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Teardown, Performance And Conclusion
Teardown
Opening the Corsair K70 RGB wasn’t difficult, but I did end up having to destroy parts of it.
Corsair employed Cherry stabilizers, which don't have the metal bars and small plastic parts you get with Costar stabs. This makes removing or replacing the larger keys just as easy as the smaller keys.
Once you’ve removed all of the keycaps, 22 screws are accessible from the top. Once you remove those, though, there are a couple more screws still hidden. One is hiding under the Corsair logo sticker, and another is obscured beneath one of the plastic covers next to the volume rocker. Prying the Corsair logo off without damaging it isn’t possible, and the volume rocker cover can also cracked when removing it.
After the above, the plastic backing comes off without any difficulty, exposing the top.
The USB cable is sturdily affixed to the keyboard. It fits well in the structure of the board, which means that you can tug on the cable without putting any stress on the electric connections.
All the solder points in the board look neat, and there is no visible flux residue on the board – nothing negative stood out to us.
Putting the keyboard back together is the same process in reverse, though sadly, the Corsair logo and volume rocker cover have suffered slight, permanent damage. (In hindsight, if we had used a heat gun and a razor blade, we may have removed the logo without damage.)
Key Rollover
Corsair claimed that the K70 RGB boards have N-Key rollover (NKRO), which means that you can press any combination of keys you want and all strokes will register correctly. We fired up the Aqua Key Test (link hosted here), and we can confirm Corsair’s claims.
Audio
The sound that the K70 RGB makes with the Cherry MX RGB Red switches is quite clean, likely due to the sturdy body.
Conclusion
Even as the first keyboard to market with individual per-key RGB lighting, Corsair has done a fine job with the K70 RGB. The design shows that Corsair put serious thought into it (albeit with oversights), and the build quality shows excellent craftsmanship.
The biggest gripe we had with the keyboard was the accompanying software. To make a signature lighting effect is nothing short of a headache, and the macro creation isn’t as streamlined as it could be.
It's also unfortunate that the Cherry MX RGB switches cannot display the color white effectively, and that the lighting isn’t particularly bright. For a switch that is engineered for RGB lighting (albeit retro-engineered), we expected better.
The $189 price tag is steep, but it reflects the build quality and features.
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