Software

The software driver for the CORSAIR K65 Plus Wireless is called iCUE and the installer can be found on the downloads page here. The latest public iCUE version at the time of testing was 5.12.97. If you haven't used iCUE recently, CORSAIR has finally addressed one of my biggest complaints about how bloated it had become. What you now get is a 3-4 MB installer that detects all the compatible hardware connected to your PC and then installs only those "modules" as necessary. This means that the same software drivers that took well over 1 GB before and were occasionally taxing even on my decent PC, are now taking up ~450 MB and are far more efficient on system resources in general. This is a very welcome change that I suspect will also please many others who had the same issues with iCUE. Keep in mind that the final install size thus depends on how many devices you have and the vast majority of users are likely to have fewer than I do.


There was no firmware update available for this keyboard which itself is not a surprise given how new it is. I did check for any updates either way and iCUE promptly confirmed everything was up-to-date. We now get a look at iCUE in its latest iteration, which we have seen multiple times already by now. I did a clean install for this review, so I noticed all the helpful cues pop up to help lower the entry barrier to newcomers—these can be toggled to appear again in the settings. Scaling with high DPI displays and Windows 11 worked flawlessly too, and another thing I noticed is the game library integrations that were "recommended" before no longer appear. Indeed, even the 3rd-party plug-in thumbnail/shortcut on the home page can be closed once to never come up again unless you want to. I like this trimmed down version of iCUE that is still just as functional as before where it matters!

As it pertains just to the keyboard, iCUE allows you to create and edit both software and hardware profiles with the latter being stored on the keyboard up to a maximum of four. Those with multiple compatible devices can also make use of easy synchronized lighting separately, although the most options will be found on the device-specific page. These include key assignments with a vast plethora of options to choose from and stack as desired in addition to the lighting options ranging from preset effects and custom per-key lighting. There is a specific toggle for "memory mode" which effectively locks down the keyboard from being re-programmed by others. The Performance and Device Settings sections are self-explanatory so let me instead talk briefly about the Control Dial section which we saw before with the K70 CORE and allows you to customize what the rotary knob in the top right corner does. It's set for volume control by default and I suspect most people will not even bother changing it. But those who prefer it to do, say, vertical or horizontal scrolling, zooming in/out, or even controlling the LED brightness can allow for those modes to be active and then cycle through these modes using a simple Fn key shortcut. I've said it before, and I will say it again—iCUE is now much better to use and is back to being a strong feature of CORSAIR peripherals, enough to justify a small price increase over Asian keyboards with dodgy software support in my books.