My favorite compact enthusiast gaming keyboard—and the one I use every single day—is a Prime Day bargain

Mountain Everest 60 | Mechanical | 60% | RGB LED backlight | Hot-swappable switches | $139.99 $59.99 at Newegg (save $80)
This is the keyboard I use each and every day. It's a compact beauty, that feels great to the typing touch, but one that can also form the base for all your enthusiast keeb desires. It's got a hot-swappable switch base, silicone and foam dampening, solid stabilizers, RGB, PBT keycaps, and pre-lubed switches, too.

Price check: Mountain $79.99 | Amazon $67.99

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There's a lot to love about this wee gaming keyboard, despite the fact that I really, really don't like normal 60% keyboards. That's something I kicked off my review of the Mountain Everest 60 with when I checked it out way back in the mists of time (April 2022), but that's because all I'd tried up to then were missing cursor keys and that's a damnable pain in the posterior. I make far too many errors when I'm typing not to be able to jump around the page.

Thankfully the diminutive Everest 60 frame has space for full-size cursor keys, and the relationship grew from there. I'm a bit of an enthusiast keyboard nerd and was prepared to be pulling out the pre-lubed Mountain switches in favor of my own Halo True switches... until I started typing. 

The type feel of the Everest 60 and its supplied switches is fantastic. The dampening foam and silicone layers make it both sound and feel great, and the overall build quality is excellent. My two little boys have spent an age bashing away at both the main board and the detachable numpad, and they've suffered not a scratch.

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The detachable numpad exemplifies the utility of the Everest 60, because as well as being a board that will let you use your pick of mechanical switches, with support for both 3- and 5-pin connections, Mountain's store also offers accessories. The most useful being the magnetically attached numpad, which is likewise hot-swappable.

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And it lets me attach it to either side of my board, too. When I'm slamming through benchmarking spreadsheets, having my right hand on my mouse and my left on the numpad makes far more sense to me. Quite why numpads are traditionally on the right I don't know, but from now on I will always be a left numpad stan.

That is an extra cost on top of the base price of the Everest 60, as are the different colored PBT key caps you can purchase, too. But it shows that this is a keyboard that can evolve as your enthusiast keyboard obsession does.

The only downside—and was it ever thus—is the software for the keyboard is pretty rubbish. If all you want to do is fire and forget the RGB lighting, then that doesn't really matter, though.