iCUE Software

Corsair iCUE Software

CUE Software has been around for some time now, possibly as long as I have been involved with building computers. That said, I have never personally used it, but that changed today with this review. As said before, the new software (iCUE) is still technically in early access, as a pre-download message is very quick to point out. That said, the software is - as far as I can tell - fairly free of niggles, issues, or quirks.

First off, the basics. The software shows all connected Corsair devices along the top right-hand side of the main interface. My Commander Pro (very kindly donated to me by Hilbert) and HS60 both show up without a problem and can be switched between just by clicking on either. Selecting the HS60 presents us with a very simple new interface as part of the same window. Corsair gives us five preset... well, presets, which you can see in the screenshot. Switching between the two is very easy, with just a single mouse click.

The slider values of these presets, however, cannot be changed. Their values can be copied though, allowing for easy tweaking of one of the default profiles (technically) by simply changing another variant of that profile. Adding new profiles is easy, and can be named whatever you want. I actually found using this software to be very intuitive, and it allowed for control granular enough to satisfy me. I see myself as a fairly regular audio person, so I don't see why it wouldn't be absolutely fine for most others, either. A small oddity (perhaps by design, or maybe a bug, I am not sure) is that you can only seem to have 5 'active' presets, with others being greyed out. Activating one of those will automatically grey out/disable another. I'm not sure of the reasoning behind this, if intentional. It's not as though there isn't ample UI space for 20 or so. Another small quirk is the fact that the EQ changes you make do not 'take hold' until you release the mouse button, meaning you cannot click/drag and hear the changes your actions are having 'on the fly.'

With regard to what the CUEi software adds to the HS60 experience, well... certainly enough to begin understanding why the HS60's are nearly 30 EUR more than the HS50's. Whilst I didn't get my hands on this unit's little brother, I feel as though the natively supported software control is a good justification for the extra cost. The iCUE software isn't especially fancy, and I will admit that my lack of usable Corsair peripherals means I cannot explore the suite as much as I would have liked to. That said, the included EQ tweaker is very good to use, and the saving of multiple different personal profiles is a good feature.

You can try out the new iCUE software here. That's really it for this section. Shall we get onto the testing?