Disassembly

The K65 RGB MINI uses a single-piece, high profile plastic case. This makes disassembly similar in principle to their aluminium frame keyboards since you only need to take off some keycaps to access the flat Phillips head screws holding the keyboard together. How many screws on this tiny 60% keyboard you ask? All of them. CORSAIR continues their merry ways of making disassembly hard by having 11 screws here, so a precision Phillips screwdriver comes in handy. Once done, you will still need to pry the PCB/plate out since it is a tight fit in this plastic case. The gaps around the space bar switch are useful here, and there is no internal USB cable to worry about since the connector is on the PCB itself. That said, the ABS plastic case has a cable-routing cutout internally, so I don't know if there were design variations in the past with a daughter PCB in the case and an internal cable to the primary PCB.


The PCB is matte black in color with some lacquer/flux residuals around the switches. General soldering quality is otherwise good and likely machine-assembled as CORSAIR sells a lot of volume globally. The switches are soldered onto the PCB through the steel plate, which is used for structural integrity. The plate being white also helps reflect light upwards, which makes for a brighter backlighting effect. We also see that the internal code name for the keyboard was Duran, which would have probably been better than the increasingly crowded numbering scheme CORSAIR is still using.


Powering the keyboard is an NXP LPC54605 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 USB microcontroller with up to 512 KB on-board flash memory and 200 KB SRAM. There is also an additional 8 MB discrete flash memory module to store all the pre-programmed functions. All the components, including the switches, LEDs, and capacitors, are soldered to a multi-layered 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.