What are Hall Effect Switches?
Introduction
If you’ve been reading up on gaming keyboards, you’ll probably have heard of Hall Effect switches. Often simply referred to as ‘HE switches,’ these are among the most popular analog keyboard switches on the market right now. In this article, we’ll explain how Hall Effect switches work and why they’re better than traditional mechanical switches for gaming.
What Are Hall Effect Switches?
Keyboards need to know when a user is pressing certain buttons. There are multiple ways to achieve this (you can read our in-depth article on keyboard switches if you want to learn more) but for most applications, a simple 1/0 switch is enough. If you’re typing away in the office, for example, your keyboard just needs to know whether you pressed a key or not. It doesn’t need to know precisely how deep you’ve pressed that key. It’s either pressed (1) or not (0).
Hall Effect switches are a type of analog switch, and they can tell precisely how deep a certain key is being pressed. To achieve this, the switches underneath each individual key have a permanent magnet inside of them as well as a Hall Effect sensor.
To put it very simply: the Hall Effect (there’s an entire Wikipedia article on it too) happens when electricity flows through a material, and a magnet nearby pushes the electricity to one side. This change in voltage can be measured by a sensor, and it allows for incredibly precise measurements of movement.
Hall Effect sensors aren’t new. They have been used in engineering for a long time, and at the end of the 2010s they made their way into gaming keyboards.
In Short
A Hall Effect switch uses magnets in order to very precisely determine how far a switch has been pressed. A Hall Effect switch can detect movement across almost the entire range of motion for said switch. Traditional mechanical or rubber dome switches cannot: they have 1 set actuation point, and are either ‘on’ or ‘off’.
Advantages of Hall Effect Switches
If you’re having trouble visualizing the difference between an HE switch and a regular switch, consider a modern console controller. The D-Pad represents a traditional switch, and the analog stick represents a Hall Effect switch.
If you press the D-Pad, your character moves at 100% speed, and if you let go, it stops. There’s no in between. However, if you use the analog stick, you can adjust the movement speed of your character based on how far you’ve moved the stick.
Due to their incredible sensitivity and ability to detect motion across the entire switch travel distance, Hall Effect switches have a lot of advantages over traditional keyboard switches.
Responsiveness
For gamers, the most obvious advantage lies in the responsiveness of the switches. With Hall Effect switches, you can (theoretically; manufacturers have to implement this in their software of course) customize the actuation point of each individual switch. This lets you set your movement keys to be very sensitive, while keys such as reload could require a deeper press.
Additionally, manufacturers came up with technologies such as Rapid Trigger to fully utilize the possibilities that these switches offer. Rapid Trigger resets the actuation point of a switch the moment you let go of the switch. This means that you don’t need to wait for the switch to travel past a certain reset point, making things like movement in games a lot more intuitive and responsive.
Precisely how ‘good’ an HE keyboard is depends on the manufacturer of course, but there’s no denying that an HE switch is a lot better for gaming than a traditional mechanical switch.
Functionality
Aside from the responsiveness in games, HE switches also offer a great amount of additional functionality. An obvious example: racing games. On a traditional keyboard, these are borderline impossible to play since you can’t finely adjust the throttle or steering angle. You’re either full throttle (switch pressed) or there’s no throttle at all (switch not pressed). Hall Effect switches allow you to use them like the triggers on controllers, giving you a lot more control over your car.
Precisely which extra features are available depends on the manufacturer of the board, but in theory the possibilities are almost endless. For instance, pretty much all HE keyboards allow you to bind 2 actions to 1 key. This is not only handy for gaming: you can set your keyboard so that pressing a key lightly copies, and pressing it fully pastes, for example.
We can go on and on here, but the essence is this: HE switches offer a lot more functionality than traditional switches.
Durability and Smoothness
Due to the fact that there aren’t a lot of parts that come into contact with each other, HE switches are more durable than traditional mechanical switches. Truth be told, it takes an awful lot of heavy use to wear out a traditional mechanical switch, but it’s always nice to have that added peace of mind.
Additionally, HE switches can also feel smoother due to the fact that there are fewer parts that come into contact with each other and can cause friction. This heavily depends on the switch though, and there are plenty of very smooth mechanical switches too.
Conclusion
For gaming, there is no doubt that Hall Effect switches are superior to mechanical switches. They are more responsive, offer more functionality, and can quite simply make you play better. As an added bonus, they are also more durable than mech switches.
For productivity, it gets a little muddier. There are hundreds of options if you’re going with a purely mechanical build, with tons of boutique options made for a great sound and feel. Hence, if you don’t care about the gaming performance of your keyboard and you’re more focused on sound and feel, we’d still recommend a mechanical switch.
