Software

As expected from a flagship ROG peripheral, there are unified software drivers for the ROG Claymore II. In fact, there are actually two separate software drivers, but the primary one is ROG Armoury Crate (notice the "u" in Armoury), which can be found on the support tab of the product page. It supports Win 10 64-bit only and downloads as a compressed folder that is just 1.3 MB in size. There is an executable you can then choose to install Armoury Crate, AURA Creator, the second software program, or both. At this point, it starts downloading all the necessary components and installs the two without giving you any options at all. You are forced to abide by ASUS's chosen install directory, whether there will be any desktop shortcuts, any start menu items, or more. Not a great start here, ASUS!


When you first open up either ROG Armoury Crate or AURA Creator, you are greeted to the EULA. Seen above are the two steps to agree to in Armoury Crate before you can finally use it. Also note that ASUS Live Services is needed and has to be running in the background for them to work, especially for AURA Creator used to better synchronize compatible AURA lighting effects across ASUS products. This results in several installed programs in Windows, a total of seven even, for 408 MB combined, and more used CPU and RAM resources than I would like with everything running.


Both Armoury Crate and AURA Creator respond quite well to high DPI displays, which automatically makes the user experience better than many keyboard drivers I have had my hands on recently. Having a fully operational window that can be minimized, maximized, and resized is also something I will never take for granted again. Armoury Crate is where you will spend most of your time, at least when it comes to the software side of things, and there are three themes to choose from, which change the color scheme as well as certain other graphical elements. The ROG theme with the red and black colors is the default, and the TUF theme allows you to go with a yellow and black theme instead. The third is just called "ASUS" and makes for a cyan and black color scheme. Changing the theme requires a quick restart of Armoury Crate, which takes a couple of seconds at most.

The video above goes over using ROG Armoury Crate with the new ROG Claymore II, which clearly also illustrates how the ASUS ecosystem would work when synchronized through Armoury Crate. There are some basic options in Settings, including, as pointed out before, the ability to change the theme. I also had to do a few things before recording the video, including syncing profiles, which took more than a few minutes. In fact, that's really my main issue: Everything seems to take slightly longer than I would expect for software from a brand as large as ASUS. A few user experience tweaks would have also been appreciated, including cue tips. After a few minutes of testing, I also realized that I had to select the keyboard with AURA Sync to get any of the lighting effects to, well, take effect. Logically, AURA Sync would have me think it synchronizes the keyboard lighting with other compatible products, of which I have none. But ASUS does not seem to differentiate as I would. I would have also liked the inclusion of a virtual keyboard that depicts the various lighting effects, and there are fewer effects than I expected, too. More advanced effects require you to use AURA Creator, a completely separate program.

The other options pertaining to the keyboard are well laid out. Key mapping uses an actual virtual keyboard, with options over drop-down menus on the right covering just about every need. You might miss out on the hotkey customization possible with the four media keys on the numpad since they are laid out under the virtual keyboard separately rather than on the numpad as expected. There are up to six onboard profiles, each of which can be associated with another program or game on your system, as well as some system-level changes, including volume. Macro recording was not captured on video, but works very well, with easy recording and editing of each step and delay, as well as the insertion of keystrokes post-recording. There are a couple of generic menus, including ads for ASUS products, an actual game store for whatever reason (probably for VIP membership with registration), and product support.

AURA Creator works fine, but I was expecting more since I had to install a separate program for advanced lighting effects. All it does is allow for stacking lighting layers, with each layer chosen from those separately available before. It also allows for per-key lighting, and you can import/export the lighting profiles as well. I did see that error message pop up occasionally, which turned out to be due to a buggy install. I did a clean install and had things work as expected. I am not sure what happened the first time around, though!