Disassembly

Congratulations HyperX, you now have the distinction of making the keyboard that took me the most effort to disassemble so far. There are screws on the back, screws on the front that require the removal of keycaps, and then small tabs that keep the steel frame/PCB connected to the ABS plastic bottom case piece. As if all of this weren't enough, you also have to bend the case section where the multimedia/lighting control buttons face upward to allow for the two tabs on the side to separate lest you risk breaking them off by applying too much pressure. Once everything is handled properly, you can lift the top piece off the bottom without much further ado.


Flipping over the top piece, we see multiple PCBs that help out with the functionality of the HyperX Alloy Elite. There are daughter PCBs for the two added dedicated button banks at the top, which have membrane switches and LEDs of their own as applicable. The USB pass-through port is on one of these, and we see the keyboard cable split off into two as it enters the keyboard itself. All the PCBs are matte black in color and with very good solder quality. Given the number of components here, this might well have been machine-assembled and soldered.


Powering the Alloy Elite is a NXP LPC11U14F 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 USB microcontroller with up to 32 KB of onboard flash memory and all of 6 KB of SRAM. HyperX has seen it fit to also include a 512 KB dedicated flash module to help store the programmed secondary functions and lighting effects, in combination with the dedicated SONIX SLED1734 LED driver which can support 8-bit PWM control over as many as 256 single-color LEDs - plenty enough for this keyboard. The hardware is plenty enough to support an LEDs per switch and more, so there are no complaints here. All of these are soldered in place on a multi-layered PCB, as is the norm lately.

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.