Disassembly

Disassembly of the Suora FX is a piece of cake, with twelve precision-size Phillips head screws holding the ABS plastic bottom panel and the rest of the keyboard together. These are located between some switches and all around the periphery of the keyboard from the front, so you will have to take off some keycaps to access them. There is also the internal USB connector to dislodge, but once done, we get a good look at the meat of the keyboard itself.


Roccat is using a blue-colored PCB here, for those who care about this. Solder quality overall was fairly good, even in places where there are four solder points in close proximity, but they are cut off neatly, evenly, and spaced away from each other to where I am not worried about internal build quality. A legend on the PCB tells me the design was formalized on the 2016-7-9 (July 9, 2016?), which goes well with this relatively new product.


There are four separate HSAK021 LED drivers to help power and control the LEDs on the keyboard, although there is no information anywhere online that I could find about them. Although I did find some Chinese keyboards under the Dahl brand which looked quite similar to the Suora FX, and with a very similar design. The MCU itself is blocked off, but I could make out HSA again. There is some onboard storage for simple profiles, so the MCU must have some built-in memory as there are no dedicated NAND flash chip on the PCB. There are five tantalum capacitors here, and the internal USB connector itself is soldered well to go along with the generally good build quality. Each switch has several solder points as can be seen, including four for the LED and housing alone. As is the norm lately, the PCB here is a multi-layered one.

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.