Corsair Blog

If you are not already familiar with the Intel term XMP, or Extreme Memory Profiles, you may be asking yourself — what is XMP? Here is an excerpt from Intel's website:

'"Intel XMP is a performance-packed expansion of the standard DDR3 memory specification, enabling a robust, overclocking solution designed to take advantage of the mega-gaming features built into Intel® technology-based PCs. If you like to overclock and squeeze every possible ounce of performance from your PC, then memory based on Intel XMP is the solution you need to destroy your enemies and save the universe without breaking a sweat.

Designed for ultimate flexibility, Intel XMP-based platforms offer major advantages for pro gamers, novices, and everyone in between. With predefined and certified memory optimizations built into Intel XMP, overclocking on Intel technology-based PCs is easy right out of the box. Expert users still have the option of manually changing specific parameters for personalized fine-tuning."

I've been playing quite a bit of the Starcraft II beta recently, and I've come to realize one thing -- I'm not very good.   There was a point where I was decent -- I could win one game for every game I lost -- but the more people they let into the beta, the fewer wins I'm able to get for each loss.  There's always the option of playing against the computer when the game goes live, right?

In reviews, we had a couple of Force Series SSD reviews this week for those of you who are still looking for reasons to pick one up.   Our Canadian friends at Hardware Canucks reviewed the Force Series F100 100GB SSD where it came away with a couple of awards.

There is no doubt in our minds that if you are looking for an SSD that offers extremely flexible performance in nearly every discipline, the buck stops at the Corsair Force 100. Throughout our tests, it exhibited class-leading performance and simply blew the competition out of the water in some benchmarks.

The other F100 review was by Hexus and they gave it their Performance Award.  

Corsair's Force SSDs represent premium performance for a premium price. Most consumers will be presented with a more favourable £-to-GB metric by opting for, say, the super-speedy Intel X25-M 160GB, but if your need is characterised by massive bombardment of the storage subsystem, few, if any, drives are better than the Force range.

The Hydro Series H50 High-Performance CPU Cooler has been out for a while now, but it continues to rake in the awards.  Case in point -- Fudzilla got their hands on one this week and gave it their Recommended award.

If you were looking for a water cooling solution with no need for assembly (which can get messy if you don’t know what you’re doing), Corsair H50 is made for you. Setting it up is no more difficult than it is to set up an air cooling system – no water pouring, and thus no risk of getting your motherboard all wet. Although the fan is pretty loud at maximum RPM, it ran silent most of the time.

That's all I have for this week.  I have to go work on my zerg rush defense.  Have a great weekend everyone!

I'm suffering from a pretty bad case of writers block right now, so I apologize for not having something witty or interesting to say in this space. Let's just get to the reviews.  

Joe over at Legit Reviews took a look at the 32GB Flash Voyager® GTR USB flash drive and were impressed with the performance.

"The Corsair Flash Voyager GTR offers outstanding performance in a stylish, yet rugged package. You'd be hard-pressed to find a better performing USB 2.0 flash drive. Being backed by Corsair's good name and excellent warranty certainly doesn't hurt either."    

Keeping the subject on our USB flash drives, Tech Power Up reviewed the Flash Padlock® 2 and gave it their recommended award.

"Corsair has gone with the unattached PIN entry with no software required to be run on the host system. This means that there is no way to bypass the system. It is a mystery to me, how Corsair manages to give the user instant access when using VBE, but if that is true, the entire flash memory is encrypted. Even if one opens up the unit and de-solders the flash storage IC and then accesses the data, all the hacker will find is encrypted data."  

Finally, Overclockers Club reviewed the Nova Series V128 solid-state drive featuring the Indilinx Barefoot controller. "For the price, this is the best bang for the buck. While not in as high capacity as mechanical drives, the blazing speed and load times it offers, out weighs the higher costs."  

Well that's it for me this week. Have a great weekend!

Plenty of Corsair SSD reviews this week. Lets see what we've got here!

The Tech Report did a round-up review that included the Nova Series V128 solid-state drive along with offerings from Western Digital, Plextor and Kingston. Our V128 SSD came away with the Editor's Choice!

"With a revised version of the popular Indilinx Barefoot controller, the Nova [Series] may be the most mature offering of these four new SSDs."  

The Nova Series V128 SSD also got tested at Legit Reviews where they were very pleased with what they saw out of the Indilinx Barefoot controller.

"The combination of the Indilinx 'Barefoot' controller and on board 64MB of cache provided stutter-free performance, even while multitasking with a combination of reads and writes. System response while using the Nova [Series] as the OS drive is crisp and lively, as to be expected. With TRIM and garbage collection doing their thing, you can also expect that performance will remain consistent over time."  

The last SSD review we have to share is from AnandTech. They reviewed the Force Series F100 solid-state drive and came away impressed.

"The Corsair Force [Series] drive should be resilient enough to maintain good performance regardless of desktop workload. SandForce's unique architecture means that read performance actually suffers more than write performance over time, thankfully you'll never be in a situation where you'll need to read back LBAs that have garbage data in them so this shouldn't be a problem."  

The last item I have to share comes with a disclaimer — do not try this at home. You will void your warranty. With that said, have a look at this kick-ass modification of our Corsair Cooling™ Hydro Series H50 CPU cooler over at the EVGA forums. As enthusiasts, this is the kind of stuff we LOVE to see! What you're looking at is a modification of the tubing on the H50 to allow for a dual-radiator setup. Just brilliant!

That's all I've got for this week. I'm off to see the Oakland A's play baseball tonight and and might be playing some Starcraft II this weekend. Do you have the Starcraft II beta? If so, add me! I'm on there as Dominator.gtx. Have a great weekend everyone!

We had a bit of a slow week for reviews, but one standout is the Obsidian Series™ 700D full-tower chassis review by Ryan Shrout over at PC Perspective. This is the first review of the 700D and they're already big fans and call it a "great enthusiast case."  

We haven't seen a lot of memory reviews lately, but Benchmark Reviews took a look at the CMG6GX3M3A2000C7 Dominator® GT DDR3 memory kit for Core i7 systems. They found it deserving of their Silver Tachometer award

"For PC hardware enthusiasts who can afford the purchase price, this memory kit could mean the difference between joining the 4.0GHz overclock club or being like everyone else."  

We'll wrap up with a F100 Force Series Solid-State Drive review. Legit Reviews was impressed with the Sandforce controller and the performance results they saw in their testing.

"The benchmark scores show the 100GB Corsair Force drive to be one of the performing drives I have tested.  It blows away the mainstream SSDs that I tested and it shows that the Sandforce controllers are enthusiast class for those demanding the highest performing SSDs."  

Speaking of SSD's, I'll be posting a video shortly showing some real-world SSD performance results. If you've been mulling a SSD purchase, this video should help make that decision much easier to make. Keep your eyes on this space!

Have a great weekend everyone. From the view from my desk, it looks like spring has finally sprung!

Hey guys, hopefully you all were able to navigate the online mine field that is April Fool's Day without tripping on any gags. There were some pretty good tricks out there, like what the guys at Blizzard and Google did. There were some stinkers as well, but we're not going to name any names. Let's just say that we're not going to incorporate any "RTFM" chips into our products any time soon.

But enough fooling around. Lets get to the reviews!  

Leading off, we have a review of our Nova Series V128 Solid-State Drive at Guru3D. They use words like "splendid" and "kickass" to describe the V128 and give it their "recommended" award.

"We don't need to make the conclusion any longer than need, the Nova V128 with its price tag of just over 300 EUR is an enormously competitive product in its category, it's a splendid SSD and we notice them in good availability at this very moment already."  

Next up, the Flash Padlock® 2 USB flash drive gets the once over at Everything USB. No awards given out, but they seem pretty satisfied with it!

"Hardened against prying prying eyes, tampering, kinetic shock and general tomfoolery, the Padlock 2 covers all the essentials of of data security. Better still, the keypad design is built from the ground up to be cross-platform with no unlocking software required and will even work with embedded platforms."

Tweak Town reviewed the Nova Series V128 SSD last week, and this time reviewed the lightning fast Force Series F200 Solid-State Drive. More awards for our SSD drives!

"The Corsair Force is a solid product that is capable of outperforming last generation mainstream products at a price that is on par with what we were paying for drives just a few months ago."    

Finally, one more Flash Padlock 2 review at Overclock3D. They feel the same way we do - your portable data needs to be secure!

"If you regularly carry around a USB stick that contains personal documents or worse yet, portable applications such as Firefox and that have username/password details for websites stored in them, then you REALLY need to start thinking about a device such as the Padlock 2."  

