Disassembly

Disassembly of the ASUS ROG Falchion is on the simpler side of things with 12 Phillips head screws holding the plate/PCB in place on the ABS plastic case. Accessing them involves removing multiple keycaps as seen above, and a precision screwdriver will come in handy here. At this point, lift the plate and PCB up together, but be careful since two cables connect the primary PCB to the case.


With both connectors dislodged, you can fully separate the two, and there is actually more going on with the case housing multiple items of interest. There are eight more screws to tackle here, as well as a grounding connector to dislodge before we can examine it all, including the 3820 mAh Li-ion battery underneath the shielded cover. There is also a daughter PCB, which really is the brains of the entire operation and acts as a conduit to the battery and switches/LEDs on the primary PCB while handling both wired and wireless connectivity in addition to the touchpad on the side. Powering the keyboard is an STMicroelectronics STM32L412R8 Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller with 64 KB of onboard flash memory for all the pre-programmed functions. We saw it put to good use on the ROG Claymore II, and it is a higher-performance MCU than typically seen on keyboards.


The primary PCB is also white, and solder quality is exceptional throughout. The switches are indeed soldered through the plate and onto the PCB, with an SMD RGB LED associated with each. There are some extra LEDs on the left side we saw used with the plastic diffuser for the indicator LEDs. As is the norm, all the components are soldered onto a multi-layer PCB.

Before we move on, be advised that disassembly may void the warranty and that TechPowerUp is not liable for any damages incurred if you decide to go ahead and do so anyway.