Software

As always, using Armoury Crate makes for an adventurous experience. This time around, Armoury Crate simply refused to display anything after installing. After a restart and generous appliance of both time and patience, Armoury Crate could be persuaded to cooperate, but even then the mouse-specific settings consistently aren't visible or accessible until Armoury Crate has been closed and restarted at least once.

Much like in Armoury II, all available settings are distributed across several tabs. The first page houses button remapping options, allowing one to rebind all but the left button to mouse, keyboard, multimedia, or macro functions. The second page includes options for CPI adjustment (100–36,000 CPI, increments of 50, four steps), polling rate (250, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000, or 8000 Hz in wired mode, 250, 500, or 1000 Hz in wireless mode), and angle snapping (on/off). CPI adjustment is done either through a slider or by inputting the value directly. Furthermore, angle adjustment is possible, ranging from -20 to 20 degrees. The third page has lighting options and is detailed below. The fourth page houses LOD adjustment options. Several pre-calibrated surfaces are available to choose from, which then can be fine-tuned manually by adjusting the high/low-selection. Performing a manual calibration may lower LOD beyond the default. The fifth page gives access to several power-saving settings. One can set the minimum battery level at which a low battery warning is displayed, and define after how many minutes the mouse enters power-saving mode, which disables all illumination. Battery status is displayed in increments of 1%; in addition to that, after having closed Armoury Crate, the charge status can be displayed by clicking on the Armoury Crate icon on the system tray. Lastly, profile management and a macro editor are available as well. Much like on the Gladius III and Gladius III Wireless, Rapid Fire is also available. Rapid Fire essentially is an auto-click function, allowing one to execute successive button presses faster than humanly possible. To access this function, one needs to create a rapid-fire profile first. Having done that, a rapid-fire activator button ought to be assigned. When configured like that, a designated button can be used to toggle or shift another button to act as a rapid-fire button. Using this function requires Armoury Crate to be running.

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 292 MB on average when running in the foreground and 118 MB when minimized. Upon exiting the application, several processes with a RAM footprint of 118 MB keep running. Please note that the number of active processes and their associated RAM footprint will depend on one's system configuration.

In order to ease uninstalling Armoury Crate, ASUS released a tool specifically for that. Using this tool instead of uninstalling all Armoury Crate modules individually is highly recommended since it indeed wipes almost everything related to Armoury Crate off the system. Only a few derelict folders are left on C: drive and within AppData/Local, which are easily removed manually. That said, I found that in some cases, not only scheduled tasks, but also several services manage to escape the uninstall tool. The easiest way to get rid of those is to open the services application and search for any ASUS-related entries. After stopping those, note their short names. Then, open an elevated command prompt and enter "sc delete servicename" without any quotes and servicename being the short name of the service in question. Afterwards, it is recommended to purge the entire ASUS folder found within the task scheduler. Keep in mind that performing these steps manually may introduce issues upon re-installation of Armoury Crate.

Lighting

The Chakram X has three physical and nine logical lighting zones: scroll wheel, logo at the back, and the light bar at the front, the latter of which consists of seven individual zones. Nine pre-defined lighting effects are available in the software: Static (single color), Pulsating (single color), Color Cycle, Reactive, Rainbow, Comet, Partition (alternating between zones), Battery, which indicates the current charge status in three different colors, and AURA Sync, which synchronizes the lighting with any other connected AURA-enabled devices. Additionally, AURA Creator may be used to create a custom lighting effect that is then synchronized with other devices. Setting custom colors and adjusting the brightness is possible for most effects. 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 go through the Rainbow, Color Cycle, and Pulsating lighting effects:

Battery Life

ASUS states a maximum battery life of up to 150 hours using Bluetooth and up to 114 hours in 2.4 GHz wireless operation without illumination for each. The polling rate is unspecified, though it is reasonable to assume that 1000 Hz is used for 2.4 GHz and 133 Hz for Bluetooth, the latter of which is host-controlled and the highest possible value. Armoury Crate includes a percentage-based battery life indicator seemingly using increments of 1%. After continually using the Chakram X with the default ROG switches, full RGB at 50% brightness, and set to 1000 Hz in 2.4 GHz mode for roughly 8 hours, the battery showed a status of 85%. Assuming a near-linear consumption rate, the Chakram X therefore could be expected to clear 50 hours of battery life with illumination enabled.

Using the included USB Type-A to Type-C charging cable, I've measured the charging speed of the Chakram X during the constant current (bulk) stage to be around 0.201 A. The battery has a capacity of 1250 mAh.