the mode that sends a ripple of light out from the key you’ve just pressed. It’s all very sci-fi, and you can also alter the lighting pattern of individual keys. I suspect you won’t get the advertised 1,100-hour battery life with RGB enabled, but after charging the K63W Pro, the battery lasted throughout my entire time with it. And when it does run out, it’ll charge while you’re using it in wired mode.

So how does it handle? Equipped with CHERRY MX Low Profile 2.0 switches, the K63W Pro is seriously comfortable to use. It’s responsive and provides just enough tactile feedback and travel without being too clicky. The feature isn’t unique to the K63W Pro, but I appreciated it having two different leg heights. Being a small form TKL keyboard, it lacks a number pad but I can’t say I missed it; when it comes to scrolling, inside or outside a game, my fingers instinctively seek out the arrow keys.

What I did initially miss, as you can see in the image below, is the lack of a separate Right Shift key, and this is one of the reasons why the CHERRY XTRFY K63W Pro has something of a learning curve. Instead, the Right Shift and Up Arrow share a key, which I was not expecting.

You can meddle with the K63W’s functions a little but it initially seems like you have to choose between using the Right Shift or Up Arrow, but not both. Fortunately, you can use ‘Mod Tap Mode’ so that tapping the key gives you Up Arrow, while holding it down gives you Right Shift. It wasn’t a dealbreaker for me, but it absolutely takes getting used to. It doesn’t help that the printed manual contains far less information than the more detailed online manual.

There’s also Snappy Tap mode, which can, Cherry says, give you an edge in counter-strafing and other timing-critical FPS moves. I’m not a Call of Duty pro, so I can’t speak to its effectiveness, but Cherry makes it very clear, both through the manual and having Snappy Tap disabled by default, that it could get you into trouble, even banned, if used with online games.

It’s odd, however, that the manual doesn’t warn you against Cherry’s Utility software, which lets you go absolutely hog wild with sneaky shenanigans. Aside from letting you tweak basic aspects of the K63W, the Cherry Utility software will allow you to define and assign macros to any key.

So, not only can you swap one key for another, but you can assign several different key-presses to one key. It doesn’t seem to handle arrow key diagonals well however, so, despite manually editing the macro, I wasn’t able to assign Ryu from Street Fighter’s fireball to a single button.

That issue aside, it’s a breeze to set up rapid weapon switching and so on, again, with the risk of getting booted if you use it online. And on top of macros, you can tweak the keyboard’s RGB settings to the nth degree, which includes altering each pattern’s brightness, colour, speed and so on.

At £172.99/$169.99, the CHERRY XTRFY K63W Pro Compact Ultra-Wideband gaming keyboard isn’t cheap and, at that price, it’s reasonable to want Bluetooth. As is, the K63W only connects via USB-C and the included wireless receiver, so it’s strictly PC only.

Ultimately, the CHERRY XTRFY K63W Pro is a comfortable and highly capable pro-level keyboard, with its customisation and low latency. And, despite its size, its feels reassuringly robust. If you can live with the shared Right Shift/Up Arrow key and the lack of Bluetooth, the CHERRY XTRFY K63W Pro is a strong, high-end choice for serious PC gamers.

Thanks to CHERRY for providing a review unit for the purposes of this article.