Fixing broken RGB lighting on my Razer Blade 2018
What is a Razer product without RGB lighting? That’s the question I ask myself when I use my Razer Blade 2018 (base model) on a daily basis. A few months ago the RGB lighting failed completely on my Blade and now no longer works. I’ve been on a long mission to try and get it to work again. It’s been a tale of frustration, expensive gambles and annoyance at Razer’s support, but join me on my journey on attempting to fix the RGB lighting on my Razer Blade 2018.
I originally purchased my Razer Blade 2018 in 2019 and up until a few months ago it had led a mostly trouble free life. It has had no physical or liquid damage and the only thing that has gone wrong with it was the dreaded battery bloat, which I fixed by replacing the battery, out of warranty and at my expense.
The first sign of trouble
The first sign of issues with the RGB lighting was when the lighting would be intermittently off when it shouldn’t be. It has been known for the lighting to be occasionally glitchy and rebooting usually resolves this. For me at least initially, it did. However, then I started to realise that the Razer Synapse software could not actually control the lighting or set new lighting settings despite seeing the keyboard zone and happily apply Chroma lighting related settings but with no visual change. It was essentially stuck. Then the lighting started to do the same behaviour of just randomly being on and off but with no real way to control it. At one point the lighting was then partially lit but only on one portion of the keyboard and flickering. Generally the Razer Blade 2018 (base model) doesn’t allow you to set multiple keyboard zones differently (unless using the Audio visualiser or third party software), however the lighting was lit with a faint purple on just a small portion of the keyboard, certainly not an actual Synapse Chroma setting. Then not long after, the RGB lighting went completely dark and I haven’t seen it ever light up again for months since.
Troubleshooting no RGB lighting
The RGB lighting on a Razer Blade 18 like many Razer products is controlled via the Razer Synapse 3 software, although there are third party alternatives like OpenRGB, given some people’s distain for Razer’s software or if you happen to be a Linux user and require unofficial drivers.
Razer has a support article on the subject, so I started there. The first step is double check to make sure the lighting is actually on. A simple step, but yes, it’s sometimes that easy. Unfortunately, this is not the case for me. Then Razer suggests reinstalling the Synapse software, which I’ve duly done and unfortunately still no lights. If that fails Razer suggests a factory reset. I’d like to point out that a factory reset is pretty excessive and a flawed step in a lot of cases. Talk about going nuclear. If the problem clearly isn’t software, then what’s that going to do? Ignoring this step, we appear to have come to the end of Razer’s support on this matter. Lovely.
Razer also has a driver cleanup tool which they don’t publicly provide but it can be found on some forum posts. All this does is basically cleanup drivers related to Razer components i.e. keyboards and ensures nothing is leftover allowing for a truly clean install. This also sadly did nothing.
Given the usual software efforts haven’t worked, I started to look at other areas, I was now going by unofficial troubleshooting steps. My next steps of trying to bring the RGB back to life involved:
- Resetting the NVRAM — This is achieved by pulling the battery connector and then CMOS battery, a fairly painless step. Note: if you’re using Bitlocker, have your Bitlocker recovery key handy or temporarily suspend/disable Bitlocker protection before you do it.
- Force reflashing the BIOS — This requires using a tool called AFUWIN. You’ll need to have a valid Razer BIOS ROM available (and for the love of god make sure it’s the right ROM with a valid checksum).
- Reseating ribbon cables — In hope something was just loose.
- Replacing the keyboard assembly — Taking a gamble with something in the keyboard assembly failing and just replacing it outright.
You could argue that Resetting NVRAM/reflashing the BIOS is still software level troubleshooting, but it’s a fairly easy step and by some slim chance it’s firmware related, this would confirm it.
Sadly none of these efforts worked either, and replacing the entire keyboard assembly isn’t exactly a cheap endeavour, given getting hold of a UK Razer Blade keyboard that fits the 2018 model is limited to eBay and AliExpress at fairly high markup from China. Razer also won’t be willing to sell you one either. I asked.
To actually replace the keyboard requires a fairly extensive tear down up to removing the system board to reveal the keyboard assembly underneath for access to a large amount of ridiculously tiny 000 Phillips screws securing it into the frame.
This helpful video goes through the entire process and it isn’t for someone who hasn’t opened computer hardware before.
You can be a bit naughty and shortcut the system board step by keeping the heatsink attached, avoiding a thermal compound replacement. I did this as I hadn’t not long replaced the thermal compound and didn’t fancy doing that again.
The keyboard replacement gamble unfortunately failed and the RGB lighting is still not working. What could it be? Do I give up and accept this Razer Blade is going to be dark until it retires? Or continue on the path of hardware diagnostics and see how deep this rabbit hole goes?
I continued on…
A little board called KB N15RC2KBMB FFC KGB
What’s the KGB got to do with this?! Don’t panic it’s just a part code! Looking at how the keyboard connects to the overall system board, the Razer Blade 2018 (and I believe 2019) has a small square board that is separate from the main system board.
This separate board which the keyboard connects into can be found on AliExpress currently and looks like this. There is also very little information around this component too. The large chip on this board identifies as LPC11U37F/401 which if you Google, does have a data sheet and appears to be some form of microcontroller but what it’s actually doing in relation to the Razer Blade 2018, I’m not exactly sure. I tried to get some information from Razer about it, that conversation was… Unproductive.
The ribbon cable marked with KB and MB, is the ribbon cable joining this board to the main system board, while the three connectors for the keyboard all go into here.
