My Thoughts

The KBO-5000 is a 80% split staggered board by Keebio. It comes mostly pre-assembled in that all the diodes and what not are pre-soldered. You’re left with stabilizers, switches and caps. The board itself comes pre-installed with QMK/VIA.

Unlike some more recent Keebio boards, the KBO-5000 is designed for soldered switches. It is possible to use Mil-Max sockets which I did for my build. It’s fiddly as the switch sockets are just barely big enough for Mil-Max but, in the end, it works just fine.

It is not possible, however, to just Mil-Max every socket on the board and figure out your preferred layout later. The amount of choice on the bottom row is madness and it causes problems for yolo’ing the sockets. Many positions will interfere with the stabilizers or neighboring switches. So, before you sit down to solder on the Mil-Max sockets, take a close look at the documentation and plan your layout.

One weird thing is that one of the layout options calls for the spacebars to be 3U. It is almost impossible to find 3U stabilizer wire and most cap packs don’t come with 3U space bars. The board does support a relatively standard 2.75U spacebar which is shown in my pictures. With the sizes I chose for the other bottom row keys, the PCB shows through a bit. If that bothers you, plan that bottom row better than I did.

As I always say, I do really like the choice of usb-c to connect the halves.

All in all, the board is a solid standard Keebio product. It’s in daily use here at the house by a heavy typer and there have been no problems whatsoever.