Disassembly

Most metal-frame or case keyboards are easier to disassemble than plastic case variants, but CORSAIR tries their best to discourage users from taking the K70 RGB PRO apart. Indeed, I went for the expected hidden screw underneath a plastic cover next to the volume scroll wheel right away only to find out CORSAIR switched things on me and has four screws under the four rubber pads on the back instead. There are an additional 20 screws on the top that are accessible after removing several specific keycaps as seen above. A precision Phillips head screwdriver comes in handy here, and with those removed, carefully pry apart the aluminium frame and bottom plastic case to separate the two.


Given the detachable cable and Type-C port on the PCB, I expected there to be no internal USB cable to worry about. But the positioning of the USB port meant a daughter PCB on the plastic case was more practical after all, and you thus need to dislodge the cable from the PCB header to completely separate the two pieces. As expected, the case is made out of ABS plastic, with some room to add some noise-dampening foam, which CORSAIR has shown no signs of incorporating in its keyboards to date. The primary PCB has the switches soldered in place, and we again see CORSAIR not contemplating hot-swappable switch sockets, unlike a few other brands in the mainstream market. There are three daughter PCBs for the added keys, volume wheel, and backlit logo inlay, and these are connected to the primary PCB via ribbon cables. All of these PCBs are green, but CORSAIR does not intend this area to be accessible anyway.


General soldering quality is very good and likely machine-assembled as CORSAIR sells a lot of volume. I do not see a reset button this time around, which has me curious about how debugging and a hardware reset would work in the absence of software connectivity. Perhaps it is another case of a specific key combination. 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.