Software

The ARGENT M5 RGB comes with its own software called iTAKE Engine, which also doubles as the software for the wireless M5 RGB. Though not a total disaster like TTesports Command Center, an older Thermaltake mouse software suite, this one isn't all that great, either. All options are accessible through four different tabs. The first page allows for button remapping to mouse, keyboard, media, and macro functions, along with the option to switch to the left-handed button layout. The second page has the usual macro options. The third page concerns illumination and is detailed below. The fourth page houses CPI adjustment settings for up to six levels, in a range of 100 to 16,000 CPI and 50 CPI increments, independently for x and y-sensitivity. Furthermore, options for polling rate adjustment (125/250/500/1000 Hz), angle snapping (on/off), and button response time (8–32 ms, increments of 4) are available. The detection of the currently set CPI step isn't too reliable—in the screenshot above, the mouse is actually set to 1600 CPI, for instance. Rather curious is a slider right below and to the left of the CPI stages, which lacks any inscriptions, doesn't work, and randomly appears and disappears. There are five on-board configuration profiles as well as regular profile management. Switching on-board profiles takes several seconds, and some functions break at times afterwards. The software also has a tendency to crash when plugging in the ARGENT M5 RGB, and for some reason, RGB lighting shuts off when that happens. 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 74 MB on average when running in the foreground, which doesn't change when minimized to the system tray. On top of the RAM usage, the software also hogs the CPU quite a bit. Upon exiting the application, all processes are terminated, as they should be.

Lighting

The ARGENT M5 RGB has three logical and physical lighting zones: scroll wheel, logo at the back, and an LED strip looping around the entire base. A total of nine pre-defined lighting effects are available in the software: Static, Pulse, RGB Spectrum, Wave, Raindrop, Blink, Snake, Music, and Temperature, the latter three of which are only available as long as the software is running. For most effects, setting custom colors and adjusting brightness, transition speed, and effect direction is possible, for each zone individually. Furthermore, the lighting effects can be synchronized with other ARGENT or Razer Chroma enabled devices. Curiously, there is no dedicated option for turning RGB off, so one has to do it by lowering the brightness to zero.

Color accuracy and vibrancy are excellent throughout. Here's a short demonstration video in which I go through the Wave, RGB Spectrum, and Snake lighting effects.