Software

The Alpha is compatible with Prime, XPG's staple software suite. My experience with Prime has been underwhelming. First of all, when executing the installer, installation starts right away into a default directory without any further user input possible. Then, upon launching Prime, one is prompted to create an account, which is needed for synchronizing settings across different systems, as well as access to certain functions such as Grit or the RMA service page. Thankfully, continuing with a "guest" account is possible. The next hurdle is to figure out how the settings are actually opened. The solution is to click on the mouse preview. Why an extra step like this has been deemed necessary, I do not know. While Prime is pleasantly functional and bug-free, resource usage is high. CPU usage in particular is considerable if any page with a lighting preview is visible, though this has been improved over earlier versions.

All settings are accessible in three tabs. The first one concerns lighting and is detailed below. The second one allows remapping all buttons to mouse, keyboard, media, or macro functions. The third one allows setting CPI for up to six steps and at a range of 100 to 16,000 CPI in increments of 100. In addition to that, options for angle snapping (on/off), lift-off distance (2/3 mm), polling rate (125, 250, 500, or 1000 Hz), and debounce time (1–24 ms) are available. The latter allows specifying debounce time on press and release independently. Lastly, a macro editor and profile management are present, too.

All settings are applied live and 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 323 MB on average when running in the foreground, which doesn't change when minimized to the system tray. Upon exiting the application altogether, all processes are terminated, as they should be.

Lighting

The Alpha has three physical lighting zones, which are the scroll wheel, LED strip at the front, and logo at the back. A total of seven pre-defined lighting effects are available in the software. These are Static, Color Cycle, Breathing, Reactive, Rainbow Wave, Ripple, and Meteor. Further customization is possible in terms of brightness, speed, and colors. Disabling the lighting is only possible by lowering brightness to zero.

Color accuracy and vibrancy are excellent throughout. Here's a short demonstration video in which I go through the Color Cycle, Breathing, and Rainbow Wave lighting effects: