Software and Aura RGB Lighting System

I've got a bit of a history with the Asus Aura, the RGB system they use on motherboards, graphics cards, and apparently every other piece of hardware you can slap a "Gaming" sticker on, including this microphone.


First, I got the Asus ROG STRIX X99 Gaming motherboard. The Aura software allowed me to adjust the color of the four RGB lighting zones on the motherboard - the back I/O, central "ROG" logo, PCI Express slots, and RGB LED strip, which I plugged into the built-in header.


A couple months later, I got the Asus ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1080 OC, a graphics card that's also equipped with the Aura RGB lighting system. It required me to install a different version of the Aura software in addition to the one that was already installed for the motherboard. Even though I had the option to run this secondary version of the Aura software separately to only adjust the RGB zones of the graphics card, the graphics card itself was also added to the "main" iteration of the Aura RGB software - the one I had originally installed for the motherboard. The GPU simply showed up as another device in the interface.


Then, the Asus ROG Strix Magnus microphone landed on my table and along with it - you guessed it - yet another, third version of the Aura RGB software. If you look at my program files folder at this moment, you'll notice three different Aura RGB subfolders, each with its own files and appropriate .exe.


Unfortunately, the RGB controls of the microphone didn't magically show up in the motherboard's iteration of the Aura RGB software. The only way for me to control the RGB lighting of the ROG Strix Magnus microphone is to do it through its own Aura RGB app, the one in the AURA (Peripheral) subfolder. There, I can choose the effect (Static, Breathing, Color Cycle), turn on an option for the lights to blink to the beat of the music, pick the color, and determine its brightness. The color itself is picked from a wheel, and there's no way to set it up via a Hex file or RGB code (0-255), so if there's a certain shade of a certain unusual color you normally prefer, you might have a hard time setting it up just the way you want it.

There's another problem. As it turns out, whatever change I made in the AURA (Peripheral) app also applied to my graphics card, both in terms of the selected color and its brightness. If I set the RGB lights on the microphone to red, the graphics card would switch to red as well. Same was true for white, green, yellow, blue, and every other color. The solution was to set the microphone's color first to then fire up the Aura RGB app located in the AURA (GRAPHICS CARD) subfolder and change the color of the lights on the graphics card. What a mess.

Perhaps, I wouldn't mind it all that much if the RGB lighting system on the microphone were spectacularly nice to look at, but it simply isn't. The RGB LEDs are built into the back, where they light up the ROG logo and two thin stripes, and there's another, small one on the bottom of the microphone. That's the only one you'll get any practical use from simply because it will tell you that the microphone is working properly. You'll never even see the zones located on the rear, not even if you push the microphone all the way up to the wall, because their intensity isn't high enough to be able to light up a portion of the wall, or even the table the microphone is sitting on.


As I've already mentioned, it would be great if the bottom LED changed the color when you mute the microphone, but it doesn't.


You can also completely turn off the Aura RGB system on the microphone, if everything I mentioned sounds like it could bother you. I don't find it ugly or annoying; in fact, I kept it on at all times. However, don't expect a spectacle of lights, and don't let it be the main reason why you're considering this microphone in the first place, especially since it has multiple other, far more important qualities.