Varmilo is known for its creativity in the mechanical keyboard space. Just look at the variety of keyboards on display at Computex last year, and you’ll see why the mechanical keyboard community loves the work they do. Varmilo’s latest creation is a custom keyboard for Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds fans that has two different layouts--the Varmilo VA108M Chicken Dinner (ANSI) and the VA105M Chicken Dinner (ISO Nordic).
They offer a high-quality custom PBT keycap set with dye-sublimated lettering. In our opinion, you can’t find keycaps much better than this. The font used is a clean sans-serif, and the PBT material won’t feel slick, greasy, or thin. The custom colorway is white and gray with yellow accents on the arrow keys, Enter key, and Esc key.
Most, importantly it includes custom icons for all of your PUBG bindings.
Each icon has side-printed legends so you can still easily read the numbers, F-keys, and media keys. The classic winning phrase “WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER!” is printed on the custom spacebar, too. (Don’t worry, if you’re not feeling like a winner that day, you can always swap it out with the blank white spacebar that’s included.)
If you’ve been using a mechanical keyboard from some of the bigger brands, chances are they’ll be using UV-coated ABS keycaps. Although ABS keycaps are not “bad” per se, they’re used on many mainstream gaming keyboards to reduce cost, but the general consensus is that the material negatively affects the typing feel.
The only downfall of the dye-sub PBT keycaps is that the printing method does not allow the white backlighting to shine through the lettering. If you’re typing away in the dark, the backlighting will give you a nice underglow, but it’s not used as a practical way of lighting up the keycaps letters and icons.
As seen on a few other keyboards from Varmilo, these models have a faux wood finish for the case. They use polycarbonate ABS with a wood grain texture to get this effect. We’ve seen it in person on other another keyboard of Varmilo’s, and although such a design may sound tacky, it’s surprisingly practical. The faux wood finish deters any greasy shine that glossier, untextured plastic cases tend to have. Depending on the lighting in your room, the faux texture can be more or less convincing.
At a retail price of $149.99, it’s not a bad price considering that custom keycap sets don’t come cheap. There’s a variety of switch options from Cherry, too; MX Red, Silent Red, Blue, Brown and Silver are all available. We can attest to the build quality of Varmilo keyboards. They have a steel plate and Varmilo’s own stabilizers (that are quite smooth in our opinion), and again, the keycaps are high quality. This makes for a solid, heavy keyboard. Combine that with the PUBG icons, and you have a...winner.
