Driver

The ACGAM AG6X has a software driver aptly named "AG6X upgrade software" and can be download from the support page on their website. The installer is 34 MB in size, and the install process is straightforward albeit with no terms of service notice to be seen. The installed driver takes up 130 MB, is product-specific, and marked as a solution from Shenzhen Semitek Co. Ltd., which is another company based in China that specializes in peripherals. ACGAM's involvement in the product is getting more confusing as we go forward.


The driver is lightweight in consuming resources at idle or while in use and will display a message saying no device was found if run without the keyboard connected. However, it scales very poorly with high DPI displays. Even at 1440p, I had to turn up scaling in Windows 10 and all the more so at 4K. If you are close to your monitor at 1080p resolution, it should be fine, but this is an area of improvement much needed for the product to keep up with the rest of the industry in 2018. ACGAM tells me they based the driver on a 1280 x 750 resolution and recommend setting the display to 1080p for now. Notice also the vast amount of empty space on the home page, and hopefully, this is something that is not the case with the various options available.

Given this is a driver specific to the keyboard, it opens up with the product displayed as a virtual keyboard. There are profiles you can set, called configurations here, which can be linked to programs, and each such profile can be given a further specific set of customization as seen below in subsequent menus. The profiles can be imported and exported alike if you so desire to carry them across multiple PCs. You can also change the skin, which in this case is the background wallpaper, and this is quite useful in many cases as a result of dark-on-dark colors used by default. Indeed, a lot of menu windows that will pop up will have a translucent gray background over the skin, so there may still be occasions where you will need to change the skin around. This is another thing that should not have been necessary at all, but it is not a deal breaker by any means. You can also check for software driver and keyboard firmware updates, as well as register the keyboard to tie it to your account for warranty purposes.

The first menu is called Custom, and here is where you get custom key assignment options. The virtual keyboard is used to select keys to re-assign, wherein the current programming is displayed on the left with options below. These include another keyboard function, a macro, a mouse function, media buttons, shortcuts, hotkeys or even the ability to disable the key entirely. Given the scarcity of available keys to begin with, the latter is probably not going to be used much. Note also that the base layer is all you get to re-assign, and here is where I would have liked to see the ability to reprogram the various layers as well. As it is now, changing the base layer but not the others will potentially confuse the end user in conjunction with the legends on the keycaps.

The second menu is called Light Effect, and here is where you customize the keyboard's backlighting. Knowing there is a single color available, the lighting options here range from static lighting (full keyboard), dynamic effects for the entire keyboard, and type-responsive effects. The name for some of the effects is interesting to say the least, and the language barrier shows here, but the virtual keyboard does help with previews in case you are not looking at the keyboard itself. Each effect has sub-options, such as brightness (five steps) and speed (three steps), which are not reflected in the preview on-screen.

The final menu is for macros, and this is fairly comprehensive in that you can create or delete macros, record and edit a macro, and assign them to keys in the Custom menu as seen before. You can select delays between the recorded keystrokes to be as recorded, remove them entirely, or set to a specific value of your choosing (in ms). Editing a macro gives you the option to delete keystrokes, say duplicate ones recorded, and move each step up or down to where you desire it to be. It would have been nice to see the option to insert a keystroke here, but you can quickly record again and add it that way.