Corsair Blog

Surprisingly enough, the entire tech world is covering Computex. So, instead of a review round-up this week, I thought I'd just show you guys the coverage we've received at the show.  

Lets start with two video previews that Hexus has done. First up is the Corsair Graphite Series™ 600T mid-tower case.

And in this one, they preview the Corsair AirFlow™ Pro parametric data display for Dominator® memory.

Lastly, TweakTown has a video preview of the Graphite Series 600T, the AirFlow Pro as well as the newly announced Professional Series™ Gold AX1200 power supply.  

So, what did you all think of our announcements? Personally, I'm pretty stoked about the Graphite Series 600T case. I've been waiting for a mid-tower with the features that we're offering there. And the AirFlow Pro is a must have for me — I'm all about the light show!

Next week should be back to something resembling normal and we'll certainly have reviews for everyone. Have a great weekend!

I got a new phone this week, the Droid Incredible. My previous phone found its way into the washing machine and sadly never recovered. I must say, the Incredible is a very nice piece of hardware but the only thing truly "incredible" about it is the incredibly short battery life. If anyone has any tips on how to extend the battery life, please post in the comments! I've got GPS turned off and I hardly use it while at work but the battery usually dead by 1PM after a full night of charging!  

Speaking of incredible, Hardware Canucks reviewed the Hydro Series™ H70 CPU Cooler and gave it their "Dam Good" and "Dam Innovative" awards. Oh, you crazy Canadians, I see what you did there.

"The use of a double-thickness radiator and a highly compact water block / pump combination usually results in high temperatures but that hasn't happened here. Instead, through engineering excellence Corsair has designed what is currently one of the best (if not THE best) closed loop water cooling systems on the market."  

Legit Reviews had a look at the Air Series™ A70 CPU Cooler and had some very nice things to say about it after comparing it to some of the best CPU coolers on the market.

"Legit Bottom Line: Corsair's first step into the air cooling market was a good one and the A70 CPU cooler is a very solid performing CPU cooler!"  

Finally, Funky Kit posted a massive round-up review of fifteen different power supplies, including the Enthusiast Series™ TX950 PSU which came away with the Editor's Choice, and the Professional Series™ HX750 power supply which came away with their Recommended award in the power user category. Can we get a championship belt too?

"For the highend power supplies, we can see that the Corsair TX950W is an excellent performer. It produced an amazing power efficiency rating of 88%, which is on par with the Coolermaster Silent Pro M1000. However, Corsair TX950W went further, producing a solid 12V reading and capable of handling whopping 98A at full load."

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

Let's face it. Floppy drives are so 1992 and CDs and DVDs don't conveniently fit into most people's pockets. USB flash drives are the ultimate in pocket sized storage and the possibilities for using them are virtually limitless. However, creating a flash drive that is a convenient and bootable tool is not as easy as making a bootable floppy or bootable optical disk. That is, until now.

The Corsair Flash Survivor™ GTR is already an outstanding drive with superior durability and performance.  

Corsair has provided an easy to use utility that will convert your USB flash drive into a versatile bootable tool. Developed by Pendrivelinux.com, the simple installation makes the drive bootable allowing the user to boot directly to Memtest or to a FreeDOS prompt. The drive is also still fully usable as a standard USB flash drive.

It's been an insanely busy time for us recently here at Corsair. We've had several new products in the works, and we just announced a bunch of them at Computex Taipei...  

The new Corsair Professional Series™ Gold power supplies, continue our tradition of innovation and excellence with three new 80 Plus® Gold certified, fully-modular PSU's rated at 1200, 850, and 750 watts. Read more about the AX1200, AX850, and AX750, and check out the press release.

The Corsair Graphite Series™ 600T Mid-Tower case is something I'm personally very excited about. No other mid-tower case has the combination of features, good looks, and ease of build that this case will bring to the market. Read the press release, and check out this video from our friends at Legit Reviews:  

Jessie Lawrence posted yesterday in detail (with a video!) about the new Corsair AirFlow™ Pro, our newest accessory for Dominator® memory with DHX Pro technology that provides a dynamic display of memory activity and temperature for up to six modules. Click here to read the press release.

We also just announced our compatability with the latest Intel® Core™ i7 and Core i5 unlocked processors and Corsair Dominator DDR3 memory. Check out Jake Crimmins post detailing his experience overclockcking the Intel Core i5 unlocked processor to 4.5 GHz, and the Core i7 to 4.05 GHz using all our latest and greatest products.

Finally Legit Reviews has a great article on everything we're up to at Computex, with tons of pictures and videos of our latest products.   

Keep checking the Corsair Blog for all the latest Corsair news from Computex Taipei!

The Corsair Force Series F40 solid-state drive is best way to bring your system into the 21^st century. Utilizing the SandForce® SF-1222 SSD Processor, and with a capacity of 40GB, the Force Series F40 delivers the performance enthusiasts demand without breaking the bank.

Optimizing your Force Series F40 SSD

There are a few simple things you can do to get the most out of any SSD. Most importantly when using a smaller drive, you want to save on disk space wherever possible. Outlined below are the steps we took to achieve maximum results without impacting performance.

