Software

As the full product name indicates, the CORSAIR LT100 lighting towers are compatible with their iCUE software drivers. You can find the installer on this page, and version 3.30.89 was the latest public release available at the time of testing. The installer takes up 382 MB, with the installed version taking up much more than that, as we have seen before in other CORSAIR product reviews.



Once installed, and with the LT100 towers connected to iCUE through the USB cable, the towers are immediately recognized, and the starter kit listed on the homepage. Note that additional towers are only seen on the device-specific control page, so do not be alarmed if you see none of your expansion kits anywhere. Indeed, as we saw before with other compatible CORSAIR products, this is where you can use the Instant Lighting function to have every connected product light up in the same static color of choice without creating a profile. The settings tab allows for global brightness control over all the LT100 towers collectively, as well as firmware updating when applicable.

As expected, the device-specific controls are all about lighting. It is when you click on the product thumbnail and go to the lighting setup page that all connected LT100 towers show up. You can then move them around depending on your actual physical setup, as not everyone will have their PC tower or laptop and AC adapter point in the same layout. Lighting Effects takes you to a familiar page if you have used iCUE before, with the ability to customize a plethora of static and dynamic lighting effects globally, as well as on a per-LED basis. There are 26 LEDs in each tower and another 20 in each base, which makes for a maximum of 184 individually controllable dRGB LEDs if you go with four towers. By default, the Super X demo lighting effect is in use, which allows for a mixture of various different lighting effects in sequence. Hardware playback is enabled on the towers by holding the LED control button for two seconds, which goes through the eleven stored effects. These are simpler relative to the more complicated ones available in the software, which of course only work while iCUE is active.

Lighting

Here is a look at the CORSAIR LT100 lighting towers powered on and lit up. Again, excuse the absence of a setup involving a desktop PC, as that is no doubt how potential customers would want to use these. I only had a laptop and a hotel room to work with, which did provide a different context, especially with three towers to play around with. Indeed, scenarios that will work with a desktop workstation and three towers are limited, and having them together or with one on either side of the display and another behind would be better. The LEDs are also quite bright at 100%, and orienting the towers away from you and towards a wall can provide for a more subtle and literally less in-your-face user experience. The reversible connectors in the tower unit help with this, and you do not have to worry about having the cables show from the side or front. Having hardware playback is also nice for testing how all of this would work outside of a PC environment, although I would have definitely liked a longer cable to position the three towers further apart. This is no doubt a power and data limitation, with CORSAIR wanting to be on the safer side. iCUE adds in more lighting effects, as well as sub-controls for each effect, allowing for a sequential light show that works within the LT100 tower setup and in conjunction with other iCUE-related products. The LEDs themselves support 16.8 M RGB colors with a color update rate of up to 25 times per second without any noticeable flickering, which results in smooth transitions between colors and effects.

Not everything is sweet as honey here, however. Some of the effects simply do not translate as well as the virtual versions in iCUE would lead you to believe. "Rain" in particular leaves much to be desired, and the various ambient lighting effects are hit or miss. Video lighting, for example, takes your display output as an example source and attempts to provide ambient lighting similar to Philips Ambilight, arguably the most famous example of bias lighting to date. In practice, these lighting effects perform poorly with the LT100 towers and iCUE version 3.30.89, at least with my laptop as the source and the default setting of edge colors being replicated. In addition, depending on your system specs, CPU utilization for these doubles to quadruples, as per my own findings and those of a few others I am aware of. While still not a lot overall, it all adds up. For a product that is all about lighting, there is much less leeway when it comes to RGB lighting, so keep that in mind. Audio lighting did work better, but the changes here can be far too quick to be pleasant for long.