Product on Review: Ducky One3 Aura TKL
Manufacturer: Ducky
Street Price: GBP £159.99 / USD $169.99 / AUD $267.99
It’s not every day you come across a brand who have produced only mechanical keyboards throughout their 15 years in business, but Ducky have yet to stray from their path, choosing to chase perfection over profits. This allows them to focus all of their efforts, technique and knowledge on producing the best keyboards they can, and they’ve made quite the name for themselves in the process.
It’s coming up for 10 years since we last looked at a Ducky keyboard, here at Vortez, so we’re eager to see what their newest release, the Ducky One3 Aura TKL, has to offer.
RGB illumination has become almost essential for any PC gaming peripherals, if you’re into your RGBees, good news, one of the main features of the One3 Aura is the transparent chassis and keycaps, allowing the RGB lighting to shine as bright as possible.
The same Quack Mechanics philosophy has been employed on the One3 Aura, ensuring the keyboard is built with a solid stance, authentic acoustics, balanced tuning and double-shot keycaps, ensuring the end user is as happy with their purchase as they can possibly be. We’ll touch on this further later in the review as there’s a lot to talk about here.
The model we’re reviewing today comes with Cherry MX Red switches, a great all-rounder that’s a fantastic entry point into mechanical switches, but if you do fancy a change, or want to swap your WASD for something clickier, you can, Ducky have designed the board with hot-swappable key switches and provide you with the tool to do so, the keyboard can be purchased with a wide range of key switch options from Cherry, Kailh or Gateron. Along with that, the USB Type-C cable can also be swapped out, making it easier to take to LAN events, or just allow you to personalise things how you see fit.
Amongst those features we also have a dual-layer PCB to extend product life and signal stability, two-step keyboard feet to help you find the right angle, 1000Hz polling rate, crucial for gaming, and an optimised construction for perfect weight distribution.
The Ducky One3 Aura TKL, on paper at least, certainly sounds like quite the keyboard but we all know that the proof is in the pudding, let’s plug this thing in and see what’s what.
Ducky on the One3 Aura’s Authentic Acoustics:
A multi-layered padding design is present to spotlight raw acoustics from your switches of choice and reduce unwanted noise during use. Moreover, a supplementary layer of EVA foam pad is located underneath the PCB to provide further improved sound reduction and the negation of any unwanted sounds.