E3 2010 wrapped up yesterday. Were any of you paying attention? How do you feel about the motion-sensing offerings from Microsoft and Sony? I didn't see a whole lot around the PC this show, but what I did see was pretty impressive. Fallout: New Vegas, Portal 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic all look great to me and will probably be getting some of my hard-earned money. I'd be interested to hear what tickled your fancy about E3.

We had a pretty awesome week in reviews, starting with this one of the Flash Padlock® 2 at Notebook Review:

"It’s not hard to find an 8GB flash drive for under $20, so does it make sense to spend at least another $30 for the [Flash] Padlock 2? That all depends on how valuable security is to you. The encryption method that the Padlock 2 uses is highly secure, so it’s not likely to be hacked. If that’s important to you for work or other purposes, then the Padlock 2 is worth the investment."

From there, we head over to Hot Hardware where they've done a combo review of both the Obsidian Series™ 700D and 800D.  They both score their Recommended award.

"The Corsair Obsidian 700D and 800D are top-end products; Corsair's design team hit virtually every target one could set for a full-tower ATX enclosure. The 800D is designed for the enthusiast that wants a top-end case with all the bells and whistles and wants to show it off afterwards."

 Lastly, Legit Reviews is the latest to jump on the Force Series™ bandwagon with their review of our blisteringly fast Force Series F120 SSD.

"With 20% more available storage, three year warranty, the same great performance and a price per GB ratio that won't make you tear up, we would add this to our short list of recommended SSD's."

That's all I've got this week. What are you up to this weekend? I'll be enjoying myself in Seattle, Washington for a nice three-day weekend. Hopefully the weather holds up for us!

Have a great one everyone!

Hopefully you've read Gareth's excellent post on designing Professional Series™ Gold AX1200 already. No? Then click here before you continue.

If you HAVE read Gareth's post, then lets have a look at some of the glowing reviews that the AX1200 has received this last week.  

Jonny Guru has been one of the go-to websites for thorough reviews of power supplies for years. They were among the first to get their hands on the AX1200 and had nothing but positive things to say about it before giving it their highly coveted Recommended award.

"I got 94% efficiency out of this thing at more than one point, folks! Do you need any other reason to buy one? Let's face it - Corsair's new baby is made of awesome sauce, and I know you all want a taste. Stop reading my review and buy one, already!"

Don't bother asking for the awesome sauce recipe. It's a company secret and we're not sharing.  

Norwegian reviewsite Hardware.no also had a look at the AX1200.  We used Google to translate their review, and it sounds like they approve...

"Corsair AX 1200 W is without doubt a quality product from beginning to end. Except that I can seem extremely enthusiastic, I will simply say that they have done everything right."  

Finally, German site PC-Max had their say about the AX1200. Again, we translated this using Google.  

"Well, what is the end? It remains to say definitely that Corsair with the AX1200 has brought a good supply on the market. Processing are both inside and out very well and there is a pleasant extras such as seven-year guarantee or a fully modular cable management."  

Lets be honest, not everyone needs a 1200W power supply.  If you're wondering what your PC requires, you should use our PSU finder tool.  It'll recommend the perfect Corsair power supply for your system based on your specifications.

Have a great weekend everyone!

After a nine hour session of overclocking on liquid nitrogen, well known overclocker Gautam Bhatnagar and I broke the 3DMark 05 dual card world record. With a score of 56,223 3DMarks, the old record was broken by 1290 3DMarks. This score not only broke the previous dual card 3DMark05 record but also took an overall top 10 score in 3DMark05.

Futuremark Compare Link

Breaking 3DMark records requires many hours of testing and tweaking to get everything just right. For instance while testing our Intel® Core™ i7-980X for this record we found the memory controller on the processor did not like running triple channel at cold temperatures. To get around this issue we used two modules in dual channel mode instead of triple channel. This allowed the CPU to be run as cold as -185°C, which allowed the CPU to scale up to 6.29GHz. This extra frequency allowed for a higher overall score, although the score was only slightly affected by running dual channel.

As a leading supplier of solid-state drives, such as the award winning Corsair® Force Series™ SSD's, Corsair would like to help you get the most out of your SSD-based system. In this brief how-to guide, we'd like to show you how to nearly double the performance of your SSD based disk subsystem by using RAID.

RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. We won't go into the many different types of RAID configurations here. The basic concept involves combining multiple storage drives in an array to gain performance, fault tolerance, or a blend of the two. One SSD is great, so two SSDs must be incredible, right? Right!

This article will focus on RAID-0, which is the most common RAID configuration utilized strictly for performance. Many enthusiast and desktop motherboards come equipped with onboard RAID controllers. These can be built into the chipset, such as the AMD south bridge, Intel® ICH / PCH controller hubs, or the NVIDIA® MCP. Some motherboard makers add a second RAID capable disk controller to the motherboard board to enable a second RAID array. Users can also add additional RAID functionality with a PCI or PCI-e RAID card.