Disassembly

Disassembly of a keyboard's wrist rest is certainly a first, at least for me. There are five Ph #00 precision head screws on the back that need to be removed, followed by the use of a flat object to pry out the plastic tabs from the locks on the two pieces that make up the casing of the wrist rest. Once removed, we see a white diffuser plate with 14 RGB LEDs underneath, all connected to a PCB onto which the five pins are also soldered for power and control. The white diffuser plate was warped at both ends in this sample owing to the two end screws being tightened more than is necessary. I did let Patriot know of this so they could rectify it at the assembly line henceforth.


To take the keyboard apart, you need to remove several screws around the periphery of the keyboard, which includes the removal of some keycaps to access them. Once done, you have to once again use a flat object to gently pry open the multiple plastic tabs keeping the two pieces together. Only then can you get the bottom panel piece loose, and you can pry out the cable at the connection to fully separate the ABS plastic bottom panel from everything else. Flipping the top piece over, we see a lot of daughter PCBs and connections - at the bottom to connect to the wrist rest, at each side for the side plates, at the top left for the lighting control buttons, at the top right for the media buttons, at the left side for the audio pass-through, and at the right side for the USB pass-through. A lot of these are soldered in place, so removing the internal cables or even some screws will do nothing.


There are some that come off for a better look at the keyboard's internals. For example, the USB pass-through is on it's own little PCB with an internal USB header the keyboard cable plugs into (along with two other locations on the keyboard). There is also a fairly large capacitor on here, which was unexpected, but appreciated. The side plates have a diffuser as well and an angled acrylic plate that holds the RGB LEDs on it in a very similar manner as the Corsair Strafe keyboards. The lighting control buttons are membrane switches, as can be seen, and they have an LED strip underneath to ensure they can be backlit as well.


We finally get to look at the primary keyboard PCB, which, as all the daughter PCBs, is black in color. Build quality and soldering is very good here, with no excess flux anywhere and uniform component assembly and soldering, and even the tallest of the solder points is cut off very precisely - almost too precisely to have been cut by a human, and I imagine everything here is machine assembled instead. The top chassis is aluminum with bits of plastic around, and the metal helps add structural rigidity while keeping mass low.


There is an internal USB header on the primary PCB as well, and surrounding it are multiple tantalum capacitors. Next to these is the keyboard's microcontroller, which Patriot tried to cover using colors, but it was easy enough to remove and identify. Powering the Viper V770 is the same unknown combination of the HSAK3201 MCU and four HSAK201 LED drivers we saw in the Roccat Suora FX RGB, and the same which Patriot and other brands, including Gamdias, use in other keyboards. That said, a combination of the firmware update function in the driver, as seen on the next page, and HWInfo shows the MCU to be made by Holtek Semiconductor, and Patriot ended up confirming that both the MCU and LED drivers are Holtek components.

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.