Corsair blog

I'm very happy to relay that Fry's Electronics has begun carrying the Corsair Obsidian Series 800D full-tower case at many of their locations. This is an impressive feat, as Fry's generally doesn't carry PC chassis that retail for more than about $200. It's simply a floor space issue; mass-market PC cases below $200 tend to sell in higher volumes, and Fry's, like most retailers, tries to carry a mix of products that will move a lot of volume.

The 800D has enjoyed a reception from both the press and customers that's been nothing short of phenomenal. It seems that many prospective customers have been asking for it at their local Fry's Electronics location. This interest has made its way to Fry's management, and they've agreed to carry the 800D on a trial basis at 14 of their locations. Some of these locations were chosen by Fry's because those are the stores where they've gotten the most requests from customers. Most of the trial stores are in Texas. The 800D is a pretty large case, so I'll let you go ahead and make the "everything's bigger in Texas" joke.

I often get asked why we go through the effort to certify our ultra-high-speed memory with Intel's XMP (Extreme Memory Profile) program. After all, the conventional wisdom states, most high end overclockers don't use XMP profiles to overclock, but head straight for every BIOS setting they can get their hands on.

True enough, I guess. However, the goals of the overclocker and the goals of Corsair are similar, but not exactly the same. The goal of the overclocker is to tweak his system up to the very level where fear of instability outweighs the thrill of competition. Indeed, I suspect that most overclockers tweak their system beyond that level, and then back off slightly.

This is an issue that I've come across a few times since I got into this business—I want to improve my desktop's performance, but I don't want to be bothered with re-installing my operating system which is the recommended procedure when you change your motherboard. So, what else can I do?

In this video, we outline upgrades that you can make to your machine without having to bother with a fresh operating system install. The result? A cooler, faster machine moved over to the Corsair Obsidian Series 800D, which has plenty of room for future upgrades. Check it out!

For CES 2010, we threw a party at Club LAVO in the Palazzo. Thanks to all our friends and partners for attending!

Click on any image for a full sized picture...

Legit Reviews posted their Best of 2009 Hardware Awards today and Corsair received awards in two categories; Best Computer Case and Best Water Cooling Kit! Here's what they had to say about the Corsair Obsidian Series™ 800D full-tower chassis:  

Corsair had been hard at work developing a new chassis long before their frist chassis was released in August of 2009. This chassis wasn't a clone of an existing case, but rather a new design from the ground up that was aimed at computer enthusiasts. When we reviewed the chassis in August of 2009, we found that this full size tower was massive, but we fell in love with the space, appearance and functionality.

The case was delayed a number of times and even had to go through a slight re-design right when it was launched, but the end product is spectacular to say the least. We liked the Obsidian 800D so much, that we gave the case the innovation award when we reviewed it this summer.

Solid-state drives have been around in one form or another for quite some time, but it’s only in the last 18-24 months that they have really started to come into their own for mainstream consumers and enthusiasts. In fact, 2009 could be viewed as the year that SSD really ‘arrived’, and 2010 is going to be even better.

The interest and excitement surrounding solid-state drives is well-founded, because they have the capability to totally transform your PC’s performance. That may sound like a bold statement, but replacing your conventional, mechanical hard disk drive with a Corsair Performance Series or Extreme Series solid-state drive is one of the most beneficial upgrades you can make, right up there with a new CPU or doubling your RAM.

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.

I had some trepidation over using “A Quiet Revolution” for the title of this post. The term was first used for the period of intense socioeconomic and socio-political changes in Quebec in the 1960s (thanks, Wikipedia!), but since then, I’m sure the play on words has already been used to advertise innumerable vacuum cleaners. However, as clichéd as it might be, it’s an apt description for what we’ve seen with the launch of the Corsair Cooling™ Hydro Series H50 High Performance CPU cooler.

Over the past few months, we’ve reached some key milestones in the technology transition from DDR2 to DDR3 memory. Both AMD and Intel have launched significant new processor platforms, AM3 and Lynnfield respectively, that both use DDR3 memory. At the same time, DDR2 pricing has come up while DDR3 has decreased—making DDR3 RAM not only higher in performance than DDR2, but also lower cost.

So, this makes it official... DDR3 is now THE memory for new builds, and DDR2 is now mainly for upgrades.

I’m sure you are wondering why the price of DDR2 memory has increased over the course of the year—the answer is actually very simple. For the past year or so, DDR2 memory has been a fantastic bargain for the consumer. In fact, at one point earlier this year, 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 memory could be had for less than $20! Unfortunately while this was great news for consumers, it turned out to be catastrophically bad news for the manufacturers. It cost far more to produce the memory than it could be sold for. Two words describe this scenario—“not sustainable”!