Corsair Blog - Archive April, 2012

We have done many “How to” upgrade guides with very few focusing on notebooks, and of those, even fewer talked about a Mac specifically. With Macs being quite a popular notebook, I thought it would be a good idea to show how easily you can increase the performance of your Mac with two of the most noticeable upgrades available on a notebook, Memory and SSD. Today I will be upgrading my own Macbook Pro (MC374LL/A Mid-2010) with a 480GB Force GT SSD and maxing out the memory with 8GB of 1066MHz Corsair Mac Memory (CMSA8GX3M2A1066C7). This Mac is maxed out at 8GB of 1066MHz memory but if you have a newer one you may be able to use 1333MHz+ and up to 16GB.

This all started over lunch one day several months back when I was asked by Corsair etail sales account manager, Josh Kreitzer, to join him at lunch with TigerDirect account manager, Orlando Pedrera. During our conversation, we realized that we all had something in common — bicycles. Josh and Orlando also mentioned that they were both avid cyclists and that they were heavily involved in working with the Team Bacardi cycling team raising money to donate to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society via an April charity bicycle ride.

Here's a Josh (L) and Orli (R), attired to do battle in the Miami/Homestead area.

The newly announced 3rd Generation Intel® Core™ processor family is their next generation of 64-bit, multi-core processors built on 22-nanometer process technology. Ivy Bridge is the successors to the Sandy Bridge processor family, and should become available to purchase at retail on April 29, 2012. The new Ivy Bridge processor offerings are the Intel Core i7-3770K, Intel Core i7-3770, Intel Core i7-3770S, Intel Core i7-3770T, Intel Core i5- 3570K, Intel Core i5-3550, Intel Core i5-3550S, Intel Core i5-3570T, Intel Core i5-3450, and Intel Core i5-3450S Processors.

Corsair Vengeance DDR3 memory in an Ivy Bridge test rig

Intel always manages to assign some interesting code names to their chipsets and to their processors. For example, their two latest enthusiast product announcements are code named Panther Point (chipset) and Ivy Bridge (CPU). Although our corresponding secretive code names aren't secret, it's always great fun to use some Vengeance® memory to learn about the new products and of course see how they perform and overclock!

In August of 2006, Corsair entered the power supply market with 2 now legendary PSUs — the HX520 and HX620. I won’t say we entered the market with a bang or with a splash as those are two sounds one should never associate with PSUs.

With the launch of the Vengeance 2000 wireless gaming headset, I’d like to take a look at some technology in the Vengeance 2000 that’s been in our headsets since we launched our first model, the HS1, a year and a half ago: 50mm drivers.

Corsair will be at PAX East this weekend in Boston, MA from the 6th through the 9th. Since PAX began in 2004 their annual shows in Boston and Seattle have become two of the largest gaming events of the year in North America, and and everyone at Corsair is exited to be a part of it. If you're attending come visit us at booth #1150 in the Exhibition Hall.