How To: Save Settings to Your Mouse or Keyboard with Hardware Playback

Hardware Playback lets you take your custom lighting and actions with you, giving you access to custom settings in situations where you may not have iCUE running.

A device that supports Hardware Playback will have onboard memory that you can save profiles to in “Slots”.

If a mouse or keyboard has a profile saved to onboard memory, those profiles will load when connected to a system that doesn’t have the iCUE Software running.

In the iCUE Software, navigate to your mouse and keyboard. A peripheral that supports Hardware Playback, will have sections for “Hardware Lighting” and “Hardware Key Assignments”.

Hardware Lighting

With Hardware Lighting, you can have your mouse or keyboard playback an effect with custom colors or animations depending on which preset you configure.

Some devices may only support one hardware lighting effect at a time.

Hardware Key Assignments

Hardware Key Assignments let you map a simplified set of custom actions to different keys on your mouse or keyboard. Like with standard "software" key assignments in iCUE, just add an assignment to the list, map it to a key or button on your device, and configure it as needed.

Saving a Profile with Hardware Playback

Once you’ve configured the Hardware Lighting and Hardware Key Assignments for this profile, it’s time to save it to your mouse and/or keyboard’s onboard memory.

Make sure that your peripheral is connected to your system using a USB cable then go to “Device Settings” in iCUE and scroll to the bottom.

In “Onboard Memory”, pick a slot to save this profile to and wait for the transfer to complete.

Enabling Hardware Playback mode is as simple as connecting your peripheral to a system that doesn’t have iCUE actively running, be it a secondary PC or other system. Once the device is powered on, it’ll fall back on the profile saved to the first slot of onboard memory.

If you’ve set up different profiles with hardware lighting and hardware key assignments and saved them to different memory slots on your device, just hit the profile switch button to quickly cycle between the different profiles that have been saved to your device.