Glorious Panda Switch Review

Even with COVID-19 seemingly putting the world (and especially the United States) at a stand-still over what feels like the majority of 2020, I can’t believe that September is already here. Part of my disbelief in that statement may be mildly delusion driven, as I’ve been sick with COVID-esque symptoms over the course of the last week and a half, which has made my presence in the community as well as my content output a bit slower than normal. For that delay and my weak-ass immune system, I want to apologize for not being quite up to normal pace and hope that I can make it up to you with the sheer length of this review.

As well, and certainly worth noting in lieu of the last paragraph where I have pointed out my slowed content output, earlier in the week in which this document was written, I’m proud to announce that I am beginning to release episodes of my new podcast that I am doing with a great keyboard friend, VogonPT, named ‘The Thocc’. Currently posting monthly (due to the aforementioned reasons on my end) on Spotify, iTunes, and Google, we are using this podcast to specifically interview lesser known important people within the mechanical keyboard scene to hopefully give a voice to some otherwise soft spoken individuals. While it won’t necessarily be switch related (save the episode we currently have posted where we interview me), it will be another means by which you all can interact with me and take in some of the content I put out since not everyone is a fan of reading longform reviews.

Figure 1: Green Eggs and Ham be damned, this is still by far my favorite book. — **Figure 1:** Green Eggs and Ham be damned, this is still by far my favorite book.

Switch Background

In order to preface the seemingly long and winding history of the Glorious Panda switch, I want to make aware to you all that some of the details surrounding the circumstances have still yet to be fully explained or understood. While it has felt like many months in the making for some, these switches were only teased onto the market barely a month before the writing of this document.

Under the guise of an unnamed “Glorious Switch”, a teaser for a new mechanical keyboard switch to be designed and sold by Glorious PC Gaming (GPCGR) was released on Twitter on July 30th of 2020. With little to no other information shared about the details of the switch, the final image of the initial teaser trailer featured a broken up and obscured image of what appeared to be a panda, which led to many people in the community to immediately ping this switch as “another Holy Panda clone”. It wasn’t until August 23rd that further information was shared by means of a less obscured and obfuscated announcement video – and the outrage began.

Figure 2: It was at this moment they knew: they fucked up. — **Figure 2:** It was at this moment they knew: they fucked up.

In their August 23rd Twitter announcement, GPCGR announced their new ‘Glorious Holy Panda Switches’ to be released in September of 2020. Subsequent announcements on the following day released a flurry of other information including price, pre-order date of release, and even a video following their travel through the final stages of the assembly line. While all of these points are important in the historical context of the switch, it is at this point that it should be made aware that the community was already on edge surrounding the existence of another “Holy Panda” switch controversy.

Earlier in 2020, around the start of February, another massive scandal surrounding Holy Panda switches had begun in the form of Drop advertising a new run of their wildly successful Holy Panda prebuilt switches, but this time featuring an all-POM housing. While this initially sparked a wave of interest and many orders were filled for these switches, as the switches began to ship in early to mid-August, they were met with some backlash. Using burn tests comparable to other (supposedly) all POM switches, many individuals in the community came to the conclusion that the switch housings of the Holy Pandas being sold by Drop were in fact not made of 100% POM as Drop had initially claimed. After a fairly short amount of time of pestering Drop, given that they are likely quite used to receiving upset complaints about nearly any product they put out, an official announcement was made on August 19th simply stating that they had labeled these Holy Pandas as 100% POM in a “miscommunication”, and that they were still actually made of the same Polycarbonate Tops/Nylon Bottoms as previous rounds. This official announcement being made on August 19th, after a few weeks of mounting suspicions had only made people in the community wary of the initial announcement by GPCGR, being made on August 23rd, as it appeared to be riding off the recent wave of drama surrounding the Drop “POM” Holy Pandas.

