ASUS ROG Azoth Wireless Mechanical Keyboard Review

Software

As expected from a flagship ROG peripheral, there are unified software drivers for the ROG Azoth called ROG Armoury Crate. You can find the installer in

When you first open either ROG Armoury Crate or AURA Creator, you are greeted to the EULA. Seen above are the various steps to agree to in Armoury Crate before you can finally use it. Also note that ASUS Live Services is needed and has to be running in the background for them to work, especially for AURA Creator, which is used to synchronize compatible AURA lighting effects across ASUS products. This results in several installed programs in Windows, a total of seven even, for ~500 MB combined, and more used CPU and RAM resources than I would like with everything running. On the plus side, I did appreciate the helpful tutorial and tips, which can be skipped or pulled up at any time. A firmware update was also available for the keyboard, and updating it was smooth and quick enough wherein you have to plug in the keyboard with the cable in addition to inserting the 2.4 GHz dongle and then allow the drivers to do their job.

ASUS AURA Creator is a separate program for more advanced lighting effects and works fine enough even if I was expecting more customization options. All it does is allow for stacking lighting layers, with each layer chosen from those separately available before. It also allows for per-key lighting, and you can import/export the lighting profiles as well. I am not sure why this is not included in Armoury Crate itself, even if it’s a separate menu as with macro recording. Perhaps it’s because anything lighting-related in Armoury Crate is also available as AURA Sync wherein you can coordinate lighting effects between all supported devices and this ends up being more specific to the device(s) it supports? It hasn’t stopped others from doing it though, and it’s not as if Armoury Crate is a lightweight program on its own!

As expected from a flagship ROG peripheral, there are unified software drivers for the ROG Azoth called ROG Armoury Crate. You can find the installer in the downloads page on the ASUS website with the latest version at the time of testing being 3.2.5.2 that supports Windows 10 and 11 64-bit only. It downloads as a compressed folder that is just 1.5 MB in size and turns out to be an executable you can then use to install Armoury Crate, AURA Creator, and/or an ASUS virtual pet if you ignore the typo on the screen. The downloads page allows you to also get the full package installer which is 2.93 GB in size and I highly recommend going this route in addition to downloading the uninstall tool as well. You see, I went with the installer as I suspect most would and chose everything but the virtual pet option. At this point, the installer started downloading all the necessary components and just installs the two programs without giving you any options at all. You are forced to abide by ASUS’s chosen install directory, whether there will be any desktop shortcuts, any start menu items, or more. It also failed the first time and I had to use the uninstall tool before trying a second time and succeeding. This could be because of any remnants from a previous installation that had been removed since. Regardless, it took a lot longer than just about any other such software installation I can remember.When you first open either ROG Armoury Crate or AURA Creator, you are greeted to the EULA. Seen above are the various steps to agree to in Armoury Crate before you can finally use it. Also note that ASUS Live Services is needed and has to be running in the background for them to work, especially for AURA Creator, which is used to synchronize compatible AURA lighting effects across ASUS products. This results in several installed programs in Windows, a total of seven even, for ~500 MB combined, and more used CPU and RAM resources than I would like with everything running. On the plus side, I did appreciate the helpful tutorial and tips, which can be skipped or pulled up at any time. A firmware update was also available for the keyboard, and updating it was smooth and quick enough wherein you have to plug in the keyboard with the cable in addition to inserting the 2.4 GHz dongle and then allow the drivers to do their job.On the plus side, Armoury Crate responds quite well to high DPI displays, which makes the user experience better than many keyboard drivers I have had my hands on recently. Having a fully operational window that can be minimized, maximized, and resized is also something I will never take for granted again. Play around with the other options if you are interested, including the settings tab where you can choose between different themes, but I had no interest in ASUS trying to optimize game settings, feeding me “news,” and generally having far more bloat than I personally like on software drivers. You can choose to ignore all this by simply heading to the keyboard page wherein there are specific menus and options pertaining to the ROG Azoth, and remember that you do not need to have an ROG user account for any of this no matter what the software says. There’s still that overall sluggishness I had the last few times I’ve used Armoury crate, albeit things are faster this time around. You will see still sync animations for a second or two each time you do anything though. The keyboard customization options are quite rich here including not only key mapping and profiles but also lighting effects, macro recording, and a specific menu for the OLED display you can fine tune or even have your own image/GIF displayed as long as it sticks to that specific aspect ratio. There are also handy visual indicators for the Azoth in wireless modes allowing you to keep track of its connection and battery status too.ASUS AURA Creator is a separate program for more advanced lighting effects and works fine enough even if I was expecting more customization options. All it does is allow for stacking lighting layers, with each layer chosen from those separately available before. It also allows for per-key lighting, and you can import/export the lighting profiles as well. I am not sure why this is not included in Armoury Crate itself, even if it’s a separate menu as with macro recording. Perhaps it’s because anything lighting-related in Armoury Crate is also available as AURA Sync wherein you can coordinate lighting effects between all supported devices and this ends up being more specific to the device(s) it supports? It hasn’t stopped others from doing it though, and it’s not as if Armoury Crate is a lightweight program on its own!