Those crazy guys down in the Corsair Labs. Usually they can be found subjecting
Corsair products to a frightening array of torture tests to ensure legendary Corsair
reliability and performance. But in the course of those activities, they manage
to come up with some pretty neat system builds, overclocking techniques and innovative
ways to push system performance. Here are their latest efforts and links where you
can see the system build log or discuss these builds in the Forums.
|
Corsair Labs October 2009: HTPC Build Log
In December of 2007 Corsair Labs took a look at building a high definition Home
Theater PC, or HTPC. Since that time, several exciting new technologies and innovations
have become available that give us cause to revisit the HTPC. Today, users have
more power and more options than ever before available in small form factor (SFF)
systems. So, we are going to take a look at what is possible with an HTPC build
using 2 very different systems.
|
|
Intel's New P55 Chipset and Lynnfield CPUs
Intel users can now harness the power of Core i7 in a more cost effective manner
while not sacrificing performance. The new Lynnfield and P55 based systems are proving
to be very powerful and feature rich based upon our testing. The system featured
here proved itself to be an excellent system for all tasks put before it at the
stock settings. And, the performance gets better as the system is also a very solid
overclocking unit. With a minimum of tweaking we took our stock 2.8GHZ system to
almost 4GHZ and saw some performance increases approaching 50%.
|
|
Configuring RAID-0 Arrays With Solid State
Drives
Many users are beginning to exploit the advantages of SSDs; specifically the higher
performance over that of standard rotational hard drives. Users are using 2 or more
SSDs to build RAID arrays to gain even more performance over that of a single drive.
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 is that users
can utilize a disk controller to combine multiple hard drives, or in this case SSDs,
in an array to gain performance, data redundancy and parity, or a combination of
these.
This article will focus on RAID-0, which is the most common RAID configuration for
performance. We'll use a variety of RAID controllers in RAID-0 using 2 of our P128
SSDs from the Performance Series and show you the basics of setting up RAID-0 arrays
on these controllers.
|
|
AMD Phenom II Gaming Machine
Corsair Labs strives to provide the most current product and performance information.
We do our very best to exploit the newest hardware available from a variety of manufacturers
to provide information for our readers. We've been keeping an eye on AMD lately
and their recent products and have been developing some Corsair products to work
with them. The Phenom II is making waves so we wanted to work with products that
complimented it.
With this idea in mind, we decided to build a new gaming machine using 3 recently
released products from AMD, ATI, and ASUS. We chose the AMD Phenom II 940 CPU, the
ATI HD 4890 GPUs, and the ASUS M4A79 Deluxe motherboard.
|
|
Upgrading an AMD Phenom System
Throughout the various Corsair technical support resources, we have recently noticed
an increase in requests for information regarding AMD platforms. Many users are
evaluating the feasibility of upgrading existing AM2, AM2+, and AM3 compatible systems
as opposed to embarking upon an entirely new build. To gain some insight for our
customers, we decided to take an existing AMD Phenom based system from our lab,
perform an upgrade on it, and compare the results from the two systems. We attempted
to keep this upgrade at or below the $500 point. With this price in mind we decided
that the upgrade would consist of a new CPU, GPU, and hard drive.
Build Log: Includes lots of testing
Discuss this build in the
Forums
|