Software

MSI Dragon Center has been replaced by MSI Center, which is a fully UWP-integrated app available through the Microsoft Store. Modules for the mouse or RGB lighting have to be downloaded and installed separately. While largely functional, MSI Center looks quite basic and not fully finished yet in some places, as some options are presented in a needlessly convoluted manner. In addition, MSI Center spawns upwards of ten background processes which are running regardless of whether MSI Center is set to auto-start, and there is no easy or convenient way of shutting them down. Furthermore, MSI Center has a certain fondness for entering infinite loading screens or just plain crashing.

All functions are distributed across two tabs. The first one has button remapping to mouse, CPI, and macro functions. The second tab allows one to adjust CPI for five levels at a range of 100 to 26,000 CPI in increments of 100, despite increments of 50 being supported by the sensor on the hardware level. Furthermore, options for polling rate (125, 250, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000, or 8000 Hz), lift-off distance (low/high), angle snapping (on/off), and MotionSync (on/off) are present. Profile management is available, too.

When applied, all settings are saved to the on-board memory, so the software does not need to be running (or be installed) all the time. On my system, the software has a RAM footprint of around 149 MB on average when running in the foreground, which is reduced to 105 MB when minimized to the taskbar and 102 MB when minimized to the system tray, along with a moderate CPU time cost. Upon exiting the application, a multitude of processes with a RAM footprint of 72 MB keep running. In order to fully and safely uninstall MSI Center, running the dedicated MSI Center Uninstall tool is recommended.

Lighting

The Clutch GM51 Lightweight has three physical lighting zones, which are the logo at the back and two zones on the sides. A total of seven pre-defined lighting effects are available in the software: Steady, Breath, Color Cycle, Wave, Reactive, Dance, and Radar, accompanied by the ability to create a custom effect. For most effects, it is possible to set custom colors and adjust brightness. Of course, disabling the lighting altogether is also possible.

Color accuracy and vibrancy are excellent throughout. Here's a short demonstration video in which I demonstrate the default "Wave" lighting effect: