Disassembly

To take a look inside, there is no need to remove any keycaps. There are a total of nine screws on the underside, including under the warranty sticker and the two bottom rubber pads, that need to be loosed and removed. Following this, there are multiple plastic tabs that keep the top and bottom panels together which need to be clipped loose as well. This helps remove the top panel, and leaves us with the plate/PCB and bottom panel piece. The top panel has the membrane pad secured in place for the four volume/macro record control keys which are not mechanical, in case you were expecting that.


More screws need to be removed now, this time from the top where the plate screws into the bottom panel. There are two screws that secure the USB cable on the panel that need to be removed as well. Once done, we can see the plate/PCB piece by itself. G.SKILL is using a green PCB here, and there is a small plastic piece near the USB connector that can be removed as well. I suspect this is to prevent any shorting issues although I do not see any potential for said shorting here.


Solder quality was average at best, with some places where there were solder peaks in close proximity. I am sure the quality control check would catch any shorting issues here, but it can still be improved. The switches themselves also have a messy solder layout- possibly by design as indicated by the PCB, however.


The keyboard uses an internal USB connector which can be removed and replaced if you have the spare part. There is a single MB15042GP LED driver for the red color backlighting (generally one of these are needed per R/G/B channel so I imagine there will be three for the RGB versions), an NXP LPC11U35F MCU for the keyboard functionality including on-the-fly macro recording, and 32 Mb (8 MB) of onboard flash storage courtesy the Winbond 25Q32FVSIG NAND module. All this on a multi layer PCB, as is the norm these days.

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 decided to go ahead and do so anyway.