Thank you EPOMAKER for sending us this keyboard to review!

After my wife reviewed a couple of stellar keyboards from EPOMAKER, I also had to get in on the fun and review one myself. Now, my tastes are different - I like smaller keyboards more than full size, and since I work from home, I don't mind (and actually prefer) a little 'thock' with my keyboards while she prefers quieter ones. I also don't mind a few little gimmicks (like knobs and screens) as long as they don't take away from the important stuff. When EPOMAKER offered me the chance to review this TH80 V2 Pro, I jumped at the chance - but I made sure it had the Creamy Jade mechanical switches rather than the Sea Salt Silent V2 switches she chose for her keyboard review.

The EPOMAKER TH80 V2 Pro is quite a looker at first glance. I chose the black color, and I'm glad I did, because not only does it match my desk layout better, but they include some really neat translucent key caps with a carbon fiber-like texture on the top. They are a really interesting design, and feel really good to type on. I must say that if you like pink, that model might look the best - if that's your thing, and the pictures are accurate. The white model looks good but doesn't seem to have shine-through key caps, again, if the pictures are accurate.

When I first took it out of the box, a few things really stood out to me. As I already mentioned, the key caps are a striking carbon-fiber design with orange accents. It looks pretty cool. When I picked it up, the all-plastic shell is obvious, but tapping on the back has a nice 'thud', suggesting a lot of dampening foam. Plastic shells can be great, and this one isn't bad, but it does have a few spots that flex a bit more than I would otherwise prefer. For example, if you pick it up and squeeze it in the center above the F key row and below the space bar, my sample will flex a bit and make a plasticy click sound. It also feels like it gives a little. This is particularly noticeable in the top center around the USB port. The other sides may flex a little, but that loud sound is particularly jarring. Thankfully, in most other ways that matter, the keyboard feels great.

While the shell has some room for improvement, the main surface of the keyboard, where you type, feels incredible thanks to a few key areas that are very well done. As I mentioned before, these key caps look interesting, but feel really great. I didn't think I'd like them at first, but somehow the material and texture is something I've come to appreciate. I will say that while the key caps are translucent so you can see the RGB coloring through them really well, the orange print showing each key’s function is a bit hard to see in a completely dark room. The RGB is better than nothing, but the light tends to shine more on the bottom of the key rather than the top where the legends are printed.

Speaking of, this keyboard uses what they call South-facing LEDs. This is where the light is on the bottom of the key switch, instead of the top. North-facing LEDs were the older standard, and are very common still. What I like the most about South-facing LEDs is that allows RGB lighting to shine through on front-facing key caps. Since this includes nice caps as it is, this is less important – but if I decided to customize this more in the future, I know that South-facing will give me the flexibility I prefer.

On top of the excellent key caps, this keyboard also has a gasket-mounted structure, as well as a flex-cut plate and PCB (printed circuit board). What this means is that if you press down on the keys, the layer underneath actually flexes when pressed. It has to be said that this is a preference; some prefer firm aluminum PCB mounts, but a popular keyboard YouTuber has made flexible gasket-mount keyboards very popular indeed. I will say that it does make some sense, as the softer plate underneath the keys can absorb some of the impact, making it easier on your fingers.

By absorbing as it does, it also leads to another key benefit of this design: sound. This keyboard sounds fantastic. The reasons are many, but EPOMAKER's experience in designing a keyboard that sounds 'thocky' has paid off with the TH80 V2 Pro. It has five sound dampening layers, which works along with the flexible PCB design, to make a truly fantastic-sounding keyboard. The gasket mount, along with the flex PCB design, tends to mute high-frequency pinging, which makes keyboards sound cheaper. In my opinion, keyboards with a deeper tone just sound better than those with a higher-pitched one. The key switches also sound great.

These Creamy Jade switches sound really, really good, and feel great too. The closest switches that I have laying around to these are the Leobog Graywood V3 switches I bought a couple of years ago. Those switches are generally similar, but have a slightly deeper sound and a slightly lighter touch. The differences are so slight that most wouldn't even notice. These Creamy Jades are linear switches with a medium-light activation force and a nice clack when they are bottomed out. They feel and sound really good, especially on this keyboard.

I know I already mentioned the gasket mounted flex-cut PCB, but if you take the key caps off, you can see one reason they are so special. Where the key switches are mounted is a soft-touch rubber layer, and there are cut slices with foam in between them. The space bar is even more unique; near the center, there is a thick slice in the rubber layer, with foam in between that as well. All of this rubber and foam under the switches makes it so that if your keys bottom out, they instead impact a soft surface rather than a hard top. This difference in philosophy of keyboard design is incredibly obvious if you mash keys on a flat-top keyboard and compare that with one like this TH80 V2 Pro. The older design returns a lot of the energy of bottoming out back to your fingers, while this newer design disperses a lot of it, making typing a lot more comfortable.

Outside of the incredible typing experience, the TH80 V2 PRO has some other things going for it as well. I know it may seem silly, but I've always appreciate a volume knob on my keyboards. The one included here takes up a single keyboard key, but considering it's location, I'm completely fine with that trade. I love having a quick volume adjustment and mute so easily accessible. It also helps that it feels like it's metal, and feels high quality to the touch.

The other premium keyboard feature is the little 1.06" LCD display located in the far right end of the keyboard. Here, it takes up what could otherwise be another key or two, which I admit I'm a little less happy about, but the screen does look really nice. It's utility is less clear, but it does look good.

You see, the screen is somewhat of a missed opportunity in that it could be a lot more useful than it is. You can have it display a still or animated .gif file, as long as it has a resolution of 96x160 pixels. It can only be programmed when connected via a USB-C connection; wireless modes can't transfer the .gif to onboard memory.

There are other screens available as well. The most useful is the clock; it shows the time, the date, the battery charge level, and the keyboard modes. The modes include Windows/Mac, what connection method is selected (wired/2.4GHz/Bluetooth), and the status of Win Lock, Caps Lock, and Num Lock. (There is no number pad, but it's still tracked on the system.) It's the screen I normally leave mine on; it's pretty useful.

If you press Fn + press in on the volume knob, it changes the knob function from audio to navigating the screen's menus. This is unfortunately part of the missed opportunity; almost all of the menus just help set the RGB mode, and strangely don't set the LED strip colors on the top (near ESC) or the RGB strips on the sides. You can also set the volume (again), or set the language. That's about it. Part of me wishes you could swap the screen out for a pair of PgUp and PgDn keys, but that's not possible.

The keyboard layout is what is called a 75% layout, though perhaps it's missing a key or two from a more typical 75% because of that LCD screen. Regardless, what makes a 75% special is that it includes the main typing area of the keyboard, including all of the F keys. It also keeps the arrows. From there, it adds some number of navigation keys; on some, it's four, while here it's two. We get Home and Delete. Some keyboards also offer PgUp/PgDn, or some other combination. Another way to look at a 75% is to consider it a 65% layout with the Fn row added back in. Whatever the case, for gamers, this is an excellent layout because it includes all of the keys we need while keeping the keyboard as small as it can reasonably be. I do like the layout, though I did have to make some changes to the default configuration with the Web App.

EPOMAKER's Web App is not the prettiest, especially since the fonts are all a bit small, but it has decent functionality. Since their products seem to have several web URLs based on the model, the one for this device is here.

Being able to use the Web App is an important part of configuring this keyboard. It should work out of the box on Windows, and presumably macOS (I can’t test it on a mac). During my testing, I discovered that Linux support might not work out of the box. Luckily for you, I happen to be a Linux administrator by day so I spent some time figuring out what you will need. As it turns out, you need a custom udev rule to get this to work on Linux reliably. I know that most of this readership uses Windows; feel free to skip this section, but I'm going to teach you how to make this work. Even so, I assume you are somewhat familiar with Linux basics; this is not a Linux training class. Hopefully this gives you enough information to get it working; if not, please ask your friendly neighborhood sysadmin for assistance.

First, open a terminal. Most Linux distributions have a working sudo (super-user do) out of the box, so I'll be having you use that. Using sudo and a text editor, create a file in the /etc/udev/rules.d directory called 99-epomaker.rules by running the following command (please replace 'vim' with 'nano' if you are not familiar with vim):

$ sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/99-epomaker.rules

You should see an empty file. If not, then something else already made it and this step might not be necessary. Now, put the following line in it (in vim, press 'i', then copy/paste this line):

KERNEL=="hidraw*", SUBSYSTEM=="hidraw", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0c45", MODE="0666"

Save the file (for vim, press ESC then :wq), and then when back at the root shell, type:

$ sudo udevadm trigger

Once that is done, you will now have updated the permissions of your EPOMAKER TH80 V2 Pro so that the Web App can access it. Because you created that file, it's a permanent change, and will persist on reboot.

Back to our regularly scheduled multiplatform review.

