Corsair's new K68 keyboard can survive a sudden soda shower

We love our mechanical keyboards. We'd never treat them poorly by coating our fingers in a fine layer of dorito dust before a game of Overwatch, or slosh a cup of coffee onto the number pad before we've fully woken up. We were interested in Corsair's K68 keyboard purely for a friend. But for our spill-inclined friend, Corsair's new keyboard is a promising design.

It's essentially identical to the mechanical keyboards Corsair's become known for, with Cherry MX Red switches (and an MX Blue model in Asia), familiar media buttons (though no volume rocker) and a wrist rest. There's only red or blue backlighting as opposed to full RGB, which keeps the price down: the K68 just went on sale, and it retails for $100.

The K68's bravery in the face of water or Red Bull comes from individual shielding Corsair's added to each key. Underneath each keycap is a rubber wall that surrounds, but doesn't touch, the stem of the key. That means the K68 isn't fully waterproof; if you submerge it, water will find its way inside the keys and short this sucker out. But if liquid flows over the keyboard, the shielding can keep each key safe from several millimeters of accidental flow.

Corsair's pretty confident in it, as you can see in the setup at the Computex suite.

The clever thing about this design is it avoids affecting the keypress in any way. The Cherry MX Red K68 feels exactly like any other MX Red keyboard, and the same goes for the Blues. Since the keys never touch the shielding, there's no trade-off in keyfeel or performance.

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If you're not dead set on an RGB board and have a tendency to spill, the K68 may save you from bricking your keyboard on a particularly clumsy morning.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).