Gigabyte GK-K6800 Keyboard Review

Up Close and Personal

The very first thing which jumps out at you when you look at this keyboard is how elegant it is. Its design never crosses over into gaudy or garish territory while keeping its color scheme simple. In a nut shell the finish is a high gloss gray and black which accentuates the subtle curves of Gigabyte's GK-K6800. We are serious when we say that there are no sharp edges anywhere…even the keys themselves have rounded corners.


The overall size is large yet not so big that most will have to worry about finding space on their desk for it. Gigabyte even found a way to include a small wrist / palm rest that does not feel like an after thought or add-on.

While this is not a mechanical keyboard, it does have a "nostalgic" look to it which harkened us back to our ancient IBM one as there is a full size enter key and the space bar is nicely oversized for easier thumb strikes. Please don’t get us wrong this is a multimedia keyboard and not an ancient 101 keyboard and this little guy is crammed with extras.


The only thing we don’t like about the layout concerns the function keys, the Escape key and the other keys on the upper most row. To put it bluntly these keys are just too small and while most people will not be using these as much as the rest, our fat fingers did occasionally mash two of them when we were going full out at 50+ words per minute. Nothing breaks your stride and jars you out of your groove faster than a mishit on a function key. The perfectly oversized and shaped space bar does help make up for this but really Gigabyte….WHY!? It's not like there was a lack of room since there is loads of wasted space above this tiny row of half pint keys.


On the positive side, the added multimedia keys are nicely molded into the side curves of the keyboard and there is almost no way you can accidentally strike one while typing. On the left side you have five keys which are Internet related. At the top of this row of keys is the ubiquitous “Home” key which will open up your default browser and load the page which you have designated as such. Below this key is the “Favorites” tab which of course opens up your favorites tab in IE and the bookmarks sidebar in FireFox.

Below the favorites key is the “Refresh” key which of course reloads the page your are viewing. Below this is the forward and back keys which replicate the forward and back buttons and most mice out there. Of course if your mouse is a basic 2 button affair while these two keys may get a lot more work out than they normally would. All in all, it’s a basic, well-placed set of Internet control keys.