be quiet! has made quite the splash with its flagship Dark Mount gaming keyboard, showing it means business in an already cluttered peripheral space. Thankfully, the brand is acutely aware that not everyone wants to spend over £200 on a transformer, paving the way for Light Mount to ease the barrier to entry.
Light Mount is not merely a budget version of its bigger brother. Instead, it’s a reimagining of the same DNA, optimised for those who prefer a cleaner setup without sacrificing essentials. It’s a keyboard designed to turn heads with its stunning illumination while maintaining the subdued acoustics that be quiet! fans expect.
be quiet! Light Mount
£170 / $170
Pros
- Five macro keys
- Near-silent acoustics
- Pre-lubed switches
- Comfortable memory foam rest
- Intuitive software
Cons
- ABS plastic build
- A touch pricy
Club386 may earn an affiliate commission when you purchase products through links on our site.
How we test and review products.
Having spent weeks hammering away on this board across work and play, it’s clear that the Light Mount isn’t just a promising first attempt – it’s a formidable contender in the crowded mechanical keyboard market.
Design and features
be quiet! Light Mount lives up to its name, presenting a brighter take on the Mount keyboard blueprint while preserving an air of premium sophistication. There are plenty of similarities to its Dark Mount sibling, including the brushed aluminium top plate and ABS plastic housing underneath, but it keeps a strict full-sized form factor for those who need all 105 keys (and then some).
Visually, the Light Mount is a feast for the eyes. A front-facing light bar along the top edge pairs nicely with the arched ARGB diffuser built into each switch, delivering bright and even per-key illumination without overwhelming the senses. The finish is vibrant, but carefully controlled, making it an attractive centrepiece for any setup.
While it lacks Dark Mount’s modular media dock and detachable numpad, Light Mount introduces an aluminium 3D Media Wheel and five macro or multimedia keys along the left-hand side that do a similar job. These additions offer quick access to key functions while gaming or working, without the need for modular attachments.
The build remains impressively refined. Folding feet offer three different angled positions to suit various ergonomics, allowing you to tailor the keyboard’s height and tilt it to your preference. A unified palm rest spans the entire 461mm board, designed for optimal wrist support over long typing sessions.
Crucially, quietness remains a cornerstone. Like its sibling, the Light Mount employs a triple-layer dampening system: a foam layer between the top plate and PCB, another beneath the PCB, and a thick silicone cushion in the base. High-quality PBT double-shot keycaps with translucent legends top off the experience, ensuring long-lasting durability and crisp, vibrant illumination.
Available in both standard ISO and ANSI layouts, Light Mount caters to a global audience, ensuring no one is left wanting.
Switches
be quiet! storms into the mechanical keyboard scene with its own signature switches. Silent Linear and Silent Tactile models are tuned for a whisper-quiet, satisfyingly muted feel. You’re locked into these options at checkout, but thanks to hot-swappable sockets, swapping in your own five-pin switches later is effortless.
Black Silent Tactile switches, which feature in my be quiet! Dark Mount review, bring a moderately weighty feel at 55g actuation. Walking a fine line, they add just enough resistance to be ideal for everyday use, curbing the potential of accidental presses and offering a more deliberate, confident typing rhythm.
The orange Silent Linear set we see here takes a much lighter approach with 45g of force, focusing more on speed without feeling insubstantial. Being incredibly nimble, these switches lend themselves particularly well to high-tempo gaming where every millisecond counts, avoiding the mushiness that plagues cheaper designs.
Regardless of which you select, each carry the same whisper-quiet ethos and come entirely pre-lubed as per be quiet!’s specifications. The brand remains hush on who its manufacturing partner is, but owns every detail of the design, meaning you won’t find these switches elsewhere.
Performance
Across both productivity and gaming, Light Mount delivers impressive performance. Key stabilisation is rock-solid, thanks to generous factory lubrication and smart engineering, using familiar Cherry-style stabilisers. There’s no distracting rattle or inconsistency, even on larger keys like the spacebar or shift.