Once connected to the Web App, you can choose from one of several options on the main menu. They are 'Custom Keys', 'Lighting Settings', 'Macro Manager', 'Advanced Keys', 'TFT Screen', and 'Settings'. There is also a 'Configuration file' option if you want to save and switch between profiles. TFT Screen only shows up if you're connected by a direct USB wire; using the wireless 2.4GHz connection everything but that shows up, and if connected via Bluetooth, you can't use the Web App at all.

Starting from the top, you have Custom Keys. Here, you can configure quite a bit, and can set or replace any key on the normal or Fn layer. The only exception is you can't reconfigure the Fn layer of the F keys; these are hard coded to various app and media functions, like volume adjustments (F10-F12), media (F7-F9), and so on. Some of the others launch default applications like a browser, file manager, and so on. I use the media keys but none of the others.

Other than the F keys in the Fn layer, you can configure almost anything to do almost anything. If you want to set the keyboard to another layout, you almost certainly can. What's neat is that even the Fn key can be remapped; a lot of keyboards I've reviewed don't let you do that. The special features can be remapped as well, including RGB lighting settings.

I find the default layout mostly fine, but I did make one set of changes that makes the keyboard work a lot better for me. Since there are no dedicated keys for End, PgUp and PgDn, I set Fn + the up and down arrows to PgUp and PgDn, and set the Fn + Left to Home, and Fn + Right to End. I also mapped Fn + Home to End as well, since they are logically connected. This helped me with the major missing buttons, and while there is a default mapping for them (Fn + j/k/l) these new settings are much more intuitive to me.

The Lighting Settings menu offers a ton of options for lighting effects for the onboard RGB lighting, perhaps more than I’ve seen on most other keyboards. There are nineteen different RGB effects, as well as a twentieth, which is called Musical Rhythm. This mode requires a special driver and only works on Windows. The rest of the options all work on any operating system, and are stored in the keyboard’s onboard memory.

It’s worth noting that two sets of RGB lights, the little light bar next to the ESC key, and the lights on the sides of the keyboard both cannot be controlled from the Web App. They must be controlled via the Fn key combinations. It’s a bit awkward and an unfortunate oversight.

Below this there is the Macro Manager. Here you can create, import, delete, copy, export, and rename macros. They can also be recorded, and you can choose to keep the delays/typing speed or skip them as you need to. You can execute them in the normal or Fn layers. It seems pretty flexible.

There is also an Advanced Keys section. Here, you can configure optional but powerful features that makes the TH80 V2 useful for gaming and other less common use cases. The first is the SOCD (Simultaneous Opposing Cardinal Directions) which allows you to configure how the keyboard reacts to pressing two keys in quick succession. Some gaming keyboards I’ve tested limits SOCD to W/A/S/D; here, you can configure it on any two keys. Pretty neat. Just be aware that some games will ban you if you use this.

The other features in Advanced Keys are interesting but less important to me. The first is Dual Effect Click, which allows you to have holding a different function than clicking. Toggle Switch allows you to make it so clicking toggles repeat, instead of holding it down. And finally, you can use Key Combination, which allows a single key to automatically add in common modifiers like Ctrl, Alt, and so on. These are neat but niche use cases.

If your keyboard is connected with a wire, the TFT Screen option is available. You can't really do anything with it other than upload a new .gif, or fix the time if it's off. The .gif uploader does let you create animations there, so you can upload a .gif and insert simple effects and add frames. Neat for those who want this.

Finally, there is a Settings menu where you can choose a dark or light theme, can update the keyboard’s firmware, and set the key response time. There isn’t a lot of explanation on what the key response time means here. I assume it’s related to double bouncing protection.

The keyboard uses a 1,000Hz polling rate, which should be more than sufficient for most gaming use cases. Only the most competitive would want or need faster, and in those cases, you should probably investigate Hall Effect or TMR keyboards, rather than the more typical mechanical like this one.

I ran this keyboard on wireless USB connection pretty intensely with RGB lighting on, and it lasted a full month before it got to 10% left. The battery life is pretty great, but I did experience occasional (but enough to be annoying) disconnects where I had to unplug and plug back in the USB dongle. I had no trouble when using it with a wired or Bluetooth connection, though.

Despite some quirks and imperfections, the EPOMAKER TH80 V2 Pro is a fantastic keyboard where it counts – the incredible typing feel. I’ve reviewed a ton of keyboards – well over a dozen. This is one of my favorites. The key caps are great, the typing feel is just right, and the sound is so lovely and thocky that it’s fun just to type on it. The value for your money is just off the charts. I do wish the wireless performance was more consistent, and I wish the shell was a bit more sturdy. Despite that, this keyboard is almost certainly staying on my desk. I don’t know how to recommend it more than that!