Software

iCUE, Corsair's all-in-one driver software, controls the settings for the M65 RGB Elite. It's rather heavyweight, but thankfully doesn't seem to be cloud-based since it didn't ask for registration or logging in by default.

The software seems to be very well designed. However, I think it's a bit cluttered and offers too much. In my opinion, there should be a specific "travel" driver for each mouse and keyboard with no sync, dashboards, or anything like that. Again, this is my personal opinion. In my reviews, I always only cover the mouse-specific settings of these all-in-one software drivers. At the top right is a Settings button, which contains the polling rate, on-board memory cleaning, lighting brightness, and firmware update options. The top left area contains a small window that contains the profiles, of which you can create an endless number as far as I can tell. These can be linked to trigger on specific executable launches as well.

Below the profiles, you can access the main setting tabs. The Actions tab contains all the button mapping and macro creating functions, which are again unlimited. Next is the Lighting tab you can read about in the lighting subheading below. The DPI tab has the CPI settings (DPI is the wrong term as it means dots per inch while it should be counts per inch). There are six available stages, including the sniper setting. You can set a default value and even turn off all stages except for one if you feel like. You can set different colors to these CPI levels, which will light up between the two CPI buttons on the mouse.

The Performance tab doesn't have many options, and honestly, I would have put the polling rate options here instead of the Settings menu. You can find the option to turn on angle snapping here, as well as the two basic Windows options. Lastly, Surface Calibration offers the possibility to change the lift-off distance according to the surface the mouse is being used on. I would suggest using this function because the mouse has a high LOD by default.

The Corsair iCUE software consumes around 20 MB of memory while running in the background and takes up a staggering 410 MB of disk space in my configuration. Once you set everything up, you can simply uninstall it if you don't want it installed because the mouse has on-board memory.

Lighting

RGB lighting options are vast on the M65 RGB Elite, which features two programmable lighting zones—the rear Corsair logo and two lines on the scroll wheel light up according to the settings. There are a lot of different effects and settings, but let the pictures and the video do the talking. You can also sync the lighting settings with other Corsair devices. All lighting effects look bright and vivid, and the transitions are very smooth.