Software

My strong dislike of Armoury Crate is probably no secret by now. Still, things went down comparatively smoothly during my time with the Gladius III Wireless. As already mentioned in the Gladius III review, Armoury Crate no longer requires several restarts during and immediately after the installation process; instead, only installing a device-specific module necessitates a single system restart. The installation process is less time-intensive and laborious as a whole, but best results are still achieved when no ASUS device is connected. Furthermore, the RAM footprint has been trimmed down a bit. As a side note, Black Ops 4 still instantly crashes for me as long as Armoury Crate is installed.

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 (100–26,000 CPI, increments of 50, four steps), polling rate (125, 250, 500, or 1000 Hz), and angle snapping (on/off). The button response time slider has been retired. CPI adjustment is done through a slider, which can get quite finicky due to the range being so large. ASUS has informed me that improvements to CPI adjustment are being worked on, including the ability to manually enter values. Unlike on other 3370 implementations, CPI adjustment in increments of 50 is possible across the entire range instead of only up to 10,000 CPI. The third page has lighting settings, which are detailed below. The fourth page houses LOD adjustment options. Through a recent update, ASUS has disentangled these a bit. By default, the "no calibration" preset is active. Furthermore, 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. For the Gladius III Wireless, ASUS also introduces a new feature called Rapid Fire. 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 244 MB on average when running in the foreground and 124 MB when minimized. Upon exiting the application, several processes with a RAM footprint of 96 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 their 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.

Lighting

The Gladius III Wireless has three lighting zones: scroll wheel, logo at the back, and several lines of text on the left side. 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 Pulsating and Color Cycle lighting effects:

Battery Life

ASUS states a maximum battery life of up to 55 hours without RGB illumination, and up to 31 hours with RGB in 2.4 GHz wireless operation. For Bluetooth, 85 hours of battery life without RGB illumination and 42 hours with RGB are cited. No details are provided about which polling rate has been used in 2.4 GHz mode to achieve these numbers. Another unanswered question is to which degree the included optical switches negatively affect battery life. Due to the way optical switches work, it is reasonable to assume that battery life suffers, but ASUS makes no indications to which degree. Armoury Crate includes a percentage-based battery life indicator with single-digit granularity. After continually using the Gladius III Wireless with the default ROG switches, full RGB at 50% brightness, and set to 1000 Hz in 2.4 GHz mode for roughly 11 hours, the battery showed a status of 62%. Assuming a near-linear consumption rate, the numbers provided by ASUS are thus at least within the realm of possibility. The battery has a capacity of 470 mAh.

Using the included USB Type-A to Type-C charging cable, I've measured the charging speed of the Gladius III Wireless during the constant current (bulk) stage to be around 0.440 A.