The emergence of RGB hardware and accessories has necessitated the installation of multiple pieces of software for control and monitoring purposes. A beta version of Corsair iCUE has now launched to merge the functionality of Corsair Link and Corsair CUE into one piece of software that can manage all of your supported hardware.

Keyboards, mice, headsets, fans, coolers, RAM, power supplies, mouse pads and more are all able to be managed from one interface in iCUE. Synchronization of lighting across all Corsair products has become easier than ever before but more practical concerns are met as well. Placing temperature monitoring and power consumption statistics in the same area allows for significantly easier adjustments to fan curves to help maintain a quiet system without pushing thermal boundaries.

All customization options can be applied on a per-application basis. Different macros, lighting profiles, fan curves, button mapping and mouse sensitivity can be assigned to individual games or standard programs so that you can spend more time gaming and less time going through menu options.

Deep integration with Ubisoft games provides dynamic lighting effects when gaming based on in-game actions. Keyboards with RGB capabilities can provide a wide variety of game stats such as remaining health or changing colors to indicate an object has been reached. Lighting can still be heavily customized for games that do not have such great levels of integration.

If you have Corsair Link installed, in order to be able to install and run Corsair iCUE, you must be running the latest Corsair Link version 4.9.6.19 or newer. For CUE users, iCUE is supposed to automatically replace CUE software and migrate your settings but lighting effects do not appear to migrate properly at this time.

The new software package is full of features but does take up more resources. When idle, iCUE uses over 300MB of memory. iCUE CPU usage sits between a half a percent and one percent on a system with an i7 8700k. Since this is a beta version, there is still time for Corsair to lower resource usage.

The latest version of iCUE may be downloaded directly from Corsair.