On this board are three connectors all for the ribbon cables on the keyboard, so we can likely assume the microcontroller has some role related to the keyboard. Two of these ribbon cables (the blue ended longer ones) appear to be keyboard data lines which process key presses. The third smaller brown cable doesn’t seem to be related to processing keyboard input data. With some further testing/diagnosis, the keyboard functions fine with only the two main blue ribbon cables connected, the lighting of course doesn’t work (but I know it’s been broken for a while anyway) with or without the smaller brown ribbon cable connected or not. So we know that cable isn’t integral to the keyboard functioning as a keyboard, but perhaps this helps narrow down our issue.
The two connectors for the blue ended ribbon cables appear to function fine, as I’ve had these connected up and tested the keyboard all working, the connector towards the top right, seems to be for something else, but having it unplugged doesn’t stop the keyboard from working, is this potentially something to do with the RGB lighting? It’s possible.
It is at this point that I wish I had more electronic/component level repair knowledge i.e. being able to solder and test electronics for shorts or continuity with a multimeter. I’ll admit, I don’t possess this knowledge. What also doesn’t help is I cannot find a schematic or detailed print out of any of the components mentioned. Having something like a boardview would be super useful to identify exactly what is doing what, but alas, Razer isn’t exactly pro right to repair either, I couldn’t find any schematics for this model online and their support is frankly terrible when asking more detailed questions around the hardware inside their own products. More on that a bit later.
I can at least examine this part in my own laptop, although you can clearly tell it’s not exactly designed to be removed, it’s not screwed into anything and just sits in two small posts and secured by some tape on the side, but there’s some seriously strong adhesive/glue on the underside bonding it to the top frame assembly. Actually removing it is a bit of a challenge, because any excessive force can potentially bend or damage the PCB. Eventually after some careful prying, wiggling and one cut left thumb later, it’s free and I could take a look at it.
There’s no signs of any corrosion or discolouration around capacitors or any components on it, it looks OK visually, but without probing it, who knows if this is broken or not working properly. We know it must be functioning to some level, given the keyboard still works, just without RGB. The one thing I can do is give it a good clean with isopropyl alcohol, in hope there’s potentially something on the board that’s being shorted and can be cleaned off with it. A long shot but while I’ve gone to the effort of a tear down, we can only try. I literally gave this board an alcohol bath and left it for a while, then removed it and let it dry, then went over any areas with residue again for the last time. Unfortunately this didn’t do anything, but I wasn’t really expecting anything to change either.
So it looks like I’m going to replace this N15RC2KBMB FFC KGB part which we’ll now call the Razer Blade gamble version 2 (version 1 being an unsuccessful keyboard replacement). It seems to be the only other part that it could possibly be, related to the keyboard and by extension the RGB lighting.
Replacing KB N15RC2KBMB FFC KGB
About a month later from the not successful keyboard replacement and the part finally arrives from Mainland China. The seller has been much more helpful than Razer support, they even kindly provided a video of a Razer Blade 2018 model running with this part in showing the RGB lighting working before shipping, which was promising!
And… It works! Success! Seeing the lighting again got me more excited than it probably should have, but after replacing it and doing a minimal re-assembly to allow a successful POST as a test, the lights came back to life in seconds, I’d almost forgot what it looked like lit up properly.
While I don’t know the specific issue with this part, I can only guess that something with the RGB circuit wasn’t working, but interestingly the main keyboard data was still being processed. Perhaps if I had more electronic experience I could have found the issue and done a cheaper repair. Either way I’m finally glad to get success from a long and expensive endeavour!
A side note about Razer support
Full disclosure, my Razer Blade 2018 is three years old, I’m aware I’m out of warranty and repair options through Razer are limited. I totally understand this. What annoys me is the fact that the company that made this laptop cannot or would not provide any useful technical information despite me going to great lengths to investigate and research the components and even replace them myself. I’ve essentially had to reverse engineer how the internal hardware works on my own.
Obviously Razer cannot determine why my RGB lighting doesn’t work anymore, unless it went to one of their repair centres. They even warned my about third party sellers/parts, which is all well and good but Razer won’t provide the parts directly either, so kind of a pointless statement to make. Going the repair centre route was impractical for me for two reasons:
- I’m quite capable of replacing parts myself.
- Sending off my laptop to a repair centre will take weeks and possibly months. There is also a very major risk of further damage in transit (and horror stories of laptops being in worse shape when they were “repaired”). They also out source their repairs, which isn’t anything new, but it’s not even being repaired by “Razer” either.
This highlights the need for right to repair legislation and having freely available schematics or boardview data, on the system board and any associated PCBs, in order to actually understand how the hardware is communicating and allow third parties to make successful repairs. None of these are available publicly and I highly doubt Razer is ever going to provide this unless they were compelled by legislation or law. Clearly, by the support case I had, they won’t.
Granted, I’m asking fairly technical questions which not many people in the company are likely to have intermate knowledge of, but Razer designed this product, someone in the company must know it’s internal components, yet I just get scripted answers from their “technical support”. It is totally understandable that the first/second line support are unlikely to know this information, but internal channels in Razer surely could allow for answer to be obtained.
Razer’s support in this scenario has been unhelpful. At one point the conversation stalled because I refused to factory reset my laptop. Given all of the troubleshooting performed and despite showing that clearly this is undoubtedly a hardware issue, Razer refused to continue further and stuck to whatever script they have. At another point, I closed the open case out of frustration because I was just getting random different “support specialists” responding with the same scripted answers. Only when replacing the keyboard didn’t fix the problem did I then re-engage in the hope I can get some useful technical information on the matter. That didn’t happen.
Razer support is infamous for being very hit and miss and this scenario confirms the miss part. I fully acknowledge that being out of warranty, options are limited, but all I wanted from Razer was information that I was literally leading them answered based on my own efforts, they couldn’t even provide “Yes” or “No” to questions. That was disappointing and makes me consider not buying any future Razer products.