Typing feels just as luxurious as its counterpart, although noise profile is a touch louder to my ear. It’s still not quite as thocky as metal counterparts, such as Glorious GMMK 3 Pro, but there’s a much more distinct deep clack than Silent Tactile switches offer inside Dark Mount.
N-key rollover and a 1,000Hz polling rate come as standard, ensuring that even in frantic gaming sessions, no keypress goes unregistered. In titles like Rainbow Six Siege, Destiny 2, and Apex Legends, Light Mount holds its own flawlessly, providing fast, responsive input without a hint of delay.
Typing comfort is exceptional, aided by the ergonomic full-size palm rest that strikes a great balance between firmness and softness. Long writing sessions feel almost effortless, with the dampened acoustics encouraging a natural, fatigue-free rhythm.
At just 0.91kg, it’s a little light for my liking but this makes it a touch more portable if you have space for a full-sized keyboard in your bag. Besides, it doesn’t shift along the desk quite as easily as Dark Mount does. This is thanks to its adjustable folding feet pulling double duty, giving great traction as well as making it easy to elevate to a comfortable angle.
Software
Mountain’s Achilles’ heel was always its Base Camp software – sluggish at best, buggy and frustrating at worst. Simple tasks became chores, and setting up even basic functions often felt like wading through treacle. be quiet! clearly took notes, aiming to dodge those pitfalls with the launch of IO Center.
I’m not a particular fan of the name, as it falls into the trap of branding for the sake of branding. Since it doesn’t show when typing be quiet! into the Windows search bar, I’m left with yet another app I need to remember in order to access it, which is less than ideal. You can always pin it to your start menu, taskbar, or desktop, but each becomes increasingly cluttered as companies insist on creating sub-brands and detached ecosystems I could do without.
Don’t worry, though, that’s where my griping ends. IO Center is one heck of a debut app, presenting an intuitive piece of software that’s as easy to use as it is responsive. Of course, no software is ever truly finished, but IO Center makes a strong first impression being quick, powerful, and intuitive enough to get out of your way.
Lighting controls are particularly strong. Six presets are on offer – static, colour wave, tornado, breathing, reactive, and matrix – each highly customisable. You can tweak colour palettes, animation direction, brightness, and speed. You can even stack up to seven layers on top of one another to blend presets into one disco show across the same top-loaded RGB bar.
For those chasing ecosystem-wide lighting, there’s Microsoft Dynamic Lighting (MSDL) support. Activating it lets Windows take over all RGB across compatible devices until you turn it off and control reverts back to IO Center.
Customising key functions is refreshingly straightforward. Any key can be remapped or disabled, and you can easily stack extra commands onto the FN layer for double the possibilities. Whether you stick to a few clever shortcuts or go all-in with hundreds of combos, the flexibility is there if you want it.
Right now, IO Center is built for Windows, but be quiet! hasn’t left others out in the cold. A fully-featured web app brings the same deep customisation to Mac and Linux users, allowing you to edit onboard profiles straight from your browser – no extra software needed. Currently, it’s getting the exact same TLC as the core app to polish the experience.
Conclusion
be quiet! Light Mount is a confident and compelling entry into the world of mechanical keyboards. It smartly carves its own niche: a full-size board that dazzles with its design, delights with its acoustics, and delivers impeccable performance.
By stripping back some of the more complex modularity of Dark Mount while retaining the essentials, Light Mount offers a more accessible path into be quiet!’s ecosystem without compromising quality. It’s an excellent choice for gamers, writers, and creatives who want a keyboard that performs as well as it looks, and who crave peace and quiet as much as responsiveness.
I have some reservations about the price, as it’s just £20 away from wireless and Hall Effect alternatives, but it still packs a lot of value for a full-sized keyboard. Light Mount should be high on your list of considerations, and if nothing else, should have you excited to see what be quiet! is cooking up for its second generation.
