[section_title title=”Software”]
Corsair Gaming have opted to not include a CD with the software with the keyboard, this means they can always have the latest version available, although a massive pain if you don’t have internet access – who doesn’t have internet nowadays? Once downloaded from the website, it is dead easy to install. Upon the launch of the program, it will detect what compatible Corsair Gaming devices you have connected to your PC. When it detected the K70 RGB was connected, it prompted me to download and flash the most recent firmware update for the keyboard and at a click of a button, it was downloaded and flashed.
The first screen you land on is the profile window with various tabs for the keyboard assignments, performance and lighting. From this screen you can create new profiles and for each profile you can configure a modes, which can be triggered to activate upon launch of a certain application. As you can see in the screenshot below, I have created two modes within the main profile. Now the first issue I came across, is that there is no easy way to switch through the profiles or modes, so to make life easier, I bound a button to cycle through the modes. To do this is incredibly simple, you select the key you want to configure, right click and select Mode Selection/Switching, from which you can get it to cycle through the various modes.
From the action editing screen you can configure a huge range of actions for the key; from macros, text strings, keystrokes and many more which you can see listed down the left side. I simply configured the Pause/Break key to cycle through the modes at the press of a button. You can get it to stop when it reaches the end of the modes, but I opted for it to cycle through them.
The performance tab allows you to change a few settings for when the windows key lock is on, such as disabling Alt-F4, should you accidentally press it!
The final tab, lighting, is where all the magic happens. From here you can configure the lighting options. First off, let me explain that the lighting is split into two sections: foreground and background. The latter is simply the LED colours that are always active and the former, is for the effects, which you can setup in the lighting page.
You can turn on type lighting, which simply put, is the effect that happens when you press a key. There are two options for this, single or multi key. The single key option is when only the one key that is pressed is animated, the multikey option effects the entire keyboard and can result in some pretty awesome effects. Below is the effect I created for each key press – a nice ripple effect in the iron palette colours.
The Actions and Lighting tabs allows you to create and import/export various lighting effects and the settings tab lets you configure the various options for the program on a whole, such as the overlay, language, media players etc.
The software is very sophisticated and took me a fair while to even setup my first lighting effect. There are also various bugs, which can get very annoying. I’ve had this keyboard for several days now and I feel I have barely scratched the surface with what it can do. If you already have this keyboard, then it is worth doing some Googling as there are plenty of tutorials out there, which really do help.
