Hall effect switches are the most customizable and fastest you can currently get in a gaming keyboard. As such, they don’t usually come cheap. However, they’re fairly affordable to upgrade to today thanks to a deal on Corsair’s Vanguard Pro 96, which is cheaper than ever at Amazon and Best Buy, selling for $159.99 (originally $229.99). This keyboard lets you adjust the actuation distance of each key — requiring less or more force to register key presses.
Corsair Vanguard Pro 96
Where to Buy:
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$230$159.99 at Amazon -
$230$159.99 at Best Buy
I’m typing this on the Corsair Galleon 100 SD, the company’s new $349.99 full-size mechanical keyboard that has full Stream Deck integration and is coming out later this month. And, you know what? I can see some similarities between it and the Vanguard Pro 96, despite the underlying switch tech being different. The Vanguard has a rotary dial, an info-dense LCD screen, nice aluminum housing for the keyboard, plus a magnetic-attaching wrist rest that’s plush and looks sophisticated. It has six programmable macro keys along the leftmost edge, and you can customize its settings through Corsair’s web app. If you want customizable switches, the Vanguard is the better keyboard to buy.
Other Verge-approved deals to get your Tuesday started
- Perhaps you already know you’re going to dive into Resident Evil Requiem on launch day. If that’s you, and you’re a PC gamer, the Steam version is 18 percent off to preorder through Fanatical, a code seller that I’ve used numerous times without issue. The game will launch for $69.99, but you can nab a digital key to add to your Steam library for $57.39. Requiem is the next mainline entry in the franchise, giving players the ability to toggle between first-person and third-person perspective at will. It will feature a new character, Grace, although Leon S. Kennedy makes his return to investigate what’s happening in Racoon City 30 years after the events of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis.
- Best Buy has marked down the 13.8-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop with a Snapdragon X Plus processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD for the day. The “Dune” golden edition is $849.99 (originally $1,199.99), which isn’t its lowest-ever price. That was around $750 just ahead of Black Friday last year. Still, it’s not a bad deal for a fast, good-looking Windows 11 laptop. Amazon is also honoring this price, although it’s unclear if it’s just for January 20th, as it is at Best Buy. We consider this model to be one of the best laptops you can buy thanks to its all-day battery life, not to mention surprisingly great performance in most apps — you might not notice you’re using an ARM-based processor, until you need to emulate apps, which can tank battery life and performance compared to those that run natively. Read our review.
- If you want to save on Nintendo Switch 2 games, you probably already know that the console’s best, newest games are rarely discounted. That’s why, whenever I have a game in mind that I want to buy, I get on Newegg to see if it’s selling Nintendo eShop gift cards for less than MSRP. Turns out, right now you can get $100 worth of eShop store credit for $88. Even if you don’t want games, the credit can be used at the Nintendo Store on hardware and accessories.