However, the wary feelings of the community at large surrounding the release of another “Holy Panda” switch quickly turned to much confusion and anger during the announcements made by GPCGR on August 24th. Going chronologically through the release time of the Tweets, the first Twitter announcement featured the name “Glorious Holy Pandas” with an unobscured image of a fierce looking Panda logo which GPCGR has gone on to use as the official ‘mascot’ of these switches. While this was a seemingly harmless announcement to make, many people began to consider the ramifications of GPCGR having “Holy Panda” switches, which would require them to have struck some sort of deal with Drop, who are the only people with access to the Halo True molds required to make Holy Pandas ‘holy’. Coming off of the recent debacle with the 100% POM Holy Panda switches only a few days prior, one can begin to understand where the unease within the community had started out at.

Moving on to the second Twitter posting of the day, which featured a quite interesting video following the final assembly line for the Glorious Holy Panda production, unease quickly turned into outrage. While the video itself was a rare look into the switch manufacturing process that few people within the hobby will ever normally get to see, people began to notice that the stems being put into these final switches featured a golden, orange-ish like color that was most certainly not a Halo True (or even Halo Clear stem) that are used to make Holy Pandas. Whereas the optics had initially lied with GPCGR cutting some sort of branding or merchandising deal with Drop, it became clear that the switches being made were not truly Holy Pandas, but rather a “clone” of them being marketed with the literal Holy Panda name. Even though the name, itself, would have caused outrage if done in such a fashion by any company, the edge of outrage was sharpened by the fact that many people within the mechanical keyboard community have (and continue to view) GPCGR as an “outside brand” regardless of their previous release of their Glorious Modular Mechaical Keyboards, or GMMKs for short.

And then to further complicate the swing of emotions surrounding the release of the switches, the third damning announcement made on August 24th by GPCGR was discussing the molds through which these switches were made. In this announcement, it was stated that the housings being used in the Glorious Holy Pandas were in fact “made with the original INVYR Panda housing tooling and our own version of the stem”. With no intent to step away from the flow of drama, it is important to understand that the existence of ‘original Invyr Panda tooling’ has long been a mystery within the community. A few years ago after the initial runs of Invyr Pandas were completed, it was rumored that the original molds were destroyed and/or damaged (depending on which legend you believe) rendering them incapable of being ‘revived’ for use in the future. However, since this rumor was announced, Drop and now GPCGR had claimed to have recovered the molds and that they weren’t actually damaged/destroyed at all. Keeping this still alive mystery in mind surrounding the existence of the Panda molds, this obviously stirred much debate within the community about the authenticity of this claim.

Figure 3: In fact, the Invyr molds were once even rumored to have been owned by Marcellus Wallace. — **Figure 3:** In fact, the Invyr molds were once even rumored to have been owned by Marcellus Wallace.

Once debates surrounding the authenticity of the mold claims either got stale or circular, further outrage and debate was then focused at the claim of GPCGR using “our own version of the stem”. As explained above, and what has been accepted by the community at large for some time now, what makes any Panda switch a “Holy Panda” is the inclusion of a Halo True or Halo Clear stem in the place of the original stock stem within the switch. Yet, here the community was presented with a stem that was clearly not a Halo True/Clear and this relatively “outside company” claiming that they had “Holy Panda” switches for sale. While no further clarification or evidence was ever provided to the claims made surrounding the molds, I am sorry to say for those of you with short attention spans that the drama only got worse from here on out.

Moving away from the Twitter updates from GPCGR, and uncovered within hours of the initial announcements on the 24th, details began to surface through public community channels of how GPCGR went about arriving at their design idea for Glorious Holy Pandas. Originating from the TopClack Discord server, mgsickler, who is the figurehead for Novelkeys, made damning statements about how GPCGR went about interacting with Kailh before finding the factory to make their final Glorious Holy Panda switch. According to these statements which can be found below, GPCGR went about asking Kailh, who has a very strong working relationship with Novelkeys, to both clone (Novelkeys) Cream switches as well as Zealios, both of which Kailh refused to do. While this is the only publicly known instance of GPCGR reaching out to companies and ham-fistedly asking for clones of switches that the companies neither knew anything about nor would fill, this most certainly implies that similar actions were likely carried out with other big companies such as Gateron or Outemu.

