Corsair blog

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!

Historically, I have always been a confirmed user of cheap keyboards. I had never really thought that premium keyboards were all that great. But then again, what makes a keyboard... well... good? Until now, it wasn't the looks — the looks only justified our need to spend excessive cash on a simple input device. Even for more than $100.00 USD, most all keyboards are still plastic with rubber dome keys and shiny, fingerprint-prone gloss. So what actually makes a good keyboard? The feel of the keys, the weight of the keyboard, the functionality and responsiveness — these are features that you can't see — you have to experience them.

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.

Intel® has made several changes when it comes to memory for the new 2nd generation Intel Core™ i7 processors (Sandy Bridge-E). Corsair has launched new Quad Channel DDR3 memory kits specifically designed for Intel’s new X79 motherboards. Intel has added the ability to run quad channel with up to eight DIMMs for a total of 64GB of memory. All the Corsair memory upgrade kits designed for X79 feature four modules and support XMP Profile 1.3.

I recently spent a week out in sunny Monterey, California for Corsair corporate training. It was great fun and it’s always refreshing to see all the people in from around the globe that make Corsair great.

In the midst of all the grueling training sessions and team building activities, I actually stumbled across a great example of the practical advantages of one of our products. Benchmarks are great but an example of every day usage is even better in many cases. Here is how a USB 3.0 flash drive literally changed my life.

USB 3.0 is slowly but surely becoming the standard for new devices and is being implemented on a growing number of motherboards. Of course that means that we are increasing our offerings of USB 3.0 flash drives. Meet our fastest UFD, the Flash Voyager® GT USB 3.0 flash drive.

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."

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.

As much as it pains me to admit it, not every person wants or needs a fire breathing dragon type PC. Quite a few people in the world will never use or want discrete PCI-e graphics processing, a personalized modded case with bells and whistles, multiple drives, and all of those other goodies that constitute a high end PC. A lot of people are going "green" with their PCs and making choices that consume less power.