I think the number one complaint that I've heard about Corsair's iCUE software is that
it's not very user friendly.
Or that it's too complicated.
Personally I don't feel it's that complicated at all, but there is A LOT of different options
which can be a bit overwhelming at first.
Getting familiar with iCUE does take some time.
BUT, once you learn how it works there's almost no limit to the amount of customization you
can make to your RGB peripherals.
Anyway in March of 2021 in an effort to make the interface more user friendly Corsair released
their latest version of iCUE, that being version 4.
Whether or not they've succeeded in making things easier or more user friendly is going
to be a matter of opinion but for those looking for a tutorial on how to navigate iCUE 4 let's
jump on in.
Now this tutorial is NOT an in depth break down of every single option available in iCUE.
This is more meant to be an overview to get you familiar with how iCUE works so you can
get started customizing the lighting on your peripherals and give you the background you
need to begin playing around with things and figuring things out on your own.
When you first start up iCUE 4 you're going to see the Home Screen here.
It'll have all your iCUE compatible peripherals listed here and as you can see I have an Asus
Motherboard which has lighting on it that is iCUE controllable, a Corsair Nightsword
Mouse and a Strafe RGB keyboard.
On the left is our current lighting profile.
This is one I made that has all the keys illuminated in blue and then when I type; whatever key
I press, that key lights up in white and then fades back to blue.
Below the Profile dropdown is what Corsair is now calling Scenes.
In version 3 they called it the Lighting Link.
Scenes allow you to instantly change the lighting on all of your devices at once.
For example I can click on Rainbow Wave here and now that lighting scheme is applied to
my Motherboard, mouse and keyboard all at once.
Corsair has 6 default scenes included when you download iCUE but you can press this plus
sign and add in some other preset scenes or even create some of you own custom scenes.
Just for fun let's create a custom one.
Here where it says Spiral Rainbow we have a drop down we can click on and it gives us
11 different effects we can choose from.
Just as an example let's choose Rain.
Already our peripherals should be displaying this effect.
To honor the late, great artist formerly known as Prince let's change the scene name to Purple
Rain.
Now we've got these two circles because we can choose two different colors for our 'rain
drops'.
Let's first click on the red circle here and find a nice shade of purple on our color bar
down here.
In the bar below that we can make it lighter or darker and once we've got a color we like
we can then click on the blue circle and this time I want a magenta... hmmm... the purple
and the magenta look too much alike...
I guess I'll go back to blue.
That actually looks more like the effect I was going for.
Once you've got your colors dialed in the way you like 'em we can adjust the speed which
this slider is a little deceiving because you only have 3 speeds.
Slow, medium and fast.
Once we're all done we can click create and now we have a Purple Rain scene we can quickly
and easily apply to our peripherals.
When you have one of these Scenes activated it's going to override whatever profile is
showing here at the top.
To deactivate a Scene you just click on that scene's name and iCUE will then switch back
to whatever lighting profile you have selected here.
When you're first start out you'll of course only have the default profile so you're going
to have to create one of your own.
When I upgraded my iCUE 3 to iCUE 4 it kind of brought my old profiles in and what I mean
by that is it brought the names of those profiles in but all the Custom Lighting and Actions
I'd programmed in iCUE 3 did not transfer over so I had to re-create them in iCUE 4.
It took me 10 or so minutes of playing around to figure things out but being familiar with
how iCUE worked before it didn't take long to get my Blue with White Type Lighting custom
profile re-created.
Now I want to re-create my Red with White Type Lighting Profile so I'll show you guys
how to do that.
Mine's already here and named for me to get started on but since you'll be starting new
you'll first want to press the big plus sign button here and then choose your profile icon.
You can select from these pre-defined icons here or click the paint bucket and select
a color or you can click this plus sign and add in an image you have saved on your computer
somewhere.
For now I'm happy to just use this red icon here.
You'll then want to give your profile a name.
I'm going to be working on my Red with White Type Lighting profile so I'm going to switch
over to that real quick.
And if you want to add a background image or even video clip to the iCUE window you
can select that here and chose whether you want to add some blur to it or not and finally
you can link an app to your profile.
So for example if you want to have specific lighting or key binds of some kind for a particular
game you can link that profile to that game.
So when you launch that game iCUE will automatically change to that profile and you'll be ready
to rock.
Once you're all done here you can click OK and now we are ready to begin customizing
all of our peripherals.
I'm going to start with my motherboard first so I'm going to click on the Asus Motherboard
icon here, and on the left click Lighting Effects.
To add an effect click on the plus sign and here's all the predefined effects you can
apply.
If you're just wanting a solid color, which is what I want, you'll need to scroll down
to where it says Custom here, click on that and it will bring up all of the choices under
that category.
I want to start with a red background so I'm going to first choose Static Color and then
I'm going to click on this circle over here and can either click on the color wheel on
a red I that like or I can go down to the bottom here and put in 255 in the Red field
and then 0 in Green and 0 in Blue.
You can also click on these 4 little dots here at the top and there's default colors
you can choose from but I was kind of disappointed to find they're all pastel colors and I wanted
a red, red not pastel red.
So what I did was type in 255, 0, 0 here at the bottom and then hit this plus sign which
added red as one of my custom colors.
I'm now going to close this little chooser window and you can adjust the opacity with
this slider heree if you want but I want the lighting intensity at 100% so I'm just going
to leave that alone.
These buttons here let me choose the different areas on my motherboard I want this lighting
effect to apply to.
I don't have anything plugged into my motherboard RGB headers so I'm just going to select the
back IO and PCH which are the lights here and here.
Next I want a white ripple animation to play over top of my red background.
So I'm going to add another lighting layer and this time from the custom list choose
Ripple.
