Software

The Corsair iCUE software didn't change much since my last Corsair mice reviews. This means it's rather heavyweight, but very well designed. It looks sleek, doesn't have any bugs I could detect, and is fast. However, some of its options could be better organized.

Once you select the device you want to fiddle with, the main screen opens up its profile settings. You can link profiles to specific applications, trigger them with actions, and even give them your own icons. Clicking on the Settings button at the top of the window takes you to the device settings consisting of dongle and battery settings, as well as firmware updating. You could change the polling rate here, but that option is unavailable. Main program preferences are at the bottom of this window. Moving on to the Actions tab, it has all the button-mapping options, accessible after pressing the plus icon on the upper bar. Naturally, you can create and execute macros, change all the button settings, and choose from a ton of key press actions here. The DPI tab contains the resolution options, and you set up to 3+1 CPI levels or disable any you don't need. I first thought you can add a color code to each step, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The Performance page only contains angle snapping and Windows-related options, plus the option to pick which color is used for profile indication. Lastly, you can set the lift-off distance in the Surface Calibration tab, which is a very useful feature.

Corsair iCUE roughly takes up 552 MB of disk space and consumes 130 MB of memory in my configuration. It's definitely not lightweight, so if you'd like, you can delete the software after setting everything up as the mouse has built-in memory for its settings.

Lighting

RGB lighting is definitely one of the Ironclaw's strong suits. It has three individually controllable zones—namely, the scroll wheel, rear logo, and front panels. There's a vast amount of lighting customization available, and you can synchronize the lighting with other Corsair devices that have the function enabled.

I made a video to demonstrate these lighting effects: