Corsair Blog - Archive December, 2011

Our Hydro Series™ high-performance liquid CPU coolers offer compatibility with a wide variety of both Intel and AMD platforms. The AMD AM2 and AMD AM3/AM3+ platforms both use the same mounting mechanism. Here's a pictoral guide for mounting these coolers onto AMD AM2 and AMD AM3 based motherboards to supplement the instructions included with the units. Pictured here is everything you will need to mount your cooler to your AMD AM2 or AMD AM3/AM3+ motherboard including a screwdriver, a mug of coffee, and an assistant.

Today, laptop memory is relatively inexpensive. Prices have fallen since 1066Mhz was considered "high-end laptop memory", and now most laptops come with 1333MHz memory as standard. In the past, the vast majority of laptop memory upgrades were done by gamers and enthusiasts who were willing to shell out the extra premium, while "everyday" users held back. Now, everyone can enjoy the benefits of upgrading their SODIMMs without experiencing sticker shock. This blog will demonstrate how to upgrade your SODIMMs, followed by a representation of the performance differences between stock laptop memory and Corsair Vengeance™ laptop memory.

Lenovo TP T420 (Samsung) 1333MHz 4GB SODIMM

In my previous blog post, I reported my experience playing Counter-Strike, using the Corsair Vengeance® K60 Performance FPS Mechanical Gaming Keyboard. However, in order to play any game you not only need a keyboard, but a mouse as well. That said, it would make sense for me to have used a Corsair Vengeance Series M60 FPS Laser Gaming Mouse, and, as where I have reported my user experience with the K60 keyboard in my previous post, I will do the same for the M60 Laser Gaming Mouse in this blog post.

Overclocking the new AMD Bulldozer CPUs on liquid nitrogen is easy, fun and affordable even for a beginner. The new generation of Bulldozer CPUs are reaching speeds near or over 8GHz on liquid nitrogen. Along with high CPU frequencies the processors are able to run memory at high frequencies as well. In this blog I am going to show you the basic template of the settings I use to reach high core and memory frequencies on liquid nitrogen. Be careful though because overclocking on liquid nitrogen voids most warranties and can kill your hardware!

Here's a question for you: what had 20,984 visitors, a 120Gbit internet connection (yes, Gigabit...), with 13,010 PCs connected to it, and the World's best professional gamers in one place? The answer, as I'm sure you guessed, is Dreamhack Winter 2011, the World's biggest LAN event, which took place last month in Jönköping, Sweden. Corsair was there in full force, showing our awesome new Vengeance K90 and K60 gaming keyboards and Vengeance M60 and M90 laser mice, and in this blog we're going to recap the event and what we got up to.

Back in October there were two large LAN events going on in Northern California, while some of us at Corsair went to NVIDIA’s GeForce LAN event, I decided to check out Intel’s LANfest 2011 in Folsom, CA. The most popular games at the party were League of Legends, World of Warcraft, Battlefield BC2, Team Fortress 2 and of course Starcraft 2. Corsair sponsored some of the events and gave away a bunch of gear ranging from speakers, headsets, cases, memory and more! There was a great crowd and we were able to catch a lot of the highlights on film, check out the video below. I had a great time and even got to participate in the Starcraft 2 tournament, although it didn’t take long before I was knocked out!  Thanks to Intel for hosting the event and thanks to the event goers that made it a great LAN party. If you missed us, hopefully we will see you at the next event!

In our first two installments of the Intel Sandy Bridge build logs, I documented the initial build of a workstation and then we did some benchmarking to document the performance. Since that time the machine has undergone an amazing metamorphosis into an all out gaming rig. With the aid of my assistant below, I made some substantial changes to the original build.

Customers have made Corsair their top choice in three major categories for the 2011 Bit-tech, Bit-gamer and Custom PC awards, awarding us Best Memory Manufacturer (for the third year in a row), Best PSU Manufacturer (continuing our five-year winning streak), and the Overclocking & Cooling Award. Of the latter, Bit-tech writes: "Corsair's new range of CPU coolers, especially its pre-filled water-cooling loops, has been especially popular."