It defaults to white which is what I want so I don't have to worry about changing the
color but I do want to adjust these options because I feel like the effect is playing
too fast.
So I'm going to change the lighting time to 3 seconds... and the Velocity to 5... and
I've already played around with this and I like the way a Tail of 3 lights looks the
most so I'm going to change that to 3 as well.
Now you'll notice that the Ripple effect is first on the list here above my Static Red
color.
If I were to move the Ripple layer below the Red Static Color layer then my Ripple can't
be seen because it's being covered up by the solid red layer.
Think of these effects like layers of paper.
If there's an effect you want to see on top of another one then that effect layer needs
to be above the other effect layer in this list.
As for my Ripple effect I only want it to play on the Back IO of my motherboard so I'm
going to turn it off on the PCH and RGB Headers.
There wwe go.
Here's how things are looking now.
Now let's switch on over to my mouse.
We're now going to click on Lighting Effects here on the left, add a lighting layer...
and once again I want the lights on my mouse to all be a solid red so I'm going to select
Custom...
Static Color... and then change the color here to red.
In the Quick Lighting Zone field here you can turn the different lighting zones on the
mouse on and off but for what I want I'm going to select all.
Now on top of this I want to add a little effect where the front and scroll wheel zones
on my mouse light up in white when I click a button on my mouse.
So I'm going to add a new layer on top of my Red layer and once again I'm going to go
to Custom and instead of static color I'm going to choose Solid because even though
they sound pretty much like the same thing, there is a difference and Static won't let
me do what I want to do where as Solid does.
For this effect I want the front and scroll zones to light up so I'm going to select those
and to add my solid color I'm going to then click on this plus sign here.
I can change the color by clicking on the circle here and then choosing the color I
want like we've done before but I want white so I'm going to leave it white and come back
to here.
Now we're going to play with the start and stop drop downs which are not available to
us with a Static color.
Depending on what you're doing you can change the Lighting Time here to make it longer or
shorter but for what I want to do 1 second works just fine.
'With Profile' means it will start playing this effect when your profile is enabled but
what I want is for this to play when I press a button on my mouse so I need to choose 'On
Key Pressed' instead.
In the stop drop down we have several different options available to us.
There's 'After' which allows you to have the effect play a certain number of times before
stopping.
There's 'On Key press' which will turn the effect on and off kinda like a light switch.
'On Key Release' which means the effect will play when you press a button but then turn
off when you release that button.
And finally 'Never' which means once you've pressed a button and that effect plays it
stays on until you restart your PC.
I want it to stop as soon as I release the button so I'm going to choose On Key Release
so now every time I click my mouse the front and scroll wheel zones will flash white.
Now for the part that most of you watching this are probably going to skip ahead to,
let's take a look at the keyboard.
If you've been watching up to this point things should look very familiar because all our
options are very similar to what we've already been doing.
Let's choose Lighting Effects here on the left... add a layer and once again there's
all the presets we can play with but I want my keyboard to be red so I'm going to go to
custom once again and choose Static Color.
All the keys on the keyboard are selected for me by default so I don't need to do anything
there but I am going to change the color to red.
The next thing I want to do is change the Corsair logo, the WAS and D keys and the arrow
keys to white.
So I need to create another layer, and choose Static Color again and since it defaults to
white I don't need to change anything here, so I can then choose the stuff I want to be
made white.
You can use the Quick Lighting Zone buttons here for WASD and the arrow keys but now to
add the Corsair logo I'm going to need to hold the control key on my keyboard and then
click on the Corsair Logo here.
If I just click on the logo then it will select only the logo and WASD and the arrows will
no longer light up white.
Another way to select the keys and stuff you want to apply an effect to is to hold control
and then click on the keys you want to apply that effect to here in iCUE just like so,
or you can even click and drag to select multiple keys at once.
Ok, we are just about done but there's on more effect I want to add which is the type
lighting.
That means whatever keys I type on will light up just like I showed at the beginning of
the video.
As you know from the name of my profile I'm going to make the type lighting White.
So I'm first going to add another new layer... go to Custom... and choose Gradient this time.
I want this to play on all keys when they're pressed so I'm going to leave 'All' selected
here and then I'm going to hit this plus sign.
Now with a gradient you can have it play one color at first and then fade to another as
well as add multiple different colors and adjust the opacity of each individual color.
I'm going to keep things simple for this because that's what I want, so I'm going to keep it
white.
The way I want my type lighting to work is when I press a key I want it to light up white
and then fade back to red.
So to make that happen I need to keep it at 100% here at the beginning of the effect but
then fade all the way to 0% at the end.
Now I want it to fade slower than it is right now so I need to add some time and I've found
3 seconds feels about right to me.
As you can see right now my entire keyboard is pulsing and I just want this to play on
a single key when I press that key so in the 'Start' drop down I'm going to change this
to 'On Key Pressed' which then enables a toggle switch here for it to only play on the key
you press.
I want to turn that option on and then in the Stop drop down I want it to stop playing
the effect after it plays through one time so I'm going to choose 'After' and it defaults
to one time.
With all the customization now done here's what it's looking like now when I type on
my keyboard.
Well I had hoped to keep this video short and sweet but it's already running longer
than I was planning.
Hopefully it's given you a good look at how iCUE 4 works.
And given you the confidence to start playing around and creating your own custom Lighting
profiles.
Thanks so much for watching, there's the YouTube stuff you can do that really helps me out
and if you'd like to help me continue making helpful videos like this one please check
out my Amazon Store linked in the video description where you can purchase products I feature
on my channel including the mouse I used in this video, the Corsair Nightsword, and the
Strafe keyboard I used.
For the whole 2 of you still left watching at this point I wanna say thanks so much for
watching all the way until the end.
You guys are the best!
And I hope to see you in another video real soon.
We'll see ya later.