Software

Software support for the XVX M61 is device-specific, and the installer can be found on the downloads page of the XVX website—simply choose any M61 in the table and click on download link to access the installer that comes in a compressed folder. The latest version at the time of testing was V1.00n whose executable installer is ~22 MB in size. Installation is straightforward, but there is no option to have a start menu entry, or even agree to any terms and conditions. Both of these are preemptively selected for you. The final installation takes a little over 53 MB, not too surprising since the software is only for this product, and it is light on system resources when running.


With the keyboard connected to my PC, the software drivers recognized it immediately. But I also recognized instantly that this program is terrible when it comes to any sort of display scaling. The window is tiny on my 4K display and responds poorly to changing the display resolution or even Windows scaling! It's barely usable in this current state if you need to squint to do anything, and I had to bump up scaling a lot to get anything going. I am not sure what's going on here, since the XVX M84 drivers scaled just fine!

Seen above is a walkthrough of customizing the XVX M61 keyboard with its dedicated software tool, which includes the option to easily create, remove, and select software profiles. The settings tab is sparse, mostly used to change the language as well as the UI theme, although there is no option to check for software/firmware updates or even do a keyboard reset. The default tab covers key mapping, and you can choose from among the vast majority of functions on a typical full-size keyboard. Here we do see extra functions such as media keys, OS shortcuts, or even profile and application switchers that the software program for the XVX M84 did not get. The lighting section is part self-explanatory, part frustrating. There are plenty of static, dynamic, and reactive lighting effects, all with sub-options pertaining to color, speed, direction, and brightness as applicable. But the handy virtual keyboard only shows up in the user defined custom lighting effect and everything feels sluggish here. Indeed, this slight lag happens throughout and there is also no consistency over which actions take effect immediately and which need to be applied to be saved on the keyboard. Gaming mode has some specific keys/key combinations being disabled as desired, then macro recording allows for more customization too. This is in a way more featured than on the M84, but also more frustrating owing to the worse user experience.