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. Interestingly, we do not see an insulating plastic sheet in between as we saw with the Race 3, so Vortex is really confident in their manufacturing and QC here.


The PCB is red, and the solder quality is very good with no solder peaks or excess flux. There are plenty of tantalum capacitors strewn around, and the micro-USB receptacle is soldered in jutting out the side, while being far enough away from the other primary components to where we can decidedly say that this is a brand-new design and not just a rehash of the Race 3 layout re-arranged.


Powering the Vortex Race 3 is an Holtek HT32F1654 microcontroller 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 to drive the 79 RGB switches having SMD LEDs associated with them each, and I do not anticipate the base version to 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-layered 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 decide to go ahead and do so anyway.