Driver

This is where I have conflicting feelings about how Cooler Master went about things. Allow me to walk you through my experience. The manual simply states that the software driver is available on the product page, and that it can be had here if you click on the Download tab. However, do so and a pop-up window with the links to the soft copies of the manual, a product sheet, and two different software installers appears. The first is for Cooler Master Portal and, at the time of review, the latest version available was 1.0. The installer is 9.4 MB in size and takes up 32.5 MB once installed. The installation is pretty straightforward, as seen above, and is light on system resources. However, Cooler Master Portal is not actually the driver for the keyboard at all.


With the keyboard connected, Cooler Master Portal opens and recognizes it immediately as a device it also displays on the left with some more options available once selected. Portal is essentially a hub to keep track of all software-supported Cooler Master peripherals, and here, you can then select the only option available - Install - to actually install the driver.


Portal downloads the installer, which is the second software installer we saw on the product page, and initiates the installation process as seen above. This installer is 74.7 MB in size and takes up 114 MB when installed. This too is light on system resources, and its installation takes up a larger portion of your display than even that for Portal, which was unexpected, but appreciated by many.


We are not done yet! With the driver installed, Portal and the driver both recognized a firmware update was available for the keyboard and prompted me to do what is shown above. Once done, you do not have to disconnect and re-connect the keyboard as with some others.


Portal now gives you the option to start the driver or uninstall it, and when you hit start, the driver opens up separately in a new window with there being two Cooler Master icons occupying your task bar/system tray. Cooler Master could have gone about things in many different ways, and they chose to do it in this specific manner that would have worked much better with a simple explanation of how to go about things. I had originally downloaded both installers because I was not sure what each was, and here is my suggestion - if you only have a single peripheral with software support, skip Portal entirely. You can just download and install the driver, which works perfectly fine by itself. If you have more than a Cooler Master device with a driver, Portal can be handy, but here is also where I urge Cooler Master to instead unify the individual device drivers into a single package. Even Roccat's method of installing modules in a single driver is better than this, and the user experience as it stands thus far has the potential to drive customers towards the competition instead.

With driver installation done and the firmware updated, let's go through the driver in more detail. In this video, I go through the settings, which just alert you to the software version, 1.11 in this case. It and the keyboard's firmware were also the latest as I was putting together this review. There is also a drop-down menu to quickly toggle between the profiles for the keyboard. The first tab in the driver is named "LED" and is all about lighting. The virtual keyboard on screen also shows the three side-lighting options in addition to the per-key backlighting, which is nice to see. There are multiple modes to choose from on the left, with each mode having further customization options, including color, direction of the effect, and speed of transition (in five steps). You have individual R/G/B channel control for 256 brightness steps each, which thus gives you the promised 16.8 M colors available. The custom mode is where you go for per-key static lighting, multi-zone mode is where you can assign multiple different effects to the same profile (four slots available here), and system status mode has two cool effects, including an equalizer and a CPU utilization visualizer. At the same time, I do not recall specifically granting permission for the driver to get that information from my system either. For those who care, no data was transferred out of my system due to the driver, if such is a concern.

The next tab is for creating and allocating macros, and it is as complete as I could have asked for. You can record long macros, edit keystrokes, edit the delay between keystrokes, and allocate them to specific keys. No complaints here, but if there was something I would like to see, it would be the ability to add missed keystrokes post-recording.

The Key Map tab is even simpler since all you can do is disable or re-assign keys to another function on the keyboard. The previous tab allowed the assignment of macros, so here, I would have liked to see the option to assign keys to other things, including computer tasks; opening a specific application, for example. As it is, the tab's name quite literally describes the scope of functionality available here.

The final tab is on the profiles themselves, and knowing these four are saved on the device means you do not have to worry about the absence of the driver once you set it up to your desire. This also goes well with Cooler Master adding in features to help with taking the keyboard from one place to another. One neat thing I noticed here was that the 1-4 keys on the actual keyboard (those with hotkeys assigned to profile switching) light up in order to indicate a driver-loading process visually.