Software

I'll be honest here: Prior to reviewing this mouse, I dreaded even the mere thought of having to install Armoury Crate. But this time around, the experience turned out to be worse than ever. While the installation went through smoothly, the mouse simply wouldn't be recognized by Armoury Crate, and due to being a modular design, a device-specific module needs to be installed first before one is able to use a device. This wasn't possible, so using Armoury Crate wasn't possible, either. I was left helpless until one day, through a random application update, Armoury Crate magically fixed itself and suddenly recognized the mouse properly. Having gotten past this hurdle, I can report some progress at least: 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 as a whole is less time intensive and laborious even though best results are still achieved when no ASUS device is connected. Furthermore, the RAM footprint has been trimmed down a bit. On a side note, Black Ops 4 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 (100–16,000 CPI, increments of 100, four steps), polling rate (125, 250, 500, or 1000 Hz), button response time (12–32 ms, in increments of 4), and angle snapping (on/off). Theoretically, the 3389 would allow for increments of 50 CPI, so the restriction to increments of 100 CPI is an artificial one. Lighting settings 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 can then be fine-tuned manually by adjusting the high/low selection. Some caution is advised when selecting the Balteus and Balteus Qi surfaces set to "low," as these will result in the sensor no longer tracking on a regular cloth pad. ASUS is currently looking into solutions to provide users a recovery option. Performing a manual calibration may lower LOD beyond the default. Lastly, profile management and a macro editor are 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 170 MB on average when running in the foreground and 60 MB when minimized. Upon exiting the application, several processes with a RAM footprint of 50 MB keep running. Please note that the amount of active processes and their associated RAM footprint will depend on one's system configuration.

In order to ease uninstalling Armoury Crate, ASUS has released a tool specifically for that. Using this tool instead of uninstalling all modules of Armoury Crate 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've made the observation that in some cases, not only scheduled tasks, but also several services manage to escape the grasp of 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, noting their short names is in order. Then, open an elevated command prompt and enter "sc delete servicename" without the 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 Keris has two lighting zones: scroll wheel and logo at the back. Six pre-defined lighting effects are available in the software: 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 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 modes: