Driver

The driver for the ASUS ROG Strix Flare keyboard is ROG Armoury and can be downloaded from their Downloads page. The latest version at the time of release was Armoury II in v3.00.16, and the installer downloads as a 170 MB archive that extracts to a folder which is 174 MB in size. As seen above, installation is simple, and perhaps too simple at that as there is no way to select an install directory, whether the end user wants a shortcut to the executable, or even whether we agree to any terms of service at all. This does come off as amateurish, especially for the last point, and hopefully, ASUS resolves this soon. ROG Armoury takes up ~350 MB on your storage drive and is a unified driver for all supported ASUS ROG peripherals.


Despite the installer suggesting a system reboot is needed first, it wasn't necessary with Windows 10. Opening the driver for the first time without the keyboard connected, we get a message on a blank slate telling us to connect a supported device. I would have liked the ability to still proceed through via "virtual" devices, if only to be able to create and customize lighting and key-mapped profiles to be shared with others. As it is, doing the same with the keyboard connected brings up a clean-looking homepage with what appears to be a row of compatible products depicted via thumbnails and names at the top, and product-specific options taking the vast majority of real estate at the bottom. These product-specific options are also laid out well via tabs, and the driver as a whole responds well to high DPI/scaling displays. As expected, the color scheme is the ROG red and black.

The settings menu allows you to check for and update the driver and keyboard firmware version. You can also change the language of the driver if English is not your preference, head over to the ROG forums/Facebook page, select startup, and auto-update options. I then skipped directly to the two last tabs specific to the keyboard, with the penultimate one being Aura Sync. It allows for the easy synchronization of lighting across compatible devices connected to your computer. Unfortunately, I have no other compatible device here, so there is nothing for me to demonstrate. The final tab is all about stats, and you can record how often you use specific keys if that interests you.

There are two game mode options with enable/disable Alt + Tab or Alt + F4, and a dedicated Win lock button on the keyboard itself. The ROG Strix Flare also supports six profiles, out of which five are configurable. These are saved to the device itself, which is where that 8 MB memory module we saw on the previous page comes into play. Key mapping is also fairly complete with a drop-down menu and further sub-menus of options to assign to keys of your choice. This enables you to, say, assign functions to Fn keys you may otherwise not use. On occasion, hitting the drop-down menu only brings up the first set of options, and I had to hit it again to get the entire list. This may be a bug in the driver, and I contacted ASUS for clarification, who in turn said they are working on a fix after being alerted to it. Getting the keyboard back to default does seem to take longer than it should, but it's no big deal really.

RGB lighting is a primary feature of the keyboard, and we get a lot of options in the driver. This includes, as per usual, a drop-down menu of different lighting effects to choose from. Each effect brings with it specific options depending on the nature of said effect. Dynamic effects, for example, have effect direction, speed, overall brightness and, in some cases, thickness. Thickness describes the fraction of keys lit up with the dynamic effect animations, with slim resulting in a bank of keys lit up while the others are dark as the effect travels in the chosen direction. Per-key lighting is possible too, and I do like the R/G/B/ individual wheels to easily pick the exact hue. That said, giving the ability to type in the brightness value for all three colors simultaneously would have made this simpler for those wanting it, and I would have also liked to see finer steps of control for LED brightness as a whole.

The Macros tab is where you can create, record, and edit macros. These options are not under the keyboard tab for a reason since they allow for other peripherals to come into play. For example, I created a macro involving mouse actions from my non-ASUS mouse ROG Armoury did not even see, and it combined well with the keystrokes from the ROG Strix Flare. Editing options are also pretty good here, with control over individual recordings, down to placement, delay, and multiple keystrokes. Once saved, the macro shows up as an assignable key map option in the key customize tab.