Software

The software driver for the CORSAIR K70 CORE is called iCUE and the installer can be found on the downloads page here. Normally, I would use the latest public version supporting the product, but with embargo releases, it tends to be an advanced version sent to the media before the public release, in this case iCUE version 5.7. 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 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 ~430 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 a firmware update available for the keyboard which iCUE promptly alerted me to. The update process took under a minute and I highly encourage everyone do so whenever there is one available. 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 K70 CORE, 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 five. 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. The "hardware" versions of both tell you which options can be stored on the hardware profiles themselves. The Performance and Device Settings tabs are fairly self explanatory so let me instead talk briefly about the new Control Dial section which allows you to customize what the rotary knob on 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 as we'll see on the next page. All these options may yet be a lot for customers to handle and, as you may have noticed in the video, this current release seems to have a weird bug about the lighting effects being shared between the two keyboards I had simultaneously in use. CORSAIR is now aware of this and working on a fix although I can't fault them since no one realistically would have two keyboards in use simultaneously, let alone two that presumably share the same controller and similar software controller ID.