Nuphy has been an up-and-coming brand in the mechanical keyboard world for the last several years, but it’s only recently that the company has begun to court gamers. The Nuphy Field75 HE is its latest offering, adopting the retro-futuristic design of the original Field75 and adding Hall Effect switches, a suite of dedicated gaming features, and online programmability.
Of all the “enthusiast” mechanical gaming keyboards that have been released in the last year, this is easily the most clearly designed around gamers with its dedicated macro buttons and magnetic switches, but it also looks like something you might pull out of the Fallout universe. It comes at a premium ($170 to $195 depending on your choice of switch), and still has some areas for improvement, but there’s nothing else out there quite like it when it comes to great gaming keyboards.
Nuphy Field75 HE – Design and Features
These days, gaming keyboards tend to blend together. New models release all the time and most tend to look like normal keyboards with RGB and maybe an extra feature or two, like Razer’s multi-function dial or Steelseries’s OLED screen. It has been quite a while since a well-known brand released something that really broke the mold and had personality.
The Field75 HE does exactly that. It comes with a retro-futuristic aesthetic, blending dials with cogwheels, toggle switches with bright RGB, bright orange with industrial gray and white. It also has an industrial-looking metal carry handle and iconography on its macro buttons would be right at home in Starfield.
It comes with eight macro keys. Four are positioned on the left and four more are just below the spacebar. These aren’t full-height keys and don’t have the same switches underneath. Instead, they feel closer to mouse buttons and have a satisfying click that contrasts with the smooth, linear presses of every other key on the board. There’s a cherry lip along the bottom, too, making the spacebar macro buttons easier to press with your thumbs.
The keyboard uses a 75% layout, which is essentially a more compact version of a TKL, but offers most of the functionality. There are dedicated arrow buttons, a full function row that’s even extended by two buttons, and four navigation buttons along the right. The vibe is like no other. It’s the kind of keyboard that would be right at home on a desk in the Institute from Fallout 4, but it’s as functional as it is unique.
The Field75 HE definitely earns attention with its appearance, but it has substance to back up its style. It’s well-made and works great as a keyboard for gaming and typing alike, but it’s the little details and fun bits of tactility that stood out to me. It’s like Nuphy studied a list of fidget toys and worked in as many elements as it could without going full “fidget spinner.” The clicks of the keys are different from the clicks of the macro keys. The toggle switch has a satisfying snap and the cogwheel and the aluminum volume roller have their own distinct clicky sounds and feels. This doesn’t necessarily impact performance, of course, but the differences are in tactility and feel distinct as to not be susceptible to errant inputs. It’s a small thing but it still makes the keyboard more fun to engage with.
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Everything has a practical purpose, too. The macro buttons can all be remapped but default to media controls and shortcuts, and the cogwheel controls lighting. The toggle switch swaps between its three onboard memory profiles, so you can have unique settings for Windows, Mac, and Gaming (or just lots of keysets for different purposes). The volume wheel stands out not because of what it does (control, well, volume), but because of its smart positioning right along the edge of the keyboard and its knurled aluminum finish which makes it easy to use.
To be clear, they have a practical purpose but Nuphy definitely added these elements for look and feel and not necessarily because they’re better than something simpler like a shortcut key. Do we need a cogwheel to turn brightness up and down? Of course not, and it’s both a bit small and too close to the Escape to comfortably turn it a full rotation, but at least they have a purpose and aren’t just plastic decorations.
Nuphy has a good reputation for delivering keyboards made of high-quality parts and that feel great to use. The Field75 HE is no exception. It uses Magnetic Jade switches, which are well known for being some of the best Hall Effect switches you can buy right now. They are exceptionally smooth thanks to an excellent pre-lubing process to remove friction between the housing and the slider. There are also no mechanical components that create extra friction. This quality also makes the switches much more durable, and Nuphy rates them for 100 million keypresses each.
Nuphy also sells the keyboard with Magnetic White switches, which are very similar, but use a dual rail structure for extra stability. While the company points out the high-quality sound of the Magnetic Jades, it doesn’t do the same with the Whites, and that’s because they don’t offer the same crisp and poppy sound. What they do offer, however, is a greater travel distance – a full range of 4.0mm while the Magnetic Jades are 3.3mm (part of their sound-enhancing design limits their total travel distance).
No matter which you choose, the sensors on the keyboard are high-fidelity and allow you to adjust the actuation point in .02mm increments. You can also have custom dead zones both at the top and bottom of the keypress to reduce the likelihood of mistaken keystrokes. They also allow you to utilize common features like Rapid Trigger (RT) and Dynamic Keystrokes (DKS), in addition to being completely remappable across three memory profiles each containing multiple layers that can be individually mapped for games and applications.
As a competitive keyboard, The Field75 HE comes equipped with an 8,000Hz polling rate (reporting its position to the computer 8,000 times each second). This is coupled with a 2,500Hz scan rate (internal polling) to provide ultra-rapid response time. While it’s debatable whether an 8,000Hz polling rate will even be perceptible (that’s 0.125ms), when paired with Rapid Trigger it leaves little room to doubt that you’re getting one of the fastest gaming experiences available today. That said, the Wooting 80HE is still better on the spec sheet, pulling 8,000Hz rates for both polling and scanning.
The build quality is excellent – even though the chassis is made entirely of plastic, the keyboard has a reassuring heft to it. It uses a metal plate under the switches to lock them in place and make sure each keystroke stays accurate. Beneath that are multiple layers of sound dampening which help to quiet each keystroke and make it more pleasant to listen to over extended periods.
The keycaps are also very good and are made of doubleshot PBT plastic. This means that the legends are able to be exceptionally crisp and that it will be impossible for them to chip or fade out over time, as they are made from a whole separate piece of plastic. PBT is also denser than the ABS plastic typically used for keycaps which helps it avoid picking up finger oils and becoming shiny over long periods of time. This helps to keep the keyboard looking good long after traditional gaming keyboards begin to look grimy.
Nuphy Field75 HE – Software
Nuphy uses an online configurator called Nuphy.io for all of its remapping, macros, lighting controls, and magnetic features. It’s impressive how feature-rich and polished it is for existing entirely on a web browser: you can do just about everything downloadable software suites can, including custom lighting, Rapid Trigger, and multi-action keys via Dynamic Keystrokes (DKS). Any changes you make are saved onto the keyboard automatically, so you don’t need to worry about reloading the site on every machine you use it on.
Like most gaming keyboards, remapping keys is easy. You can assign up to four layers of keymaps for each of its three built in profiles, allowing you to have up to nine separate layouts to choose from at any given time (assuming you want to keep the standard keys available on every profile; it’s 12 otherwise). These default to Windows, Mac, and Gaming settings but they’re all fully customizable to everything from standard keys and media controls to mouse control through keyboard.
Where things are a bit limited is with Windows shortcuts and the ability to launch applications with the press of a button. Downloadable suites, like Logitech G Hub and Razer Synapse, make this very easy and it’s just not possible here without keystroking your way through a convoluted macro.
The Hall Effect features are well laid out and, for the most part, easy to wrap your head around. Just be aware that some of them, like multi-action keys (DKS), require you to right click on the key you want to remap. I recommend you do, however, because there are a couple of other neat features tucked behind this context menu, like Hyper Key, which allows you to automatically send an action as soon as you release a key. These functions are easy to set up but are easy to miss and could’ve been shown more clearly in the menu.
Nuphy Field75 HE – Performance
The Nuphy Field75 HE is a high-performance keyboard in every respect. I was able to spend a good two weeks with it as my daily driver and enjoyed it for everything from typing out articles to playing Battlefield and Call of Duty competitively. It’s not only a solid gaming keyboard, however: it’s a solid everything keyboard. Most people will probably buy it for gaming, but in my opinion, it’s worth considering even if you spend most of your time getting work done and only play games casually.
The biggest reason for this is that Nuphy has tuned the keyboard to offer an exceptionally good typing experience, which translates to a gaming experience that also feels much better than gaining keyboards typically offer. The switches are excellent and have the kind of smooth linearity that magnetic input needs in order to shine. It’s enough to make you wish that games like Asseto Corsa accepted analog input from normal keyboards and not just controllers and sim rigs.
The macro keys are also very useful. The ones on the left are nice but Nuphy is onto something with its thumb buttons. The angled cherry lip and low-profile, easy-actuation design of the buttons make them easy to use in-game with either hand. Using the software, you can record macros or keymaps just like downloadable software suites, and the position of the buttons makes them feel more readily available and make me more likely to actually use them.
Like I mentioned in the section above, however, I really wish there were more Windows shortcuts and programmable features for these buttons built into the Nuphy.io software. It’s an impressive suite, but it would have been nice to launch Chrome or Photoshop or OBS straight from those keys, for example.
What you don’t get here is a wireless option and that’s disappointing. It’s not at all unusual since very few Hall Effect keyboards are available with wireless connectivity and 8,000Hz polling rates. Still, that would be a killer feature here, especially with the futuristic design it offers.
