Corsair Blog

First of all, congrats to Michael Chinander of Chicago, IL for winning the Obsidian Series 800D Jelly Belly candy corn contest hosted by Tom's Hardware. His guess of 50,650 was the closest to our count of 50,712 pieces of candy corn. There were over 3,500 entries, so well done!

Runners up were Justin Langness of Long Beach, Erin Cleary of Portland and Timothy Finnegan of Tucson. All of our winners were within 300 pieces of the actual count.

While making kick-ass hardware is serious business for us, we do like to have fun from time to time. Whether it's making jokes about how bacon makes everything better (aside from dessert), or laughing at some poor soul who fried some hardware in the lab, we can ham it up pretty good around our office. So, when George and I came up with the idea of filling the Obsidian Series 800D with candy corn, we had to do it.

The idea came from this relatively innocent post I came across on the forums over at Hardware Canucks: "Corsair Case could double as a beer fridge."

While we decided that the beer fridge would take quite some time to conceptualize and actually put together (we would much rather spend engineering hours on products that will hit store shelves), the conversation evolved from things we can turn our case into, to fun things we could easily fit into the 800D. Ball bearings? Hot wings? Carlos in tech support? And then we thought that since Halloween was coming up, it would be the perfect time to do something with candy. And to us, no other candy says Halloween better than candy corn.

We first had to figure out how much candy corn fits into our case. We did this by buying a one pound bag of candy corn, and doing some math on the volume of that one pound bag. We then did the math on the volume of the Obsidian Series 800D (5200 cubic inches!). We figured we needed over 130lbs of candy corn.

Jelly Belly is about 90 minutes north of us, so we figured we might be able to get them involved. I made a phone call, explaining what we wanted to do and to say they were stoked would be an understatement. They're pretty proud of their candy corn and they were happy to help us out with the quantity needed. We were in business!

Once we got the candy back to our office, things moved pretty fast. We emptied each box into the case while it was on its side, got some video of the process and sent the information over to Tom's Hardware so they could host the contest.

We're still munching on the candy corn, and our 120+ employees in our Fremont, CA offices have made a pretty significant, yet disturbing, dent in the 130lbs of candy corn we used.

We'll keep thinking of fun things to do in the future, but we'd also love to hear your feedback on this contest and also any ideas of fun stuff you'd like to see us do in the future!

Congrats again to the winners of the contest. We hope you enjoy your new hardware!