Corsair Blog - Archive May, 2011

It’s not every day you get to build a super high end gaming machine, let alone building it gets to be part of your job description! For this build I got to use the brand new Corsair Link™ hardware, along with the new Corsair Hydro Series™ H100 CPU cooler. The Corsair Link technology allows you to control your fans and lighting right from your Windows® desktop. The H100 cooler offers great cooling ability with its dual 120mm fan radiator and it also connects to Corsair Link.

Let’s take a look at the hardware to build this system. For the motherboard I went with the MSI Big Bang X58 motherboard, the CPU used is Intel® Core™ i7-990X Processor Extreme Edition. Filling the memory slots is Dominator® GT DDR3 memory, with an Airflow fan and Corsair AirFlow Pro™ on top. For the power supply I used the top of the line Professional Series™ Gold AX1200 and for the SSD I used a 120GB Force Series™ 3 6Gb/s SSD. To output display to the monitor I chose two NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 560s in SLI. For the sound card I went with the ASUS Xonar sound card. I have found it makes a great combination with our SP2500 speakers or the HS1A headset. Finally to house all of these components the Corsair Obsidian Series™ 800D full-tower case was chosen.

Corsair Link™ is a technology that lets you monitor and adjust your PCs cooling and lighting based on any number of criteria and preferences.

Why am I going to want Corsair Link for my system?

If you want the best cooling control solution and the coolest lighting solution on the market, you’re going to want this.

Check out this video where George Makris, Product Marketing Manager and Aaron Neal, Engineer Program Manager walk you through the Corsair Link™ hardware and the Corsair Link Dashboard software.In the video they explain the differences between the cooling kit and the cooling and lighting kit. Aaron also gives a demonstration of the Corsair Dashboard software and shows you how to adjust the cooling fan profile based on the current CPU temperature as well as the LED profile based on the current GPU temperature.

Here at Corsair we have a level of obsession for performance that sometimes worries our parents. The latest result of this singular focus is the production of a Dominator® GT 2x4GB DDR3 kit that's guaranteed to operate at 2400MHz, with latency settings of 9-11-10-30 at 1.65V. We made the announcement yesterday.

We recently posted some amazing benchmarks put up by our newest SSDs, the Force Series™ 3 120GB and 240GB solid-state drives. Here’s the original blog post for Corsair Force Series 3 SSDs are Now with Us.

Further testing has yielded more awesome benchmark results. One frequently used test by enthusiasts is PCMark® Vantage from Futuremark®. According to Futuremark, “A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.“

Several years ago, Corsair worked with Intel® on the development of the Extreme Memory Profile (Intel XMP). These profiles are used to store overclocking information on the memory module, so your system can be overclocked to a known-stable value by adjusting a single setting in the BIOS.

We are big fans of Intel XMP, and we'd like to announce a bunch of new Intel XMP certifications for the latest 2nd Generation Intel Core™ processor family!

This past weekend Corsair went to the GXL Lan, located 45 minutes from Philadelphia.  The event was completely sold out with over 350 gamers attending. 

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.