Figure 4: Screenshot of mgsickler discussing GPCGR’s early switch development actions. — **Figure 4:** Screenshot of mgsickler discussing GPCGR’s early switch development actions.

And to further top off of the sentiment that the community had developed at this point, which was centered around the idea that GPCGR was simply out looking for a ‘hype switch’ and brazenly stepping on toes all around the community, on August 28th even more dirt was uncovered about GPCGR’s actions behind the scenes. While I am not familiar from what location this information was first discovered, it was found that GPCGR had actually filed a Trademark request for the phrase “Holy Panda” on August 24th. Being that the name nor the switch were developed by GPCGR, the community took this as the absolute ‘nail in the coffin’ that the company was simply trying to walk into the scene and take corporate control of something that they were never involved in prior. Needless to say, there was very little that GPCGR was capable of doing at this point that could have aggravated the community further, and the sum of the aforementioned actions had permanently turned off many people within the community to the idea of trying the switches, regardless of their qualities.

However, this background section has a slightly less abysmal ending to it as compared to this double black diamond slope of a switch introduction. At full drama crescendo, Glorious did what we all were expecting them to do and took to the r/MechanicalKeyboards subreddit with a several page explanation letter titled ‘The Future of the Glorious Holy Panda”. In this post, u/woox13, who introduces himself as Shazim, the CEO of GPCGR, starts off by explaining some of the past of the company as well as what drove them to re-enter the mechanical keyboard scene and to develop their own mechanical switch. After explaining a bit of the background, and accurately pinpointing why the community had been so upset with the recent string of announcements by them, they proceeded to outline their apologies and changes moving forward. Claiming the trademark attempt as legal advice given to them by their lawyers as in their best interest in rolling out a mass produced product, they stated that they initially chose to put it up to a community vote what should be done with the trademark filing. After deliberating internally about it, they instead chose to reach out to u/Quakemz, who was the individual in the community responsible for popularizing the Holy Panda switch, to see if he would be willing to be the trademark protector once the trademark was registered. With Quakemz declining this offer, GPCGR ultimately chose to withdraw their trademark attempt. As well, due to the outrage surrounding the name, GPCGR chose to drop the “Holy” portion of the Glorious Holy Panda name, effectively making the switches Glorious Pandas from here on out. Finally, deep in the comments of the apology post in a thread started by u/Escabrera, Shazim directly responded to the statements made by Mike and claimed them simply as their very early explorations into developing their own switch and a slightly misinterpreted understanding of the requests made by GPCGR at the time. Capping it off with an apology directly to Novelkeys, u/mgsickler responded with open appreciation for the apology fielded by Shazim and GPCGR, neatly tying off a bow to the drama that unfolded in this switches’ roll out.

As the dust has begun to settle on the late August drama of the Glorious Panda switch announcement, the community at large seems to be much more at ease with GPCGR’s rollout of the Glorious Panda switches. While many people were openly stating their appreciation with GPCGR’s transparency and community outreach regarding the situation that they arguably started themselves, there is still the occasional person in the scene who doesn’t feel as great about the entirety of the situation. In complete overview, though, it does appear that GPCGR’s decisions to both repeal their trademark application as well as change their switch name did make an overall positive on what was shaping up to be one of the most contentious switch rollouts in history.

As of the time of the release of this document, the Glorious Pandas should be up for their first pre-order sales, selling in packs of 36 switches for $24.99, or $0.69 per switch. Nice. Since the first batch of switches have already been boxed up and packaged preemptively for the pre-order event, the first round of orders will all feature “Glorious Holy Panda Switches” on the box, with future rounds of production after this featuring only “Glorious Panda” as per GPCGR’s apology post.

