Corsair Blog - Corsair

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.

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.

We all know SSDs are fast but are limited to smaller drive capacities. The Corsair Accelerator Series SSD Cache Drives allow you to get SSD performance while still having large hard drive like capacities. The Corsair Accelerator Series SSD Cache Drive is available in 30GB, 45GB, and 60GB. To test the performance I used the 60GB drive along with a Western Digital Green 1.5TB hard drive. The drives were plugged into a Gigbyte GA-Z68A-UD4P running a 2500K with 16GB of Vengeance Memory. After installing Windows I ran several benchmarks. After running the benchmarks I installed the Dataplex caching software. You can read the software install blog here.

We've created screen cast covering the basics of overclocking. This is part two which goes more in-depth on overclocking including XMP, bios settings, overclocking software, benchmarks and overclocking forums.

We've created screen cast covering the basics of overclocking. This is part one which covers why people overclock, what can be overclocked, and cooling.

Over the past year or two, we have greatly expanded the Corsair CPU Cooler product line. One of these new additions is our new Air Series™ CPU coolers which we proudly debuted at CEBIT in March 2010. We offer two models at this time, the Air Series A70 and Air Series A50.

The launch of the new Windows 7 operating system from Microsoft presents budding enthusiasts and early adopters with some exciting opportunities to improve the way in which they use their PCs. Windows 7 has received widespread critical acclaim, and for good reason, because it offers some compelling advantages compared to previous Microsoft operating systems. And by upgrading your existing PC, or building a new Window 7-based PC, you can maximise these benefits.

One such benefit is that Windows 7 is highly efficient at making use of high-density memory kits, by which I mean kits of 8GB or larger. Combined with Windows 7’s slick new user interface, which makes it simple to use and manage multiple open applications, Windows 7 is the ideal operating system to really take advantage of the 64-bit memory addressing and multi-tasking capabilities of modern processors.

I have been a long time advocate of the modular PSU, especially one that is exceptionally well built. If you are not familiar with the term modular power supply or modular PSU, it’s a feature allows you to attach and detach cables from the PSU.  

The main benefit a modular power supply gives you, is the ability to customize PSU cabling by only plugging in the cables you need to use. This gives you the flexibility of going with a basic setup or an extreme setup, using the same PSU.

In a basic setup, let’s take a regular home system with two hard drives, a DVD-ROM drive, and a high-end PCI-E video card for example. Using a modular PSU, such as a Corsair HX850W, you technically only need 5 cables from the PSU: the ATX-24pin cable, the 8-pin EPS/12V CPU cable, a SATA cable with three connectors, and two PCI-E cables. You don’t need to worry about tucking away a spaghetti of unused molex, floppy and PCI-E cables that might hinder the air flow inside the case.

In an extreme case, let’s say you want to build a 24 SATA drive storage server and you don’t need to use any molex or floppy connectors. Of course, you will not find any PSU on the market with native support of 24 SATA connectors. But with a modular PSU, again taking a Corsair HX850W as an example, you can plug in 6 modular SATA cables with 4 connectors on each cable into the PSU.

The October 22nd official launch date for Windows 7 is just around the corner, and of course like everyone else we hear lots of buzz about this latest OS. I have been using Microsoft Windows 7 on various computers since shortly after the beta first came out. I wanted to get a handle on the way Win 7 uses memory and SSDs... and of course it didn’t hurt that it booted faster, was more stable, and was much more fun to use than the various versions of Vista that I was barely tolerating!

One feature of Windows 7 that I stumbled upon by accident is the upgraded backup and restore capability. It is known, cryptically, as “Backup and Restore”, and can be found in the “Maintenance” folder in the start menu. Now, my backup scheme is all set up, at work and at home, so I didn’t really want to mess with that. The problem is solves for me is a little different.

The way it has worked out, I do my work on a bunch of different computers. I have the usual desktop computer in my office. I have a netbook that I use for meetings and for short trips. I have a full function notebook that I use for longer trips or if I need to make a presentation. And, at home, I usually end up on my wife’s Dell or my kids’ gaming rig—whichever one is unoccupied at the time. And I can’t count the number of times that I have found that the ONE file I need is the ONE file that is not around or inaccessible just when I need it!