Corsair Blog

In this video, Jeff Checchi walks through upgrading a Dell Inspiron's stock power supply to an Enthusiast Series TX650 V2 PSU. While he's at it, he upgrades the onboard graphics to an NVIDIA GPU.

We chose a Dell Inspiron for this demo, but the purpose is to show that it's straightforward to replace components in just about any off-the-shelf PC.

While lots of Corsair customers have built their own PCs from the ground up, independently sourcing the case, motherboard, and every other component, Dell and other vendors still sell tons of pre-configured PCs. And, it's a safe assumption that the majority of off-the-shelf PCs like Dell Inspiron models are never upgraded by their owners (similar to the oft-repeated statement that the majority of SUV owners never take them off-road).

Unfortunately, this means that lots of off-the-shelf PCs are simply scrapped if the stock PSU fails. Or, their owners take them to a repair shop and pay more than they might need to, and possibly receive replacement components of questionable quality.

And, that's why we created this video — to show those folks that it's easier than you might think to make basic PC repairs or upgrades.

I recently did some testing with our new Hydro Series™ H60 high performance liquid CPU cooler. The H60 comes with a stock fan rated at 1700 RPM, which is designed to deliver good static pressure against the radiator without excessively high RPMs, and the accompanying noise levels. Of course, like any enthusiast I decided to test the H60's performance.

My current test system consists of an EVGA® 759 Classified motherboard, an Intel® Core™ i7 920 D0 stepping CPU, and Corsair Dominator® GT 2000C7 DDR3 memory. I did a bit of quick tweaking and managed a stable overclock of 189 x 20 on the CPU for a CPU frequency of 3.770GHz. The memory clocked in at 942MHz, 7-8-7-24 1T timings. The actual voltages under load, measured with a DMM, varied a bit from what was set in the BIOS. Measured, the CPU Vcore was 1.33v, Vdimm was 1.65v, and CPU VTT was 1.41v. The CPU did not respond well to voltage increases after this point and this was the maximum stable overclock using Prime95 over 24 hours.

We've created a set of short screencasts demonstrating the control panel software for the HS1 USB Gaming Headset. Jeff Checchi, the host of our videos, does narration duties.

If you have ever looked at the top 3DMark® scores or know a little about extreme overclocking, you've probably seen the name Vince “K|ngP|n” Lucido. Recently Vince teamed up with fellow overclocker and mad scientist Illya “TiN” Tsemenko to break some world records.

Four highly modified NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 580 with K|ngP|n cooling Tek 9 LN2 pots installed

The Hydro Series H70 is a popular cooler for today's current CPUs. I was already using a H70 to cool my CPU, and I decided to try to mod one to cool my GPU as well. Mounting the H70 onto my GPU should make it run much cooler. In order to mount the H70 onto my GeForce GTX 480, the stock mounting bracket for the H70 needs to be modified.

To make the modified mount as stock looking as possible, I decided to use 20 gauge steel to make the new piece fit on top of the modified H70 bracket. After measuring the mounting holes on the GTX 480 and the outer diameter of the H70, I created a template I could follow. After the template was transferred to the sheet of steel the center hole was drilled with a 2-7/8" hole saw. The next step was drilling out the mounting holes. After drilling all of the holes I used a dremel to roughly cut around the outside line. I made small cuts with metal shears to give it the final shape. All of the surfaces were then filed and sanded smooth.

It's been a while since we've done a how-to video, so we've recorded Jeff Checchi installing a Hydro Series H60 liquid CPU cooler.

The original Hydro Series H50 earned praise for its ease of installation. With the H60, we've made further refinements to make installation even simpler.

Quite often I am asked to tell the story of how Yellowbeard came to be. Well, as requested, here it is! The true tale of how a humble cop from Georgia became Corsair's most notorious web personality...

Two different times in my life I've thought to myself; “I have an awesome job”. The first of those times was when I was a police officer. I was in law enforcement for 16 years and I really enjoyed my work. I spent some time in the patrol division, detective division, narcotics, SWAT team, and I was even a bike cop for a while. (Please, no Pacific Blue jokes...)

If you don't have your own Graphite Series 600T mid-tower case, or if you haven't yet had the chance to see one in person, or simply if you're a fan of Jeff Checchi, you'll probably enjoy our new video. Jeff shows off the features and takes off the panels and grilles to show off the goods, and the Special Edition White model makes a guest appearance.

Please let us know what you think.

Hard OCP, Gaming Audio Series™ HS1A Gaming Headset Review — "The Corsair HS1A is the most comfortable and best performing stereo gaming headset we have ever used. We had a great sound stage in music, movies and games. The HS1A simply did a stellar job reproducing the sound signature of whichever sound card we used as well."

Legit Reviews, Gaming Audio Series SP2200 2.1 PC Speaker System Review — "Corsair's offerings being "Gaming" speakers, this is a very important part of their design and I can say with all of my pride that they did an amazing job at this. I can say that gamers are going to be happy. Even compared to a normal 5.1 system, these speakers are a better value in my mind. I could close my eyes during a nature scene in the movie Avatar and feel like I'm surrounded by the Pandora jungle. 

If I was playing a game like Counter Strike or Battlefield Bad Company 2, I could tell when those footsteps were directly behind me or when they were to my right or left."

Hot Hardware, Gaming Audio Series SP2500 Review — "If you’re in the market for a high-quality speaker system and don’t have the room or desire for a 5.1 channel surround sound setup, we highly recommend the Corsair SP2500s. The Corsair SP2500 2.1 channel speaker system is available for about $230 currently, which certainly isn't cheap for a 2.1 channel setup, but they are worth every penny. Sound quality across a wide range of sources is excellent, plain and simple."

PC Perspective, Corsair Enthusiast Series™ V2 TX850 and TX750 Review — "Corsair is well known for producing some of the best PC power supplies on the market today and their new TX750 V2 and TX850 V2 power supplies continue that trend at an affordable price. Both TX V2 power supplies delivered clean DC outputs, with good efficiency and very good voltage regulation. Both power supplies come with a good assortment of fixed cables that can support the latest CPUs and multiple, high-end video cards.  And let’s not forget active PFC, universal AC input and Corsair’s 5-year warranty."

JonnyGURU, Corsair Enthusiast Series™ V2 TX750 Review — 9.5 out of 10 — "Stop the presses - Corsair has another winning power supply on the market. The TX750 V2 is an extremely stable, well performing unit at a great price. They've done a lot right and very few things wrong. Voltage regulation was very good. Efficiency was very good. Ripple suppression was excellent. Why are you still reading this and not running out and buying one? Go... go now."

Force Series™ SSDs continue to offer blistering performance with an awesome combination of read and write speeds. We are continually working with SandForce® to support and improve our SSD line up. We noticed that even after our most recent firmware update for our SF-1200 based Force Series SSDs (released November 2010), that a small number of users are still having issues relating to startup and hibernation. In some cases these issues relate to how certain systems boot up or recover from a hibernation state. We're currently qualifying several firmware versions to evaluate their reliability and effectiveness at addressing these issues. However, they're not ready for release at this time.

We determined that some users with these startup and hibernation issues can benefit from using a work around. Many motherboard BIOS have a feature that occurs during the POST process relating to boot speed called Quick Boot, or Fast Boot, or some similar variation of this term. We've found that activating this setting may contribute to these start up and hibernation issues.