Glorious GMMK 2 Gaming Keyboard Base - Full Size Barebones Kit- Hot Swappable Black Mechanical Keyboard - Modular, Wired, RGB Backlit,- PC Setup Accessories - 96%, Black

This board is great I have zero complaints. It can support 5 pin switches, and these are north side facing leds. If you already know what switches you are going to put in this board you cant beat the price. You will want to lubricate and tune the stabilizers, or just replace them altogether. To me the stock didn't sound/feel great stock. Aside from the stabilizers the board sounds great out of the box. The unit feels very solid, and the build quality is awesome. The software misses the mark completely. Glorious Core would not load at all. Normal troubleshooting yielded no results. Clean boot/compatibility modes/admin mode/uninstall/reinstall nothing really worked. Personally I would ditch the Glorious Core software and use QMK. I think its worth the time investment in learning how to use QMK with your GMMK2. If your Glorious Core experience was anything like mine it may be a lot less frustrating.

Great keyboard. Overall amazing quality. +Price, This keyboard is a great price for what you get. It is the cheapest barebones 1800/96% keyboard. +Quality, Surprisingly very high quality. For the price I wasn't expecting something quiet this nice. No complaints. +Software, The glorious core software is great. Allows you to program macros, change led colors, remap keys. Very useful. +Support, Glorious has some of the best support around. some cons - screw in stabilizers don't seem to fit without modification, Even the gsv2 from glorious. I tried with 2 different gmmk 2 pros. Both had the same issue. Random stabilizers are stuck no matter what I did. I think the top frame interferes with how the stabilizer lines up making it bind and get stuck bottomed out. -LED colors are slightly off. The sidelight led won't display yellow. It has a very obvious green tint. My gmmk pro does not have this issue. Overall I really like this keyboard. Was easy to build/work on and came out great when finished.

Overall, this is a good barebones keyboard for the price. You get a lot of customization via the software which is neat. Build quality doesn't feel the most premium but definitely not bad either. My biggest problem I have is when I updated the firmware to version 0009 it completed bricked the RGB and would not light up or respond on the software, the way I fixed it was FN + ESC then F1 + F3 + F5 (Hold for 10 Seconds.) Everything worked fine after doing the factory reset but I get some occasional flickering on the side RGB light that I did not have before updating the firmware. If you can get this keyboard on sale, I would recommend it, just don't update the software and save your self the headache.

Great keyboard base if you’re looking to choose your own switches and caps . The software is really nice ,the overall feel and weight of the keyboard assembled is very nice

UPDATE 1/2025: They now have their Core platform available for Macs. It is fairly janky and took multiple installs, forced opens, circumventing Apple's malware "protection", restarts, and applying changes, but.... I HAVE CUSTOM COLORS AND PATTERNS NOW. Definitely will buy from Glorious again in the future. --- Super quality build. Gorgeous. Amazing. Everything is great. Except... MACS! The software to fully customize the colors for this IS NOT AVAILABLE FOR MACS. I'm fine with keepin' the colors basic but honestly it really sucked to buy this and build it only to realize that after. I would've purchased the competing brand I was looking at because their software is Mac OS compatible. I didn't test both beforehand and that was my mistake.

second faulty board delivered in a row. i am not ordering this again and I will not recommend this to anyone to buy. 98% chance that some of the switch connectors are not lined up properly which makes the key effectively dead. i included a photo of what I am talking about. look at the A and X key. pretty sure I received someone’s board that they returned and they didn’t even bother to check it. very bad look. buy something else

Love everything about this bare bone keyboard! You can download a software to control the profiles and rgb settings, but you can also use kb shortcuts with the Fn key to do this (I saw this on a YT video). It’s my first time building my own kb so there’s a lot more to uncover in this niche, and I’m here for it. I will be taking it apart to mod though, so it’s nice that it comes wrapped in PE foam already. :) Also, there’s definitely some weight to it which overall, does give it a more quality-like feel.