Driver

The driver for Corsair keyboards, including the K95 Platinum, is the same as for any of their software-supported peripherals - the Corsair Utility Engine (CUE). The current version of CUE, 2.8.70 at the time of this review, can be downloaded here.


Its installation is fairly straightforward, and be aware that it takes up ~280-300 MB on your hard drive with any imported profiles included. When you open it the first time with the keyboard connected, you will see an icon for it in the devices list at the top:


Click on it and a prompt comes up if the keyboard has had a firmware update since it was shipped - something I am now used to with newly released units. My firmware update was buggy, though, taking two tries before it flashed on properly. The first time it gave no error, but CUE kept crashing anytime I tried to save a profile or edit any lighting modes. In case you have similar issues, hold down Page Up and Page Down before plugging the keyboard's USB port into the PC while holding them down. This will reset the keyboard and allows you to flash the firmware again.


Assuming you have highlighted the keyboard, you are now on a page where Actions, Lighting, and Performance tabs open up. If you have used CUE 2.x before, this will all look very familiar.


Actions is where you make use of the keyboard's full programmability. Set up macros, reassign buttons, including the media buttons, or even set a timer, which, once it has run its course, will trigger a sound playback or a lighting change on the keyboard.


Layers is the name of the game in CUE 2.x, and nowhere more so than in the lighting menu. By default, you will be in basic mode, which makes preset animation schemes available. Choose as many layers as you want in software profile mode and save that profile for later. Note that you will need CUE to run for any software profiles to work, however.



The two (well, three if you count the part where I accidentally had two spiral rainbows active) animation modes can be seen in the videos above. The light bar is quite striking, and I like how it becomes a part of these animations so naturally. As with any RGB LED, the color white is not true to color here, and perhaps RGBW will be the next trend to catch on.

If this is too much work, you can just import profiles others created for the device. Check out Corsair's RGB Share, which is now also integrated in CUE if you go into the profile section and choose the search profiles option as seen below:


Alternatively, if you fancied something with more control, you would have noticed in the video above that I had to toggle between basic and advanced lighting modes. You can create your own advanced lighting modes by simply toggling between modes with the big button to the right of the devices list as seen below:


Here is how that gradient looks on the keyboard:



Hardware profiles can do most of these, but you are, as mentioned before, limited to one basic and five advanced layers with these lighting options. Do not forget to save the profile to the device before disconnecting or closing CUE. I am unable to demonstrate this since Corsair made it so that the hardware profiles do not work if a CUE-based software profile is active, meaning all my existing software profiles would have to be removed for that to be shown. This was done so people would not have yet another toggle between their hardware and software profiles, akin to swapping between basic and advanced lighting modes. But you can still create, edit, and save hardware profiles to the device, so there are no complaints from my end. This is not a review of CUE itself, I will limit myself here. I will also add that as of January 23, 2017, the K95 Platinum is having some extreme macro-execution issues wherein macros will not execute as expected. Corsair is aware of this issue and is working on it, and they did say it is affecting a very small number of systems. I tested it on two identical rigs and experienced both sides of the coin - I had macro-execution errors on one and absolutely none on the other, so it really is a matter of luck as far as I can tell.