LED Lighting + Software Control

Cougar Phontum Gaming Headset Review - Time for the tunes

First, the basics. The lighting on this unit is actually fairly understated, with two angular light bars located behind each ear cup. These are capable of the full 16.8 million RGB colour range, as is to be expected. The headset comes with three pre-set colour cycle modes, namely 'static,' 'breathing,' 'colour cycle', and - a neat feature, if perhaps a bit gimmicky - an ability to pulse to the beat of whatever music you happen to be listening to. 26-year-old Raffaele may call it gimmicky, but 12-year-old Raffaele happens to think this is really rather neat, even if it may only be used 'for show'.

Bare in mind that the application needed to control the RGB lights from one's phone does require your PC to have some for of Wifi connectivity, which necessitated in me going out and buying a cheap dongle, thanks to most even mid-high end ATX motherboards in 2018 not having native Wi-Fi on board. A very slight gripe, but a gripe nonetheless. Then again, aside from Bluetooth or direct in, I fail to see a way Asus could have implemented this. Aura is - in fact - the only utility available for download from Asus' site when looking at the 500's product page. On opening up the software, you are presented with a relatively simple user interface. At the top, all of your 'potential' Aura capable products will be displayed.

First, the good news. Synchronisation worked effortlessly from within the desktop, with the 'master' software acting as the main arbiter. Where they could, the headphones followed stayed synced to the motherboard's inbuilt RGB strips and replicated any effects (again, where they could). When it worked, it was great.

Now, sadly, the bad news. Certain things, for me, did not work. Period. I was unable to test the application, naturally, as I was only sent a single unit. Now that this is out of the way, I faced a fairly frustrating unreliability of the accompanying software. Whilst it was perfectly able to work the RGB strips on the headset, it did so sporadically. The LEDs on the headset sometimes refused to turn on, and only a system reboot would solve this problem. I can't help but feel having both suites just inside the regular Aura software would be a lot less cumbersome.

I have used this software before, back in 2017. There, I was color coordinating a system with an X299 Strix board and GSkill Trident Z RGB memory, and I had no issues whatsoever. This could to be fair, simply be teething problems, and the product is very new. At the time of writing this review, however, the software was unreliable at best.

In the next section, we will test out the headset using a variety of modern titles.