Software

The Scimitar RGB Elite is fully compatible with Corsair's staple software suite, Corsair iCUE. It's a highly capable software with a rich selection of customization options and programming functions, but not too intuitive to navigate. Here's a quick rundown of the most important functions. The "Settings" tab in the top bar contains both the iCUE and device settings, including polling rate, lighting brightness, onboard memory clearance, and the firmware update function. I'm not entirely sure why brightness isn't part of the lighting settings. Changing the polling rate is also a bit of a hassle as the whole device needs to be restarted every time the setting is changed.

To the left are several extendable menus. The first is "Actions," which allows one to record and execute highly sophisticated macros. My experience with macro editors is limited, but from what I've seen this is one of the most powerful—double macros can be created, too. The second menu is called "Lighting" and detailed further below. The third menu, "DPI," offers CPI adjustment for up to five color-coded levels and ranges from 100 to 18,000 CPI, in increments of 1 CPI. X and y-sensitivity can be set independently, and a dedicated sniper button is configurable as well. "Performance," the fourth menu, includes Windows pointer settings, an on/off-toggle for angle snapping, and three LOD presets to choose from, along with the option to perform a manual surface calibration in the fifth menu.

As for the onboard memory, it's a bit complicated. When making any setting changes that are tied to profiles (e.g., CPI levels), these are only saved to iCUE. Hence, upon exiting iCUE, any affected profile-dependent settings revert to the default. In order to save changes to the mouse, one of three pre-defined hardware profiles needs to be selected and changed, and the changes need to be saved to the hardware profile by overwriting it. It's not exactly self-explanatory, and a simple "Save to Device" button that performs these actions automatically would be quite handy. Granted, most people will run iCUE anyway for easy access to their macros. That having been said, macros can be saved to hardware profiles and work without iCUE, so having iCUE running all the time isn't required for macro usage.

On my system, the software had a RAM footprint of 470 MB on average, which is massive even when keeping the vast functionality of iCUE in mind. This only applies as long as iCUE isn't minimized to the system tray, however. When minimized to the system tray, RAM consumption goes down to roughly 200 MB in total. Furthermore, even upon terminating iCUE, several processes with a RAM footprint of 45 MB keep running.

Lighting

The Scimitar RGB Elite has five zones for RGB lighting: scroll wheel, logo at the back, "grill" at the front, side panel, and the CPI indicator. Through the software, it is possible to customize these zones independently of each other, either with custom or pre-defined lighting effects. The CPI indicator can only be set to static colors, however. The pre-defined lighting effects are too many to list and describe here. There are 13 different lighting effects in total, including shift, blink, gradient, and pulse effects, many of which can be further adjusted in terms of transition speed, direction, and color palette. Of course, it is also possible to disable the lighting altogether.

Color accuracy and vibrancy are excellent throughout. Here's a short demonstration video of the "Rainbow," "Spiral Rainbow," and "Visor" lighting effects: