Armoury Software
The days of plug-and-play gaming peripherals are seemingly long gone, with many modern units requiring additional software to fully realise their potential. Said utilities can be a sticking point for users who prefer to keep their Windows install tidy (myself included), but Asus's solution is reasonably small in size and unobtrusive in operation.
Dubbed Armoury and available as a free download for Windows 7, 8 or 10, the software lives in the system tray and when restored is split into six core areas; buttons, performance, lighting, calibration, power and macro.
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Covering the basics, Asus offers five customisable profiles, all of which are stored on Spatha's onboard memory. The first tab makes it easy to re-assign 11 of the available buttons (only left-click can't be changed), as well as scroll up or down, to an array of functions. These can be a mouse function, a Windows shortcut (e.g. copy or paste), a multimedia shortcut (e.g. volume or pause), a predefined macro, or any key on the keyboard.
The performance tab is where enthusiasts will want to tinker. Sensitivity can be adjusted from 50dpi to 8,200dpi in 50dpi increments, and these can be configured independently for the x or y axis. Polling rate can be manually selected for wired or wireless modes, and there are also options to tweak angle snapping, acceleration/deceleration and button response time. Plenty of choice, though it's worth noting there are just two sensitivity presets to toggle between.
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Lighting options are well thought out, with Asus providing brightness settings for both wired and wireless modes. Being able to sync all lighting zones makes customisation that little bit easier, and we quite like the battery mode, in which the LEDs are illuminated to indicate how much juice is remaining.
The relatively sparse calibration tab is designed to marry the mouse to your surface by either selecting a preset or choosing manual calibration. The presets currently include two Asus surfaces - ROG Whetstone or ROG Sheath - as well as a selection of generic surfaces such as cloth, plastic, glass or wood. Manual calibration simply entails moving the mouse around on your mouse pad for a short period of time.
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Click on power and you can see exactly how much battery life is remaining, and you can tweak how quickly the mouse should enter sleep mode when used in wireless mode. Last but not least, the macro tab provides user-friendly recording of button presses or scroll, and everything other than sensitivity toggle can be recorded.
The software is, for the most part, well laid out and easy to navigate, though we did experience problems with firmware updates. In a pre-release version of Armoury, a firmware update left our Spatha review mouse unable to click, and our dock unable to pair. The latest software, v2.105, has fixed these issues and appears to work flawlessly, however we'd still like to see Asus add a restore factory defaults option to guard against any erroneous updates.
