Software

For once, installing Armoury Crate gave me no trouble. Of course, installation took quite a while, but everything worked once installation was complete.

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 (125, 250, 500, or 1000 Hz), 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 -30 to 30 degrees, accompanied by a basic acceleration/deceleration function. 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.

In lieu of Armoury Crate, the Harpe Ace also allows for basic on-board configuration. Using various button combinations, the four default CPI steps of 400, 800, 1600, and 3200 can be further adjusted with the scroll wheel in increments of 50. Furthermore, polling rate and lift-off distance too are adjustable. If needed, a full reset to factory defaults is also possible.

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 309 MB on average when running in the foreground and 114 MB when minimized. Upon exiting the application, several processes with a RAM footprint of 114 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 Harpe Ace has but a single lighting zone, which is the scroll wheel. Six pre-defined lighting effects are available in the software: Static (single color), Pulsating (single color), Color Cycle, Reactive, 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 99 hours using Bluetooth and up to 90 hours in 2.4 GHz wireless operation without illumination, and up to 79 hours and 70 hours with illumination, respectively. 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 with single-digit accuracy, which is reliable and accurate. After continually using the Harpe Ace with Color Cycle RGB at 50% brightness and set to 1000 Hz in 2.4 GHz mode for roughly 6 hours, the battery showed a status of 90%. Assuming a near-linear consumption rate, the Harpe Ace therefore could be expected to clear 60 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 Harpe Ace during the constant current (bulk) stage to be around 0.336 A. The battery has a capacity of 300 mAh.