Meet Maggie, PCMag'sBe Quiet, a company known for its silent-running PC chassis and fans, breaks out of the case with its new Light Mount keyboard. This peripheral features silent key switches with additional sound-damping material in the chassis, as well as dedicated shortcut keys and a volume knob. The keyboard doesn’t deliver a ton of extras, unlike its pricier, more elaborate counterpart, the Dark Mount, but that's a good thing: The lack of shiny doodads keeps the price down. (Granted, $139.90 isn't cheap, but it's well below other premium keyboards.) Ultimately, the Light Mount does what it’s supposed to do extraordinarily well: be pleasant to type on and, well, being quiet while you do it. It’s our latest Editors’ Choice pick for wired gaming keyboards
The Light Mount offers a fairly standard design for a gaming keyboard: a sleek, black, metal-and-plastic chassis with customizable RGB lighting. The keyboard measures 5.1 by 18.2 by 1.7 inches and weighs 2 pounds. The device has only a wired connection, which is fine by me—it's reliable, and I don’t need to stow away the cable and unearth it every time I need to recharge the keyboard.
This keyboard has a full-width layout with 110 keys. On the right side of the layout, you'll find a number pad, while the dedicated shortcut keys are on the left, running down in a single column beneath the textured-metal volume knob. A mute button is embedded conveniently on top of the knob.
The keycaps—made from polybutylene terephthalate (PBT)—are solid black with shine-through letters. They're slightly textured so each keystroke feels smooth enough, yet you won’t have to worry about your fingers sliding off the tops. Unlike the Dark Mount, this unit doesn’t have lighting around the sides of the keyboard, but to me at least, that's no big deal. I found those lights a bit distracting and ended up turning them off via the keyboard's IO Center software.
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If there’s one feature worth talking about on the Light Mount before all others, it’s the key switches. Be Quiet's proprietary silent switches deliver brand-consistent whispery keystrokes while maintaining a pleasant level of resistance to make typing feel satisfying. As a writer and casual gamer, I love the slight resistance that comes from the small bump inside of tactile switches. Still, if you want to remove the resistance altogether, the Light Mount is available with linear switches for ultra-sensitive, unimpeded keystrokes that won't, say, disturb co-workers or wake the sleeping baby in the next room.
To bolster noise dampening, the Light Mount backs up its silent switches with three layers of foam and silicone to absorb vibrations and fill any echoey, empty space inside the keyboard's chassis. While adding layers of material to make a keyboard quieter isn’t a wholly original idea, it does wonders for this keyboard compared with other builds.
To test the difference the layers of sound dampening make, I popped off the Light Mount's hot-swappable PCB and 5-pin MX switches and put them into my everyday keyboard at home, the Inland Gaming MK Pro 75% Keyboard. To my surprise, I found a difference: Even though the MK Pro has a gasket mount and two layers of foam, there was a distinct "thocc" to the keystrokes that I didn't hear on the Light Mount.
Meanwhile, the Light Mount's volume knob is easy to access and satisfying to use, a much more intuitive design than the volume roller on the pricier Dark Mount. Ironically, clicking the mute control that sits atop the Light Mount's volume knob is notably louder than the rest of the buttons on the keyboard.
With Be Quiet's IO Center, you can fully customize your Light Mount experience. The software offers all the usual features one expects from a keyboard utility, with a simple, approachable layout. The available RGB patterns are sure to mesmerize (even if I, personally, can’t handle the distraction of rainbow colors rippling under my fingertips when working or playing a game).
The default functions for the dedicated shortcut keys are mostly media-centric: M1 through M4 for play/pause, next track, previous track, and stop, while M5 mutes the mic. IO Center makes it easy and fast to customize the buttons, or any other keys.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Be Quiet Light Mount
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
The Light Mount is a triumphant debut for Be Quiet as it enters the keyboard market. The keys are satisfying to type on and impressively hushed without feeling mushy. The only improvement we can imagine would be a Bluetooth or wireless connection. If you type in a room or apartment with a light sleeper or an infant, this keyboard is absolutely for you. (I definitely know what I’m getting my brother, and his newborn daughter, as his next gift.)
If you’re simply looking for a full-width mechanical keyboard with a number pad and don’t mind the classic mechanical rattle (or dislike silent key switches—maybe you prefer the click or the thocc!), a model like the Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless might be a better bet. But in a market full of keyboards clamoring for attention, the Light Mount stands out by keeping the noise—and the fluff—firmly turned down.
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About Our Expert
I am a freelance writer for PCMag.com focused primarily on PC peripherals and audio equipment. I started off at PCMag as the inventory control coordinator, and now I'm thrilled to be reviewing and testing PC peripherals. I am a certified geek, with passions spanning PC hardware, Magic: the Gathering, experimental music, and everything in between.
I graduated from the University of Hartford, where I found my passion for building PCs and custom keyboards. From there, I moved to New York, where I bounced around jobs and creative pursuits, writing mainly for independent publications on music, culture, and card games.
If I’m not at work, I can usually be found writing, playing with my dog, Ollie, or playing online video games with my PCMag colleagues.
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