The keyboard market is vast, so start your search with our picks outlined up top of the best keyboards available. In the market for a mouse, too? Check out our top mouse picks, as well as our favorite mice for gaming and our top wireless mouse picks.

While all keyboards offer the necessary QWERTY layout of keys for everyday typing, sometimes typing isn't your main concern. Gaming keyboards are designed for competitive use and emphasize things office keyboards don't.

Gaming boards are equipped for maximum specialization and control, optimized for specific styles of gameplay, and built to exacting standards of responsiveness and durability. They also appeal to the gaming aesthetic with designs that impress and intimidate with pulsing backlighting and dramatic RGB color schemes.

Premium gaming models almost exclusively use high-grade mechanical key switches and sculpted keycaps, and offer scads of customizable features such as programmable macro keys, textured WASD keys, and swappable keycaps. Others let you tweak the color and intensity of the backlighting to make finding certain keys faster and personalize the look of your keyboard. Cheaper boards usually have just one color of backlight, but as you move upmarket you find programmable RGB lighting customizable by zone or even by individual key (so-called "per-key RGB").

Anti-ghosting is an essential feature, allowing a keyboard to register multiple keystrokes hit at the same time—a feat not all standard keyboards can perform. Other extras include USB pass-through ports or audio connections that simplify the process of connecting peripherals or headphones to a desktop PC whose ports may be inconvenient to reach under a desk.

Finally, any gaming keyboard worthy of the name comes with dedicated software and discrete keys for triggering macro commands, letting you save and play back complex strings of commands with a single keypress. The number of macro commands you can save, and the ease with which you can create them, varies from one model to the next; our reviews are handy for summaries of this kind of software. These aren't the sorts of customization features that everyone will use day to day, but for players who invest time and money into gaming, these keyboards offer a competitive edge. Again, check out our guide to gaming keyboards for more on gaming software.

Most keyboard enthusiasts, however, won't have much to say for either of the two above styles. Instead, they'll be singing the praises of mechanical keyboards.

The switches used in these are more intricate, with a spring-loaded sliding keypost beneath each key. Lots of variations are available (see our guide to choosing among mechanical switches), each tweaked to provide a slightly different feel or sound, but, generally speaking, mechanical switches provide the best tactile feedback, and many emit the "clickety-clack" sound long associated with typing. Their sturdy switch mechanisms and springs are significantly longer-lasting, too. Mechanical switches can also register keystrokes with a much shorter amount of travel, making them ideal for touch typists.

The downside to mechanical switches? They usually require more vertical space than silicone-dome or scissor switches, which means mechanical keyboards tend to be thicker. You won't often find them on shallower, low-profile keyboards. That might change now that venerable switch maker Cherry AG has introduced low-profile mechanical switches (so have some of its competitors), but the vast majority of mechanicals are relatively chunky.  

In the past, most mainstream mechanical keyboards made use of Cherry MX switches offered in Blue, Red, Black, and Brown varieties. (Each "color" has a slightly different click feel, acoustic aspect, and pressure requirement; see our roundup of the best mechanical keyboards for a lot more detail.) Cherry switches are still extremely popular, but you'll also see house-brand mechanical switches from leading keyboard makers such as Logitech and Razer, as well as "imitation Cherry" switches using the same color schemes from makers such as Kaihua.