Wooting 60HE Plus

Verdict

The Wooting 60HE+ is a fantastic gaming keyboard. It’s well-built with an aluminium case and premium touches, while offering seriously powerful hall effect switches with rapid trigger and analog capabilities, as well as lots of software-based customisation. It may be quite expensive, but this is a true contender for the best gaming keyboard out there.

Introduction

The Wooting 60HE+ is the latest keyboard from the Dutch keyboard brand that arguably invented the whole analog switch thing almost ten years ago.

It is a brand I’ve wanted to cover ever since I first ventured into the world of writing about peripherals back in 2016, but until now, I haven’t had the chance.

Priced at £174.25/$174.99/€189.99 (prebuilt), or £254.75/$269.97/€292.47 (fully custom), the 60HE+ walks the line between enthusiast-level custom keyboards from similarly boutique brands or more pro-grade options such as the Razer Huntsman V3 Pro TKL and the SteelSeries Apex Pro Mini Wireless, and brings a blend of standout features including a 60 percent layout, aluminium case and hall-effect switches,

I’ve been testing the Wooting 60HE+ for the last couple of weeks to see if it’s one of the best gaming keyboards around.

Design

• Incredible build quality
• Choice of pre-built or custom models
• Smaller layout

The 60HE+, in the fully custom configuration I’ve got here, is a real beast of a keyboard. It comes with an aluminium case with a metallic finish and sandblasted, anodised coating. It’s a gorgeous-looking keyboard in the Lavender Purple colourway I have, although you can also get the case itself in black, grey, blue, white or pink if you’d like.

It weighs in at 970g overall, which is quite hefty for such a small keyboard, and it makes the 60HE+ feel a lot more of a premium product even against top-class performers from SteelSeries and Razer. As expected, this aluminium case also means the 60HE+ offers no deck flex of any kind – there are Keychron Q1 Pro levels of rigidity here.

I should explain at this juncture the difference between opting for a pre-built 60HE+ and the fully custom option I’ve got here.

The standard 60HE+ comes with a plastic case and the option for PBT keycaps in ISO layout, as well as plate-mounted stabilizers and a steel plate inside. The fully customised one comes with the hall effect PCB, as well as a polycarbonate plate, a silicone sandwich pad for sound dampening, as well as screw-in stabilizers. The keycaps and case are optional, although Wooting provides them at an additional cost, hence the higher price.

It’s also worth noting that with the fully customised version, it needs to be built, as opposed to coming pre-assembled. If you’ve worked on keyboards before, then this shouldn’t be too much of an issue, although it can be a little daunting for a complete novice.

The process is quite simple, however. Screw in the standoffs included in the case box into the case, before adding one of the pieces of case foam for better acoustics. Then you need to screw the PCB into the case, pop the Lekker switches inside, and add the keycaps. It’s a process which takes around half an hour if you’re a ham-fisted idiot like I am, otherwise you may be quicker.

Elsewhere, the 60HE+ also features other enthusiast-grade features such as textured doubleshot PBT keycaps, available in a choice of black or white. These feel excellent and come with clear shine-through legends that will stand the test of time. It goes a long way to justifying the 60HE+’s expense, although if you want to save a little, then Wooting also offers the keyboard with etched ABS plastic keycaps.

The 60 percent layout makes the 60HE+ quite the small form factor keyboard in line with the likes of the SteelSeries Apex Pro Mini Wireless and the newer Logitech G Pro X 60, with it sacrificing a lot of keys in favour of offering more desk real estate for the big, sweeping mouse movements adored by pro gamers.

You only get the standard alphanumeric keys in a conventional layout, as opposed to anything else. This means you are sacrificing the likes of arrow keys, a function row and a number pad here, and if you’re moving from a full-size choice down to a 60 percent, then there is an adjustment period of a couple of weeks.

You won’t find any additional features such as a volume roller or multimedia keys, although Wooting adds one interesting thing which is unique to them – a strap. The strap seems to have various uses, be it as a constant reminder you have a Wooting keyboard on your desk, or as a means of carrying the 60HE+ around with you. Whichever one it is, it’s a unique addition which looks excellent.

Otherwise, this keyboard has a very simple interface with a singular USB-C port for wired connectivity, while it also comes with a braided USB-C to USB-A cable which is yellow and black. That makes a change from the usual black cables found with all sorts of other keyboards up and down the price ladder.

