Software

The only hurdle involved in getting Armoury Crate up and running this time around was the sheer time investment required. After several rounds of installing and updating, no less than 30 minutes had passed, which is substantial.

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 (100–8000 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. The third page has lighting options and is detailed below. The fourth page houses options related to adjusting lift-off distance. Aside from performing a manual calibration, one can choose between various surface presets, which then can be fine-tuned using a low/high selection. Lastly, profile management and a macro editor are available as well. In addition, a function called 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.

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 264 MB on average when running in the foreground and 51 MB when minimized. Upon exiting the application, several processes with a RAM footprint of 51 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 M3 Gen II has a single zone for RGB lighting, which are the logo and strip at the back. A total of four pre-defined lighting effects are available: Static, Pulsating, Color Cycle, and Reactive, along with the option to synchronize the lighting with other AuraSync-enabled devices. Color and brightness can be adjusted on most effects. Of course, disabling the lighting altogether is also possible.

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