Disassembly

You will have to remove some of the keycaps in order to access ten small countersunk screws with Phillips heads. These are all that keep the PCB mounted in the case. Remove them and you can separate the two to take a look at the components in more detail. There is also a thin plastic sheet between the PCB and the case to prevent electrical shorting. The serial number of your specific unit should be mentioned here if you need it for anything else later on.


The PCB is red, and solder quality is decent, but not exceptional with no visible residual flux but multiple short solder peaks. These solder peaks are spaced far away from each other owing to the keyboard's layout and should, as such, not be an issue. The USB receptacle is soldered in and juts out the side, being close to the keyboard's MCU itself.


Powering the Vortex Race 3 is an Holtek HT32F1654 microcontroller, a 32-bit Arm Cortex USB controller with up to 64 KB of onboard flash memory and 16 KB of SRAM. On this engineering sample are also three Macroblock MBIA043GP LED drivers. This is likely a result of this sample having RGB switches and SMD LEDs onboard, and I do not believe the base non-backlit version will have the same components. To be fair, there is not much that needs to be done with the base version, and a decent MCU with some integrated memory for the programming will suffice. Common to this engineering sample and retail samples will be the steel plate as well as the multi-layer PCB.

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.