Software and Lighting

You might have already heard about Razer Synapse, Razer's all-in-one driver software for their products. The newest is the third edition, and we're talking about a fully cloud-based software you always have to log into your Razer account to use. This is quite ridiculous if you ask me, and I don't see any proper reason behind it. On the other hand, the program looks fantastic and is very fast, with some very sleek-looking transitions and smooth animations.

In the first tab, which is called Customize, are the button configuration settings. You can remap each button according to your preferences by adding macros, program launches, multimedia commands, and a lot of other functions. The Performance page has the sensor settings, of which there are not too many for this specific product—namely, the polling rate and resolution can be set here (and you can also open the Windows mouse settings over the shortcut).

Macros can be accessed on their corresponding page. You can create a vast number of these with a ton of different execution options. You can also create a lot of different profiles (I couldn't find the limit here, there might be none) and link them to activate on specific program launches to avoid manually switching between configurations.

Unfortunately, Razer Synapse is not at all lightweight as it takes up a staggering 414 MB of disk space and consumes over 170 MB of memory in the background on my configuration, and has quite a lot of different processes, too. As far as I can tell, there is no memory built into the mouse, so you have to have Synapse installed and running if you want to customize your Essential.


There aren't many lighting options on this mouse, which I guess is fine if you're not an eye-candy maniac. It has two zones of simple green lighting; the scroll wheel and rear Razer logo light up according to the settings you set. Static and breathing modes are available, or you can turn everything off if you'd like. You can also adjust the brightness from 1 to 100, in steps of 1, which is a very nice touch if you ask me. The photos above were taken on 25% brightness as my camera captures vivid lighting colors better this way.