Disassembly

Disassembly of the Cooler Master MasterKeys MK750 is more intensive than with most keyboards. As with most metal-plate keyboards, you have to remove some keycaps to access the screws holding the keyboard together. Once located, a precision Phillips head driver will help remove the 17 screws and separate the top plate from the rest. At this point, there is still the smoked acrylic piece in the bottom which needs to be removed, and here, you have to use a thin, flat object to pry it out by separating interlocking tabs on the interface between the metal plate and the acrylic. I left some irreversible scratches here, but once you have 1-2 tabs out, you will have enough give to be able to lift the metal plate upward, which reveals two pieces of U-channel rubber trim for some friction to prevent an easy separation of the pieces. We also see the magnetic piece that helps keep the wrist rest in place here.


The bottom panel is made out of ABS plastic and houses the I/O PCB with the Type-C port soldered on to it. This PCB design was finalized on August 21, 2017 as per the marking we see, which is not too far off from the release date of the product itself. Dislodge the internal USB cable from the header that transfers the signals over to the primary PCB and back and you can separate this panel piece from the other entirely. We also see that three plastic diffusers are screwed in place here - on the sides and bottom - to help diffuse light into those directions on the keyboard in addition to the backlighting for the keys.


The MasterKeys MK750 has plate-mounted switches that are soldered into the PCB, so these are all one piece unless you want to de-solder switches. A look at the PCB reveals clearly where the LEDs for lighting the keyboard on the sides and bottom are, with a contrasting beige color on the PCB to the black elsewhere. This PCB design was finalized (probably, rather, the date when this PCB was manufactured in this particular case) on October 21, 2017, which is right before Cooler Master announced the keyboard. There is another daughter PCB used for the media keys, which is connected via a ribbon cable to the primary PCB. Solder quality is exceptional - so much so that I daresay it was machine-manufactured.


The Cooler Master MasterKeys MK750 is powered by a Holtek HT32F1634 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller with up to 64 KB of programmable flash memory onboard, and 16 KB of SRAM. Cooler Master also added dedicated flash modules for a total of 512 KB of onboard storage for the pre-programmed functions and user-defined profiles. There are also three Macroblock MBIA043GP LED drivers for the RGB lighting control, and all of these are soldered onto a multi-layered PCB.

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