Patriot Viper V760 Keyboard Review

Benchmark Results

Audio Testing

Subjectively speaking, the V760 has among the cleanest typing sounds I’ve heard on a keyboard. Of course, you really can’t hear the tactile bump in a Brown switch, so there’s just a single “thunk” when the switch bottoms out and a light “snap” when it rebounds. Beyond that, I can detect almost no additional noise. Usually, there’s a pronounced “ping” when you hit a key hard, but I detected very little of that on the V760. It’s possible this is in part due to the aluminum top plate design.

Switch Testing

The charts below represent testing performed on the switches that are mounted on this keyboard. For a primer on the what, how, and why of this testing, read our How We Test Mechanical Keyboards reference article.

The lines on the charts are force curves showing the characteristics of the key travel, the distance and rebound of the key travel, the force required to depress the key, and the rebound force applied by the spring to reset the switch.

The squiggly line is the press, and the smoother line below it is the rebound.

The dotted gray lines show a given switch specification as provided by the switch manufacturer. They’re not a measurement; they’re merely a reference. For the metrics we can measure, they’re present to show how closely the switch performance matches the manufacturer spec. Some specifications we cannot measure, but we’ve shown them here so you can see what they’re supposed to be, at least.

The force curve above shows the median of all the switches on this keyboard (red line). Bear in mind that the median curve represents all switches on this keyboard, including any outliers.

The black line is the force curve of a single switch on this keyboard, chosen at random. The graph gives an indication of the kind of keyfeel you can expect from the keyboard.

As you can see, the tactile bump is about 14gf above the initial force (~38-52gf), and the bottom-out force is about 14gf higher than the tactile force (~52-64gf). That’s about 26gf start to finish. Further, the force gap between the tactile bump peak and the dip after is bit small (~40-52gf), so the Kailh Brown switch will give you a fairly soft tactile bump with a strong linear feel.

What’s perhaps most notable about this force curve is that although the tactile force is pegged at 60gf in the spec, we measured it quite a bit less than that, at about 52gf. Even so, that’s well within the tolerance of +/-15gf.

If you take a look at the range of the Kailh switches (highest median force on top in dark gray, lowest median force below in light gray) on the Patriot Viper V760, you can see that the tolerances are impressively tight early in the travel, but after the actuation point, at least some switches required far more force than the median. (We’ll explore that more shortly.)

This chart shows the force curves of all of the standard keys - the stabilized key force curves have been omitted. It’s apparent that there are several outliers, which are responsible for the high top range.

Looking at all the switches, though, you can clearly see that indeed, the tolerances are nice and tight until after the actuation point.

Note further than a number of switches show total key travel beyond the stated 4mm specification. All of them, though, landed within the specifications acceptable tolerance range of -0.4mm--although several switches cut it awfully close. What we can conclude, then, is that the overall travel of many of these Kailh Brown switches are past 4mm and at the very edge of the acceptable tolerance range.

Here we’ve isolated the outlying switches, but we’ve omitted the many switches that finished their travel beyond 4mm--partially because there are so many and partially because, after all, they’re within the tolerance range. However, it’s notable that so many switches require more force than the median once they get past the actuation point.

Even among these outliers, only one switch (left arrow) is peaking up above the median; even that is hardly noteworthy, as it’s just a few gf off of the median. It is, however, one of the more stark outliers elsewhere in the travel. Right after the actuation point, it shot up about 12gf above the median and more or less stays there until the end of the travel.

Only its neighbor, the up arrow key, has a higher force towards the end of the travel. Indeed, by the time the up arrow key reaches the end of its travel (4.188mm), it requires a whopping 96.3gf. The arrow down key is right up there with it, as are the forward slash and M keys.

Most of the others show a required force somewhat above the median (enough to flag, anyway), but the F1, F6, and 3 keys and a few others show a small but odd quirk: After the tactile bump, they don’t shoot back up as fast of most of the other keys. Instead, they dip and then slowly require more force until they’re back close to the median at or beyond the actuation point.

Surprisingly, many of the stabilized keys show performance right in line with the median of the standard switches. This is remarkable, because stabilized keys typically have notably different force curves than standard keys.

The Backspace, Enter, NumAdd, and NumEnter keys are actually almost smack dab along the median line, in fact. Curiously, the Spacebar follows that curve tightly, but it starts and stays a few gf below it throughout the travel. They even have roughly the same total travel, too.

Not to be ignored, the left Shift, right Shift, and Num0 keys have more predictably out-of-sync force curves from the standard keys’ median. Num0 isn’t all that far off, but both Shift keys require a great deal more force than the media right after the actuation point, spiking up into the 80gf range at the end of their (slightly long) travel.

It’s worth noting, though, that all of these switches are remarkably close to the median until after the actuation point.

MORE: Best Deals

MORE: How We Test Mechanical Keyboards

MORE: Mechanical Keyboard Switch Testing Explained

MORE: All Keyboard Content