Software

While the original Strix Impact II still launched during the days of trusty old Armoury II, the Moonlight White relies on Armoury Crate, where it even shows up as a new SKU. Regular readers will know that I have an undying detest for Armoury Crate, and of course, I was not disappointed in that sentiment. Before installation would even commence, Armoury Crate wanted me to restart my system. After that, the installation still took a decent while, but ultimately succeeded. After launching Armoury Crate, another round of updating for connected devices was in order. At last, after just 20 minutes of installation action, Armoury Crate could finally be used. Unfortunately, Armoury Crate still has the habit of randomly discovering new updates, so be prepared for several extra rounds of update action.

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 (200–6200 CPI, increments of 100, four steps), polling rate (125, 250, 500, or 1000 Hz), and angle snapping (on/off). Furthermore, the Button Response Time setting makes a return, allowing for adjusting click latency from 12 to 32 ms in increments of 4. The third page includes lighting settings and is detailed below.

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 231 MB on average when running in the foreground and 101 MB when minimized. Upon exiting the application, several processes with a RAM footprint of 100 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 not only scheduled tasks, but also several services sometimes 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 Strix Impact II Moonlight White has three zones for RGB lighting: scroll wheel, logo at the back, and the "grille" at the front. Whereas Armoury II allowed one to operate these zones independently, Armoury Crate does not. Instead, one can choose one of five pre-defined lighting effects, which are Static, Pulsating, Color Cycle, Reactive, and Partition, along with the option to synchronize the lighting with other AuraSync-enabled devices. Color and brightness can be adjusted on most effects. Of course, the lighting also can be disabled altogether.

Color accuracy and vibrancy are excellent throughout. Here's a short demonstration video of the Breathing and Color Cycle lighting effects: