Software

I was actually very surprised that the M500 had any software functionality as the 6Gv2 didn’t and a lot of similar keyboards don’t unless they have RGB. The Siberia 200 doesn’t have any software though. That said if you run any other SteelSeries products you shouldn’t even need to install anything because the M500 uses the SteelSeries Engine 3. When you first open it up you are on your gear page where you can see all of your supported SteelSeries devices. You can see that on top of the M500 I also have my Sensei RAW and Sensei Wireless hooked up. Before getting into the rest of the software I did run the firmware updates that the software warned me about.

The main page for the M500 gets right to the point really. It has a large photo of the M500 across it with its blue backlighting running. Over on the right side we can adjust the USB polling rate for the keyboard, set its region, and even change the lighting. The M500 doesn’t have any fancy RGB lighting and from what I can tell it also doesn’t have a controller capable of individual key lighting like the Cooler Master Rapid-I. But you can adjust the backlighting brightness across three settings and set it to be constantly on or have a breathing effect.

You can also click on any key on the keyboard and program it just like if it was a macro key. That means we can change the layout manually or even set specific keys to play only once or maybe toggle on or off if you need that. You can also go into the macro editor and record and edit macros and bind them to any key as well. It gets a little interesting because we don’t have multiple profiles so you can’t set a crazy profile for in a game and then flip back to a normal mode for everyday use though so keep that in mind.