That's it for me this week. Enjoy the weekend. Happy Easter!

Sorry for the lack of posting last week, I was out of the office enjoying some sun and some baseball in Airzona. I'm back now and have some great reviews to share with you.  

First is a review that Tweak Town did of our newly-released Nova Series V128 solid-state drive. If you're looking for a SSD that offers fantastic bang for the buck performance, look no further!

"The Corsair Nova 128GB SSD is not the fastest drive on the market, but it is the fastest drive you can buy for tis cost and you are getting a hell of a lot of performance for your Dollar with this drive."  

Next up is an Overclockers Club review of the 32GB Flash Voyager® GTR USB drive where they gave it their "OCC Gold" award.

"With its high read and write speeds, the Voyager GTR managed to outpace the competition and in test after test, left all other drives in its dust. This drive is perfect for those who transfer large amounts of data and don't like to waste time waiting while the drive is transferring or accessing the data. "  

Finally, the Obsidian Series 800D full tower chassis gets yet another award at OCIA. I think he likes it...

"So yeah, I think it's safe to say I like the obsidian 800D from Corsair. In fact, it is my new favorite case and taking it one step further, it is the best case I have ever used. I have been doing reviews for 10 years and I can't think of a single mass-produced chassis that offers the features and attention to detail that Corsair has produced with the Obsidian."

What a great month it was for us. We're really excited to see what you all think about all the products we launched: Corsair Cooling™ Air Series CPU coolers, Force Series SSD drives and the GTR Series of Flash Voyagers USB drives. See you next week.

The Corsair Dominator and Dominator GT memory modules are made with the latest iteration of our patented DHX Cooling Technology, DHX+. DHX+ based memory modules feature the original DHX heat sinks and extruded printed circuit boards that facilitate more efficient heat removal. DHX+ adds a removable top cooling fin. This fin can be removed to allow for aesthetic improvement upgrades and for the addition of custom cooling solutions.

These fins are easily removed so that users can add different cooling fins such as our extended cooling fins or mount custom cooling solutions such as our Corsair Cooling™ Hydro Series H30 memory cooler. There are also aftermarket cooling solutions made specifically for the DHX+ design such as the Dominance LN2/DICE cooling pot from Kingpin Cooling.

We announced the Obsidian Series 700D full- tower case last month and gave the 2nd member of our PC case family its world debut at CeBIT during the first week of March. You've probably seen some of the industry blog coverage of the 700D and you may have read the press release. It's been a crazy couple of weeks since then, and I finally have the chance to share some background on the decisions that went into defining the follow-up to the original.

The Obsidian Series™ 800D full-tower case was a huge success. It nabbed several major press awards, and has become the go-to platform for case modders and system integrators' high-end configurations. It was clear that we needed to add a new model to the series. As it turned out, picking the features for the next version was pretty easy, too.

Hey everyone, I hope March has been treating you well. We're still getting rained on here in California which is a bit of a downer. Don't forget to "Spring forward" for daylight savings on Sunday morning — assuming your location observes it.

It was a pretty slow week for reviews. I think a lot of sites are recovering from CeBIT while also trying to cover the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.  

Vortez is a new hardware review site in the UK. We sent them a CMG4GX3M2B1600C7 Dominator™ GT DDR3 memory kit and in return, we received a silver award. Here's what they had to say:

"For those looking for a high performance DDR3 dual channel kit the Dominator GT on test here would be a fine choice. Its high speed and low latencies lend themselves to great performance and the fact that you can increase that capability through a decent overclock is all the more commendable."  

CDR Info reviewed our smallest product, the Flash Voyager® Mini 32GB USB flash drive and gave it their greatest honor — the Editor's Choice award. Here's a sample of what they had to say:

"What we also require from such a tiny flash drive is a good build quality and of course, a good performance. The Flash Voyager Mini had them both. "    

Finally, we're always interested in seeing what you guys are doing with Corsair hardware. We found this "Corsair Dream PC" on the front page of [H]ardOCP. Great job by "Putz" with this one. Here's what Steve from [H]ardOCP had to say:

"Long time [H] forum member "Putz" decided to build a new rig and used just about everything Corsair makes in the process. The result is an extremely clean system with impressive specs that anyone would be proud to own."

That's it for me this week. Have a great weekend everyone!