Software

Moving on to the software, Cooler Master Portal is a program I would love to see improved a little bit. It's not bad, but heavyweight, and sometimes doesn't make perfect sense. Overall, it still provides a good user experience and is rather intuitive to use. Starting on the first page, we can access the button-mapping settings. You can set the main buttons, scroll wheel, and CPI-button on the top view, and the D-pad with the side view, which can be changed in the top-right corner. There's a handy function called Tactix, which is basically a function modifier key; you can configure a whole new layer of buttons that can be accessed after pressing and holding the Tactix key down (which can be rebound to different buttons, too. It's on the top side button by default).

Next up is the Performance tab, where all the sensor settings can be fiddled with. You can set the resolution, polling rate, angle snapping (again, I'd advise against using it), as well as some OS-settings. The button-response time can also be set here—I highly recommend using the lowest value of 4 ms.

The OLED page, as its name might suggest, lets you fiddle around with the little screen on the left side of the mouse. You can totally customize it, from showing actual mouse settings or CPU and RAM usage, along with more pre-defined settings. You can also create your own bitmap images to be shown on the screen. All these, including the custom settings, can be set to be rotated through at a specific cycle speed.

Macros can be accessed via the Macros page, and you can pretty much create an endless number of these as far as I could tell. There are different ways to execute them; they can run once, loop while their button is held down or toggle to loop. There are a total of four profiles available, and as far as I could tell, there's no way of deleting or adding more. You can link them to programs and import and export their settings as well. You can activate these profiles via mouse buttons if you set them to do so in the Buttons tab.

The program doesn't minimize to the system tray; it consumes 150 MB of memory in the foreground and takes up 284 MB of disk space on my configuration. After setting everything up, you can even delete the software as the mouse has built-in memory that saves all the settings.

Lighting

16.7 million vivid, bright and amazing-looking colors with a myriad of lighting settings and a lot of customization options, and all four lighting zones can be individually controlled, which means all can have different effects, brightness levels, and colors, of course. The palm rest's main zone has six sub-zones, which too can be controlled individually. Cooler Master has really done it this time even though the great look doesn't justify the affect these LEDs have on the polling rate.

As for the effects themselves, there are a lot of options to choose from, starting with the usual ones—static lighting, breathing, and color cycle—and moving to some Cooler Master-specific ones, like stars and sky. I made a video in order to demonstrate these effects, but trust me, they look way better in real life. My camera can't quite capture them properly.