Performance

• Supremely powerful switches
• Snappy inputs with rapid trigger and analog capabilities
• Fantastic acoustics

Wooting was actually the first brand to offer both analog switches (in the Wooting One in 2017) and rapid trigger functionality (in the Wooting Two Lekker Edition in 2019), so they’ve been in the business of these types of keyboards for a lot longer than mainstream brands have. As such, the 60HE+ arrives with high expectations.

The 60HE+ utilises Wooting’s Lekker45 switches, made in partnership with Gateron. These are the lighter of the two switches available, as the 60HE+ is also available with slightly heavier 60g Lekker 60 switches. Both are hall-effect options, and offer the benefit of smooth, linear actuation which is ideal for gaming, combined with the powers of rapid trigger and analog capabilities in one switch, much like the Razer Huntsman V3 Pro TKL does, except Razer’s are optical, as opposed to being hall-effect.

In testing, the Lekker 45 switches felt sublime with analog or rapid-trigger enabled, depending on the games I was playing. For the former, I tested it in racing games such as BeamNG Drive and Forza Horizon 5, and the 60HE+ worked as expected, with progressive inputs for throttle, brakes and steering.

The only trouble was that the 60HE+ didn’t want to be recognised initially as the default Racing Profile disables the WASD keys with controller inputs mapped to them, and to get it to work, I had to override a setting in software which prevented keys from being recognised. Once that had been changed, it worked without a hitch, as I powered my way through Mexico, or deliberately punted a pickup truck into a wall.

For Rapid Trigger, I used the keyboard’s basic Rapid Profile, which sets the actuation point to 0.4mm across all keys, and with a high sensitivity across all keys. In testing it in Counter-Strike 2 alongside an ultralight gaming mouse, the 60HE+ offered supremely smooth and snappy keys, and arguably offered the best switches I’ve used for gaming in quick draw situations. Third-party testing has also revealed Wooting’s customer to offer the lowest latency out of all of the rapid trigger keyboards available, making it a prime choice to use for competitive titles such as CS:2.

A 45g actuation force and linear travel also make the Lekker45 switches a decent option for day-to-day working, even if I soon reverted back to a tactile switch.

Acoustics here are excellent, with no rattle or ping, especially thanks to the silicone sandwich for the PCB, and the case foam inside. It is also worth noting that the 60HE+ is technically hot-swappable because switches can be swapped out without any need for soldering or desoldering, although you are highly limited with what switches can be put in place given that the 60HE+’s PCB does not support the traditional 3 or 5 pin switch mounting.

Software and Lighting

• Lightweight software
• Lots of controls for remapping and changing functions
• Vivid and consistent RGB lighting

The good times keep rolling for the 60HE+ into its software and lighting. The 60HE+ utilises Wooting’s lightweight Wootility software, which is compatible with Windows, macOS and Linux. All of its functions are laid out in a simple manner, with a tab on the left side for selecting profiles, be it preset ones, ones you’ve created yourself, or ones downloaded from Wooting’s Wootabase for various games.

Wootility also contains the ability to easily configure lighting in the Colour tab with plenty of preset options or on a per-key basis. The Performance Tab is where you set rapid trigger either across the entire keyboard or on individual keys. The rapid trigger programming also contains adjustable actuation points with a default of 0.4mm, although this can be configured as high as 0.1mm and as low as 4mm if you’d prefer.

Remapping keys is present in the Remap tab, where you can either do this on individual keys, or you can even change the key layout with certain presets to offer either a DVORAK or Workman layout, amongst others. There is a wide range of available functions, from letters to numbers and system functions such as opening a calculator app or an email client for instance.

The Advanced Keys tab offers some seriously powerful kit for remapping keys and binding them either to four different actions in a single key based on where it is on its travel with the Dynamic Keystroke function, or two different actions with the Mod Tap option. You can set a key to be a Toggle Key, whereby pressing it down toggles a certain action, although holding it down returns it to the original one.

Some presets, including the Racing preset, also offer the Gamepad Mapping function where you can map keys to controller inputs, which is switchable between a ‘Classic’ controller or an Xbox controller for convenience, while the final Gamepad Response tab allows you to fiddle around with the deadzones for each analog key by dragging a graph around, or by using one of the seven preset options.

The 60HE+’s lighting is also vibrant and shines through and around each key well, making for some of the cleanest and brightest RGB lighting I’ve come across in a while. What’s also quite clever here is that in some instances, the preset you have selected dictates how the key lighting will look.

For instance, the Racing mode lights up the WASD keys in a different colour to the rest of the keyboard, while the Rapid Profile switches all keys to blue. This is a feature pro gamers will feel at home with, given it provides one even colour as opposed to a full RGB spectrum, which can be distracting. That’s a thoughtful touch.

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