Corsair Blog

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!

Corsair has provided a utility that helps users create the Ultimate Bootable USB Flash Drive. One outstanding feature of this tool is that it is very simple for end users to add advanced functionality to the tool once the basic installation is complete.

A drive like the Flash Survivor® GTR, pictured below, can become a wonderful tool in a few easy steps. An ISO image is an image of an optical disk and this tool has the ability to boot from a bootable ISO image thus eliminating the need to burn a CD or DVD. Following the directions in this guide, the user simply downloads the desired ISO file, extracts it to the USB drive, edits three lines of text, and the tool is ready to use.  

There are many options that an user can add to the basic version of this tool. Most Linux distributions can be downloaded as ISO files. With this tool, users can boot to Linux from their drive which amounts to a pocket sized portable operating system.

Corsair has long been recognized as having some of the best technical and customer support in our industry and we take great pride in this fact. We use a large variety of tools and techniques to provide these services to our customers. One of these tools is Memtest86+ which can be downloaded here: Memtest86+.

Memtest is a standalone program that requires no operating system to run. It can easily be run from a variety of media including a bootable USB flash drive. A bootable USB flash drive is an extremely useful and versatile tool. Corsair provides a utility users can utilize to make their flash drives bootable. The current version also has Memtest embedded in the installation. The Corsair bootable USB flash tool can be found HERE.

Once you have a bootable USB flash drive, you simply boot your system from the device and Memtest runs automatically. We recommend using the default settings so no setup of Memtest is required. Users have the option of manually selecting their boot device during the BIOS POST process or, they can set the USB device as the first boot device in the BIOS.

When making memory modules that are tip-toeing the very edge of what is possible, it takes a lot of time and some very talented people. We're lucky enough to have one of these people in Michal Nowicki. Michal was kind enough to give me a bit of time to discuss our latest and greatest Dominator GTX DDR3 memory module, the GTX4 — with operation guaranteed up to 2533 MHz.   

Q: What is your job here at Corsair?

A: I am an Engineering Specialist at Corsair. My day to day responsibilities are focused around DRAM Product Development. Anytime you hear about Corsair memory products reaching another milestone of performance leadership with the Dominator GT and GTX product lines, or a high-density 24GB Dominator DDR3 memory kit, there is very good chance I had a part in the engineering effort to bring those products to end-users.    

ASUS held their first IIIXIII Extreme Overclocking Summit in Santa Clara, California on April 10^th and 11^th, to overclock the brand new ASUS ROG motherboards and set world records.  Three extreme overclocking teams from North America battled it out over two days of tweaking and pushing their systems to the limit using liquid nitrogen.  The liquid nitrogen allowed the Intel® Core™ i7 processors to be pushed to frequencies over 6.5GHz on the ASUS motherboards.  The event was centered on ASUS’s new Rampage III Extreme and Maximus III Extreme motherboards. It was split over two days, with the first day dedicated to ASUS-provided hardware and the second day open to any hardware the teams brought.  The event was streamed live via webcam and broadcast on ASUS’s ROG website.

Over 200 Liters of Liquid Nitrogen

Each team was provided with enough hardware for three complete systems, with additional spare parts as well.  Each team received three ASUS Rampage III Extreme and two Maximus III Extreme motherboards along with Intel Core i7 processors to match.   Each was also provided six ATI Radeon™ HD 5870 video cards, three kits of Corsair® Dominator GT modules, several SSDs and three power supplies.  Along with all the hardware, each team was allotted 60 liters of liquid nitrogen each day.  This allowed them to cool the processors and video cards to sub-zero temperatures, nearing the -190°C mark. Each team had to compete in several different benchmark categories including: CPU-Z Frequency, WPrime 1024m, SuperPi 32m, 3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage on both P55 and X58 platforms.