Disassembly

In order to take a look inside, we must first remove all keycaps. The provided keycap puller comes in handy here. After doing so, we get our first look at the switches themselves - this sample uses the Cherry MX RGB Speed (Silver) switches that were for a while only available on Corsair's RAPIDFIRE K65/K70 keyboards but have since shown up on different keyboards from various companies. There are twenty-one screws on the plate that need to be removed, and there is a hidden screw next to the volume scroll wheel as well.


Two more screws secure the cable to the keyboard's base, and removing them helps loosen the base out for closer examination. It is made out of ABS plastic, but is thicker than the base of previous Corsair keyboards I have examined - possibly because they had to account for the cable-routing cutouts on the underside. This also separates the plate/PCB piece, and we see that it has multiple daughter PCBs that cater to the K95 Platinum's additional keys.


The first daughter PCB caters to the USB pass-through and the profile, brightness, and Windows lock buttons. The second takes care of the dedicated media buttons, including the scroll wheel. There is also a reset button hidden in here, but it is not accessible elsewhere and is meant to be used by Corsair staff (unless you open the keyboard up as I did). A third daughter PCB handles the light bar, but is taped to the plate, which makes it hard to remove, and I left it there.


The primary PCB, as with the daughter PCBs, is green in color, and the soldering is generally well done with no issues spotted on this sample. The switches are attached to the PCB through the aluminum plate making them plate-mounted, which makes it impossible to take the switches apart without de-soldering them off the PCB. There is a single PCB here, and as with most keyboards these days, it does have multiple layers. The LEDs are directly below the switches on the PCB's upper side, putting them right next to the switch housing, which diffuses the light, thus keeping them bright. On the flip side, Corsair is limited by space and had to accommodate LEDs that are small enough to fit here. Some competitors, such as Cooler Master and Ducky, have adopted a multi-PCB layout with LEDs on their own PCB to get around this restriction. In the end, it is mostly a tie as the most important factor is still the keycap - the bigger the legends, the more light passes through. This is also why Corsair changed the font on their keycaps recently.

There are three separate ISSI IS31FL3732 FxLED drivers for individual PWM control in 256 steps for lighting as per R, G, B, which makes for a total of 16.8 M colors without any flickering or color shifts. The processor is an NXP LPC11U68JBD100 32-bit ARM Cortex unit with up to 256 kB flash memory, 36 kB SRAM data memory, and 4 kB EEPROM on board. While a step up from the NXP LPC11U3x series used in Corsair's previous keyboards, including the K70 RGB LUX or RAPIDFIRE, it still forces Corsair to limit what the hardware profiles can do. For storage, Corsair has gone with Cypress Semiconductors' Spansion FL-1K 64 Mbit (8 MByte) flash memory, which is more than enough.

Before we take a look at the driver, be advised that disassembly will void the warranty and that TechPowerUp is not liable for any damages incurred if you decide to go ahead and do so anyway.