We're now on the 5th generation of iCUE, and the software has undergone a great deal of evolution over the years, through versions and mergers between Link & iCUE.
CUE (Legacy)
Link (Also Legacy)
But what about memory consumption in the latest release of the software?
iCUE had a reputation for consuming a lot of memory through the Corsair.Service process, but as you'll see this isn't true anymore, as iCUE has changed drastically.
iCUE has several services, and their presence depends on the CORSAIR products and components you currently use. The more components and plugins you have, the more memory iCUE will require, additionally, a higher amount of effects will also have an impact on memory consumption.
For example, a fixed colour effect will be lighter on RAM usage than the Mural Video mode or a combination of different lighting designs going on simultaneously, which will increase RAM usage.
iCUE 5 setup
W10 Task manager
The capture above compares the memory usage of iCUE 5 with other very common applications on a Windows 10 system. A clear split of RAM usage for a typical system can be seen below.
You can see that iCUE is not nearly as big of a slice as people might think.
Application name |
Total Memory consumption |
iCUE |
393MB |
Discord | 699MB |
Teams | 770MB |
Chrome with 2 tabs open | 946MB |
NVIDIA broadcast | 482MB |
NVIDIA Container | 113MB |
Compared to the capture of iCUE 4 below, iCUE 5.0 memory consumption has been drastically reduced.
To summarise, iCUE only consumes a very reasonable amount of RAM for all the functions it has built in, compared with other applications such as Discord, Nvidia Broadcast and the very needy Google Chrome.