Figure 5: Front side of the Glorious Panda’s first round of production packaging. — **Figure 5:** Front side of the Glorious Panda’s first round of production packaging.

Glorious Panda Switch Performance

Appearance

Rather than jumping immediately into the appearance of the switches themselves, I have to take a quick detour to talk about the packaging and design of the boxes that the Glorious Pandas come in. While I have been known to swoon over beautiful switch packaging in the past, such as ThicThock’s Marshmallow switches, these absolutely stand out in a league of their own in terms of package design. Coming in packs of 36 switches, these average cellphone sized cardboard boxes feature the panda mascot teased in the initial Twitter postings in beautiful holographic foil, switch details on the side of the box, a bit of (marketing fluff) product description on the back of the box, and even more detail on the sides and ends. Honestly, I wouldn’t even bat an eye to see these sitting on a shelf next to other gaming peripherals at my local electronics store.

Figure 6: Back side of the Glorious Panda’s first round of production packaging. — **Figure 6:** Back side of the Glorious Panda’s first round of production packaging.

Upon opening the box, the impressive characteristics of the packaging continue even further. The first and most noticeable feature of the actual packing of the switches is that they come in a resealable bag that can likely fit closer to 70 or 80 switches, which is a nice touch with respect to reusability in a world rife with single use plastics. As well, the switches come with a sort of “catch all” quickstart guide directing any product questions to the website as well as a sticker of the same panda mascot on the front of the box. All in all, the packaging of these switches is unlike anything I’ve seen before and I can only pray that this will hopefully spark other large companies looking to foray into switches to do the same with their packaging.

Figure 7: It’s no Iron165, but it sure is a nice touch. — **Figure 7:** It’s no Iron165, but it sure is a nice touch.

Moving onto the actual switches, the first thing that jumps out to the eyes is the bright orange/goldenrod colored stems that clearly were designed to try and standout like halos. While they are not on their own necessarily subtle, the intensity isn’t any more jarring than the normal tan colored Halo True stems that we’ve all come to recognize with Holy Panda switches. Very similar to Holy Panda switches, though, is the housings of these switches. First, and most easily recognizable, the Glorious Pandas feature the same off-white/greyish looking tone that have been in more recently Holy Panda switches, such as the Massdrop x Invyr Holy Panda switches. In addition to matching in color, the Glorious Pandas actually have mold numbering in the same exact locations as other Holy Panda switches have had – one on south side lip of the LED slot and one on the bottom in between the switch pins.

Figure 8: Mold numbering locations on the Glorious Panda switches. — **Figure 8:** Mold numbering locations on the Glorious Panda switches.

However, a lot of the concerns surrounding the authenticity of the mold claims made by GPCGR have come down to the nameplate of the Glorious Pandas. Featuring ‘GLORIOUS’ in raised letters and stylized font similar to other products that GPCGR has put out in the past, these differ quite a bit from the indented ‘INVYR’ seen on original Invyr Panda molds. The claim made by GPCGR, though, was that the indentations on the molds which spelled out INVYR were smoothed over and then GLORIOUS was carved into the blank space over top to provide the new nameplate on the molds. Keeping in mind that in adding to the molds that one subtracts from the overall plastic that can be injected into the spot (and vice versa), this seemingly makes sense with the switches in hand. Whereas normally made switches have no differing texture between the rest of their top housings and the area surrounding their nameplate branding, the Glorious Pandas feature the raised, textured text on a smooth rectangle that stretches over the entirety of the nameplate. While this isn’t necessarily definitive proof that the original molds were obtained and rebranded by GPCGR, it certainly does lend credence to this idea.

Push Feel

Given that everyone’s chief concern when it comes to a switch that is claiming to be “better than a Holy Panda” is the tactile event, I am going to choose to defer that for the next paragraph. The first thing that one should be aware of, if they weren’t already, is that these switches are intentionally packaged as unlubed and thus would almost certainly benefit from the inclusion of even a small bit of lube on the slider rails, at the extreme least. As imagined, due to this lack of lube from the factory there is an ever so slight soft scratch to the stroke feel of the switch that is consistent throughout the entirety of the stroke. As well, it features a bottoming out and topping out feeling that is firm, solid, and very much fits what would be expected from a strong tactile switch in terms of feeling.

Now, as for the tactile bump of this switch, the nuance is a bit more interesting. With virtually no linear pre-travel, the tactile bump in these switches starts at the very beginning of the downstroke, in similar fashion to other highly tactile switches. The bump, itself, is not particularly short nor extended in any fashion, and very much fits a reasonable ‘mid-ground’ bump length at something I’d imagine is around 1.0 to 1.5 mm in length (for a 4.0 mm travel distance). As well, the bump can easily be imagined as ‘snappy’ in a literal sense of the word, feeling perfectly sized for the reasonable amount of force it gives back. Overall, in terms of the tactile bump, the Glorious Pandas feel exactly how I would imagine a good representation of a highly tactile switch should feel. While some of the more recent “Holy Panda clone” attempts have tried to shoot for the maximum finger breaking level of tactility, these switches fit perfectly into the high tactility range without suffering in performance trying to shoot for more.

Figure 9: Picture of the stem and tactile bump from a Glorious Panda. — **Figure 9:** Picture of the stem and tactile bump from a Glorious Panda.

Sound

Even though I am certain that somewhere in the promotional material GPCGR made claims regarding the sound of the Glorious Panda switches, since this seems to be such a strong focus point for people looking for their first switches, I can not for the life of me find it anywhere. That being said, if they had marketed the sound as ‘unique’ they wouldn’t entirely be wrong for good and for bad reasons. For the good, the tactile bump itself produces an interesting firm, mid to high pitched snapping sound in the most literal sense of the word. Both through the downstroke and upstroke, the tactile bump has a relatively distinct noise skin to snapping with fingers that does not sound nearly as sharp as what I remember other highly tactile switches being. And this interesting, snappy tactile bump does good to help cover up one of the two issues regarding the sound of the switches. The first and least noticeable is that the slight scratch that was mentioned above in the push feel section is again noticeable at low to moderate typing speeds, though it is quickly drowned out by the snapping noise at higher activation speeds. However, at these higher activation speeds, a pinging noise starts to become audible alongside the snapping of the tactile bump, which is likely due to stem leg/leaf interactions. All things considered, while these are slightly annoying detractors from the stock sound experience, these both seem easily fixable with a light application of lube before using of the switches.

Wobble

For being a highly tactile switch with a fairly normal, but higher end bottoming out spring force of 67g, the stem wobble on these switches isn’t great, to put it bluntly. While by no means are they catastrophically bad, the N/S and E/W direction stem wobbles are within that range of potentially noticeable with keycaps on and may be of some annoyance depending on the user. Otherwise, the top housing itself has no give to it whatsoever, even after a few openings of switches, and likely will not require films if only opened one or two times to lube prior to usage in a board.

Other

Performance aspects aside, there are only two other design and/or marketing choices about the Glorious Pandas that I am not entirely sure why they were made. The first is the decision to make these switches only plate mount (3 Pin) rather than PCB mount (5 Pin). While some would immediately jump to the conclusion that this is for ease of integration into existing GMMK products, which I don’t believe support PCB mount switches, GPCGR has already begun marketing their own lubricant brand alongside these switches due to their unlubed production. If GPCGR is willing to pump up interest in “DIY” improvement of their switch line via their own lube, its not too much more work for their audience to take nail clippers to PCB mount pins. The second decision, which is entirely unrelated to performance, is their decision to package switches in packages of 36. Seemingly this was done to sell more product intentionally, as buying enough ‘packs’ of switches to fit a TKL or 100%, which are the only sizes of GMMKs offered currently, would leave you with more than enough spares lying around for no real purpose. Much as I have bitched before about Drop’s 70/90/110 packing options, selling switches in packs of 10 is infinitely more consumer friendly.

