Software

ASUS has begun to phase out support for Armoury II on new releases. Instead, the UWP-integrated Armoury Crate is the universal software for everything ASUS now. In terms of functionality, Armoury Crate is roughly equivalent to Armoury II, but resource consumption has gone up a bit. Additionally, it's no longer possible to freely select a non-OS language.

Much like in Armoury II, the available settings are distributed across several tabs. The first page houses button remapping functions, which allow one to rebind all but the left button to mouse, keyboard, multimedia, or macro functions. The second page includes options for CPI adjustment (100–16,000 CPI, increments of 100, four steps), polling rate, button response time (12–32 ms, increments of 4), and angle snapping. From what I can tell, the button response time (debounce delay) option isn't just inaccurate but non-functional altogether. As seen on the previous page, click delay is nowhere near close to 12 ms, and increasing the value to 16 or 20 ms doesn't do anything. Lighting settings are detailed below. The fourth page houses LOD adjustment (high/low). Lastly, profile management is available as well. All settings are updated live and saved to the on-board memory, so the software does not need to be running (or be installed) all the time. On my system, the software had a RAM footprint of 165 MB on average when running in the foreground and 45 MB when minimized. Upon exiting the application, several processes with a RAM footprint of 40 MB keep running.

The biggest challenge one faces when dealing with Armoury Crate is actually the uninstall process. First, it is recommended to uninstall the mouse-specific module. Then, all the individual services and apps, starting from the smallest and ending at the biggest (Armoury Crate itself). A restart is in order afterwards. To get rid of the last traces of Armoury Crate, it is necessary to go into Task Scheduler, stop all ASUS tasks, delete them one by one, and then delete the whole ASUS folder. Finally, after another restart, a clean-up of everything ASUS on the C: drive is in order, which includes more than 500 MB of leftover folders and files. It goes without mention that this process is hardly optimal, and I do hope ASUS will find a way to make this more user-friendly.

Update January 11th:
In order to ease the uninstall process of Armoury Crate, ASUS has released a tool specifically for doing that. Using this instead of uninstalling all modules of Armoury Crate individually is highly recommended, as the uninstall tool indeed wipes everything related to Armoury Crate off the system, including scheduled tasks and similarly obscure entries. Only a few derelict folders are left on C: drive and within AppData/Local, which are easily removed manually.

Lighting

While the regular Chakram has three RGB lighting zones, the Chakram has two, which are the scroll wheel and logo at the back. A total of six pre-defined lighting effects are available in the software. These are Static (single color), Pulsating (single color), Color Cycle, Reactive, Partition (alternating between zones), and AURA Sync, which synchronizes the lighting with any other connected AURA-enabled devices. Additionally, the AURA creator allows one to create a custom lighting effect that is then synchronized with other devices. For most effects it is possible to set custom colors and adjust brightness. Of course, it is also possible to disable the lighting altogether.

Color accuracy and vibrancy are excellent throughout. Here's a short demonstration video in which I'm going through the the Color Cycle, Pulsating, and Partition lighting effects: