Software

The Burst Core is compatible with ROCCAT Swarm, which is used for other ROCCAT devices as well. Though a bit crowded and dated in its design, Swarm leaves little to be desired in terms of functionality. All options are accessible through separate pages. The first of these includes the basic Windows pointer settings and CPI adjustment, which ranges from 200 to 8500 CPI in increments of 100 and for up to five levels. Values can be entered manually, but non-native inputs are truncated to native values, as they should be. Additionally, values for x and y-axis can be set separately. All buttons can be remapped to mouse, keyboard, or media functions, and EasyShift allows one to designate a shift button that can be pressed to access a second set of bindings. Further options include polling rate adjustment (125/250/500/1000 Hz). By default, LED sleep timer is enabled, which turns the lighting off after a set period of inactivity. In order to disable this option, "None" ought to be selected. Lastly, a macro editor and profile management are included as well. 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 had a RAM footprint of 65 MB on average when running in the foreground, which doesn't change when minimized to the task bar, but goes down to 26 MB upon closing the application (minimized to the system tray). Upon exiting the application, all processes are terminated, as they should be.

Lighting

The Burst Core has but a single zone for RGB lighting, which is the scroll wheel. A total of six pre-defined lighting effects are available in the software. These are AIMO, Wave, Fully Lit, Heartbeat, Breathing, and Blinking. For most effects, it is possible to set custom colors and adjust brightness and transition speed. Though there is no dedicated option for this, the lighting can be disabled by setting the brightness to its minimum.

Color accuracy and vibrancy are excellent throughout. Here's a short demonstration video in which I'm going through the AIMO, Wave, and Breathing modes: