ASUS ROG Keris Wireless Review

Software

ASUS has begun to phase out support for Armoury II on new releases. Instead, the UWP-integrated Armoury Crate is the universal software for everything ASUS now. In terms of functionality, Armoury Crate is roughly equivalent to Armoury II, but resource consumption has gone up a bit. Additionally, it’s no longer possible to freely select a non-OS language. I have to admit that I have a special disdain for Armoury Crate. This time around, it was the installation process that provided nightmare fuel. First, the installer refused to proceed two times in a row, and I had to run the uninstaller first before I was even able to install Armoury Crate. Even then, the software prompted me to install several updates before giving me access to any mouse functions, which required two further restarts. As a whole, merely installing and setting up Armoury Crate took no less than 30 minutes, which is just ridiculous. When installing Armoury Crate, I’ve noticed best results are achieved when no ASUS device is connected.

Much like in Armoury II, the available settings are distributed across several tabs. The first page houses button remapping functions, which allow one to rebind all but the left button to mouse, keyboard, multimedia, or macro functions. The second page includes options for CPI adjustment (100–16,000 CPI, increments of 100, four steps), polling rate (125, 250, 500, or 1000 Hz), button response time (12–32 ms, in increments of 4), and angle snapping (on/off). My testing indicates that the button response time slider is neither accurate nor working. Lighting settings are detailed below. The fourth page houses LOD adjustment (high/low). The fifth page provides options related to battery level and power saving. One can set the minimum battery level at which a low battery warning is displayed, and one can define after how many minutes the mouse enters power-saving mode, which disables all illumination. Lastly, profile management and a macro editor are available as well. All settings are updated 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 250 MB on average when running in the foreground and 70 MB when minimized. Upon exiting the application, several processes with a RAM footprint of 45 MB keep running.

In order to ease uninstalling Armoury Crate, ASUS has released a tool specifically for that. Using this tool instead of uninstalling all modules of Armoury Crate individually is highly recommended since it indeed wipes everything related to Armoury Crate off the system, including scheduled tasks and similarly obscure entries. Only a few derelict folders are left on C: drive and within AppData/Local, which are easily removed manually.

Lighting

The Keris Wireless has two lighting zones: scroll wheel and logo at the back. Seven pre-defined lighting effects are available in the software: Static (single color), Pulsating (single color), Color Cycle, Reactive, Battery (shows battery status), Partition (alternating between zones), and AURA Sync, which synchronizes the lighting with any other connected AURA-enabled devices. Additionally, the AURA creator may be used to create a custom lighting effect that is then synchronized with other devices. Setting custom colors and adjusting the brightness is possible for most effects. Of course, it is also possible to disable the lighting altogether.

Color accuracy and vibrancy are excellent throughout. Here’s a short demonstration video in which I go through the Pulsating and Color Cycle lighting modes:

Battery Life

ASUS states a maximum battery life of up to 78 hours without RGB illumination, and up to 56 hours with RGB. No details are provided on whether these numbers refer to 2.4 GHz or Bluetooth mode, or which polling rate has been used to achieve them. Armoury Crate includes a basic percentage-based battery life indicator. This indicator is a bit of a mystery. Originally, it had four notches in total and used increments of 20, so the minimum came out to 20% battery life. Furthermore, the indicator showed 80% in wired mode after ten hours of continuous charging, but 100% in wireless mode. After switching to an updated firmware and software, the indicator now simply shows “100% charging” no matter what, which is somewhat befuddling, too. In any case, I would’ve been able to roughly gauge power consumption, but alas, I didn’t even get to the see the 80% mark after eleven hours of use with illumination enabled. At the very least, this has me conclude that the cited battery level is within the realm of possibility. ASUS states battery capacity to be 500 mAh.

The fast-charging capability of the Keris Wireless made it difficult for me to consistently measure charging speed during the constant current (bulk) stage. Right after plugging in, current was around 0.450 A, but continually decreased until entering the constant voltage stage during which current is continually lowered anyway.

ASUS has begun to phase out support for Armoury II on new releases. Instead, the UWP-integrated Armoury Crate is the universal software for everything ASUS now. In terms of functionality, Armoury Crate is roughly equivalent to Armoury II, but resource consumption has gone up a bit. Additionally, it’s no longer possible to freely select a non-OS language. I have to admit that I have a special disdain for Armoury Crate. This time around, it was the installation process that provided nightmare fuel. First, the installer refused to proceed two times in a row, and I had to run the uninstaller first before I was even able to install Armoury Crate. Even then, the software prompted me to install several updates before giving me access to any mouse functions, which required two further restarts. As a whole, merely installing and setting up Armoury Crate took no less than 30 minutes, which is just ridiculous. When installing Armoury Crate, I’ve noticed best results are achieved when no ASUS device is connected.Much like in Armoury II, the available settings are distributed across several tabs. The first page houses button remapping functions, which allow one to rebind all but the left button to mouse, keyboard, multimedia, or macro functions. The second page includes options for CPI adjustment (100–16,000 CPI, increments of 100, four steps), polling rate (125, 250, 500, or 1000 Hz), button response time (12–32 ms, in increments of 4), and angle snapping (on/off). My testing indicates that the button response time slider is neither accurate nor working. Lighting settings are detailed below. The fourth page houses LOD adjustment (high/low). The fifth page provides options related to battery level and power saving. One can set the minimum battery level at which a low battery warning is displayed, and one can define after how many minutes the mouse enters power-saving mode, which disables all illumination. Lastly, profile management and a macro editor are available as well. All settings are updated 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 250 MB on average when running in the foreground and 70 MB when minimized. Upon exiting the application, several processes with a RAM footprint of 45 MB keep running.In order to ease uninstalling Armoury Crate, ASUS has released a tool specifically for that. Using this tool instead of uninstalling all modules of Armoury Crate individually is highly recommended since it indeed wipes everything related to Armoury Crate off the system, including scheduled tasks and similarly obscure entries. Only a few derelict folders are left on C: drive and within AppData/Local, which are easily removed manually.The Keris Wireless has two lighting zones: scroll wheel and logo at the back. Seven pre-defined lighting effects are available in the software: Static (single color), Pulsating (single color), Color Cycle, Reactive, Battery (shows battery status), Partition (alternating between zones), and AURA Sync, which synchronizes the lighting with any other connected AURA-enabled devices. Additionally, the AURA creator may be used to create a custom lighting effect that is then synchronized with other devices. Setting custom colors and adjusting the brightness is possible for most effects. Of course, it is also possible to disable the lighting altogether.Color accuracy and vibrancy are excellent throughout. Here’s a short demonstration video in which I go through the Pulsating and Color Cycle lighting modes:ASUS states a maximum battery life of up to 78 hours without RGB illumination, and up to 56 hours with RGB. No details are provided on whether these numbers refer to 2.4 GHz or Bluetooth mode, or which polling rate has been used to achieve them. Armoury Crate includes a basic percentage-based battery life indicator. This indicator is a bit of a mystery. Originally, it had four notches in total and used increments of 20, so the minimum came out to 20% battery life. Furthermore, the indicator showed 80% in wired mode after ten hours of continuous charging, but 100% in wireless mode. After switching to an updated firmware and software, the indicator now simply shows “100% charging” no matter what, which is somewhat befuddling, too. In any case, I would’ve been able to roughly gauge power consumption, but alas, I didn’t even get to the see the 80% mark after eleven hours of use with illumination enabled. At the very least, this has me conclude that the cited battery level is within the realm of possibility. ASUS states battery capacity to be 500 mAh.The fast-charging capability of the Keris Wireless made it difficult for me to consistently measure charging speed during the constant current (bulk) stage. Right after plugging in, current was around 0.450 A, but continually decreased until entering the constant voltage stage during which current is continually lowered anyway.