Comparison Notes to Other Notable Tactile Switches

Note – These are not aimed at being comprehensive comparisons between all factors of these switches as this would simply be too long for this writeup. These are little notes of interest I generated when comparing these pieces to the Glorious Pandas side by side. (Edited on 9/21/2020)

Massdrop x Invyr Holy Panda

- The tactile bump on the Glorious Panda actually appears to start ever so slightly after the Holy Panda bump, in a side by side comparison. That being said, they both definitely do start quite early in the overall stroke of the switch.

- The spring ping noted in the Glorious Panda takes on a higher pitched tone than that of the Massdrop x Invyr Holy Panda, though they both have volume and competing sound from scratch.

- Interestingly enough, while having two different stem molds between the switches, the N/S and E/W stem wobble for these two switches is quite comparable.

Zealio V2 (78g)

- Having similar sounds in terms of spring ping, tactile bump event, and bottoming/topping out, the Glorious Panda overall is a louder switch at all typing speeds than the Zealio V2 78g.

- The top housing wobble and stem wobble in both the N/S and E/W directions for these switches are pretty much within the same ‘potentially negligible with keycaps on’ range.

- The tactile bump in the Glorious Panda appears to sit noticeably higher in the downstroke than the Zealios V2, which would make sense given that this is a relatively known comparison Zealios and Holy Pandas of all types.

Koala

- While there is not any spring ping in the Koala switches, the sound from scratch as well as the bottoming and topping out noises are extremely similar to that of the Glorious Panda.

- Even though the strength of the tactile bump between the Koala and Glorious Panda are similar, there is a slightly softer start to the Koala tactile bump whereas the Glorious Panda has a rather harsh beginning to the bump.

- The N/S stem wobble of these two switches is pretty comparable, though the Koala is seemingly marginally better with respect to E/W stem wobble than the Glorious Panda.

Novelkeys Blueberry

- In terms of both sound and push feel, the Novelkeys Blueberries have a harsher tactile bump than that of the Glorious Pandas.

- On all fronts, the Blueberries appear to have greater wobble. While the N/S and E/W stem wobble is only marginally worse than that of the Glorious Panda, these switches also feature a slightly loose top housing that the Glorious Pandas do not have.

- The topping out feeling of the Novelkeys Blueberry is a bit more firm and solid feeling than that of the Glorious Panda switch.

Kailh Crystal Box Royal

- Interestingly enough, since Box Royals are often not considered ‘highly tactile’ in comparison to all of the other tactile switches out there, the tactile bump strength of the Royals is only marginally lesser than that of the Glorious Panda.

- While both switches feature some spring ping, the Glorious Pandas have a much more ‘ringing’ style ping whereas the Crystal Box Royal simply has a metallic clanging sound to it.

- At arm’s length and reasonable typing speeds, the Kailh Crystal Box Royals are slightly louder than Glorious Pandas.

Star Purple

- In similar fashion to the Massdrop x Invyr Holy Panda comparison above, the Star Purple switches have a nearly identical starting point to the tactile bump as the Glorious Pandas, but come on with a much sharper and abrupt bump.

- Overall, the switch and specifically the metallic clanging from either spring ping or stem/leaf interactions is significantly quieter in the Star Purple switches.

- While only marginally so, the N/S and E/W stem wobble in the Star Purple switches appears to be better than that of the Glorious Pandas and likely completely unnoticeable in a normal keyboard build.

Scores and Statistics

Note – These scores are not necessarily completely indicative of the nuanced review above. If you’ve skipped straight to this section I can only recommend that you at least glance at the other sections above in order to get a stronger idea of my opinion about these switches.