Razer BlackWidow Chroma (Origin PC Edition) And BlackWidow Ultimate 2016 Review

Teardown

We take apart all of the keyboards we review to have a closer look at their build quality. Some keyboards are more friendly to teardown than others (which is neither positive nor negative), and the BlackWidow Chroma is one that you should not disassemble at home. The risk for breakage of the top cover is high. But we did it anyway, because it's what we do, for you our dear readers.

First, we located the screws. Razer kept them cleverly hidden under the rubber feet, presumably for aesthetic reasons, so you have to pry them off to get to the screws. The adhesive used to keep the little feet attached is strong.

There are six screws total holding on the top panel. Even with them removed, it's tricky surgery to wiggle the top panel off without breaking it. However, there are barely-perceptible notches dotting the edge of the panel that will let you slide in a small flathead screwdriver (or knife blade, whatever works for you) and leverage things loose.

With the top panel gone, I had to remove eight more screws and apply some gentle wiggling to get the full switch assembly unattached from the back of the chassis. Two more screws freed the cable assembly, which uses a piece of plastic that's screwed into the back of the chassis to hold the cable in place.

Bless Razer for using screws throughout that are all the same size.

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On the rear of the switch assembly, there's a black PCB with four chips embedded. These are P3917 3731 microcontrollers, which handle all the LED lighting. The welds under the switches are mostly clean, but there are several that look sloppy.

Flipped back over, the keyboard's microprocessor is visible on the upper right corner. It's the NXP LPC11U24F ARM Cortex-M0/M0+, which features 256 KB of flash and 32 KB RAM. This chip also handles the USB passthrough.