Corsair Blog

What a crazy week. To an outsider, it probably seems like not a whole lot is going on as far as Corsair is concerned. But trust me, this is just the calm before the storm. I'll leave it at this — Computex starts next week. There will be plenty of news to go around. Until then, check out these reviews...  

Up first is a round-up review that ZDNet UK did of five different SSD drives, including our Nova Series V128. Here's a snippet:

"If you factor in price, then the Intel X25-M starts to look expensive for its 80GB capacity, whereas the Corsair Nova [Series] really shines. It's by no stretch of the imagination a cheap drive in a market where £70 buys you 1.5TB of conventional disk drive. But among its peers, the 128GB Corsair Nova [Series]hits the right capacity/price/performance point and so is our overall choice."  

Hot Hardware also had a SSD round-up but this time it was the Force Series F100 bringing home their Editor's Choice award.

"Taking all things into consideration, the Corsair Force Series F100 and OCZ Agility 2 drives would be our preferred all-around choices, for obvious reasons. The Corsair F100 offers better overall performance than the Agility 2 thanks to its firmware..."  

I really wish I could spill the beans about what we're showing at Computex. It's so exciting! We've been working real hard on these products and I think you'll be seeing a lot more awards being handed out when they get reviewed. I'm going to leave you all with this food for thought. If you had a dream product for us to announce at Computex next week, what would it be? Post your answer in the comments.

Have a great weekend!

Tomorrow is a pretty significant day in geek history. No, I'm not talking about the Windows 3.0 release in 1990. Thirty years ago tomorrow, Pac-Man hit the arcades of Japan. Just a few years later, I got my first game console, an Atari 2600, for Christmas with a Pac-Man cartridge and I was hooked. Never played Pac-Man? Shame on you. You should head over to Google's home page and click on the "insert coin" button and get your game on!

But you didn't come here looking for information on antiquated video games, did you? On to the reviews!  

Our friends to the north, Hardware Canucks, were busy this week with a couple of reviews. First up, we have their video review of the Obsidian Series™ 700D full-tower case. 

In addition to getting a Dam Good award for the 700D, we also received one for the 32GB Flash Voyager® GTR along with an Innovation Award.

"In both synthetic and real world testing the [Flash Voyager] GTR simply destroyed the competition and even gave our lone USB-equipped solid state drive a run for its money. The fact that you can get all this speed in a package which is only slightly bigger than your average run of the mill flash drive is simply a testament to miniaturization."  

Before we go, you simply must check out this awesome luggage mod we found. You heard me right. Luggage. Why do we care? Did I mention it's a luggage mod? In all seriousness though, they're using our Hydro Series H50 CPU cooler and we think this has to be the coolest application of the H50 we've seen yet.

Have a mod we MUST see? Leave it in the comments!

Have a great weekend everyone.

What a crazy week for Corsair products! First, they broke the dual-channel memory frequency world record and then they go and travel around the world. Already, our products have accomplished more and traveled more this year than I have!  

Hot off the press is a review from Hexus of the Corsair Obsidian Series™ 700D full-tower case and it pulled in their Recommended award.

"The good is bountiful, including cavernous interior; the best cable-management system we've seen; well-thought-out cooling zones; cutout for through-the-motherboard heatsinks and decent airflow. Perhaps most importantly of all, it's an absolute doddle to build into, and it's practically impossible to have an ugly-looking installation."  

If you're looking for a fast USB flash drive, the guys over at Everything USB enjoyed the performance of the 32GB Flash Voyager® GTR.

"With synthetic read and write speeds reaching up to 34.1MB/s and 31.7MB/s respectively, the Flash Voyager GTR series stands head and shoulders above its USB 2.0 brethren. Real-world writes were also at least 70% faster than another 32GB flash drive from a reputable maker."

 
Finally, Vortez Hardware reviewed the Corsair Hydro Series H50 CPU cooler and gave it their Silver award after testing it in numerous different environments.

"Performance wise, it matched many of the high end air coolers such as the Noctua NH-U12P, Alpenföhn Nordwand, Prolimatech Megahalem and the Thermolab Baram. When a push/pull configuration was employed, the H50 delivered even better results pitting it against the like of the Thermalright Ultra Extreme."  

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

Unfortunately, it was a pretty slow week for reviews this week. Must be the weather? Either way, the two reviews we do have this week are focused on the Obsidian Series™ 700D full-tower case. If you've been salivating over the 800D, but were waiting for a cost-down alternative you might want to take a look.   

Shane from Legit Reviews thought enough of the Obsidian Series 700D to give it their highest honor — the Editor's Choice award. Here's a bit of what he had to say:

"Corsair had done what it set out to do with the 700D for the Obsidian Series. They made a more affordable version of the 800D that will fill the gap for the users that wanted the 800D, but not the side window (yes some people prefer no window) and/or the hotswap features."   

Tweak Town has reviewed the Obsidian Series 800D in the past, so they have an interesting take on the 700D.

"...the 700D offers all the room of its older brother, but there are changes afoot. Some really obvious, some less conspicuous, but all designed to offer the same quality and pleasurable experience of ownership as was brought to you with the 800D, just this time a little different way of looking at things."   

That's all we have for reviews for this week, so I wanted to mention that we'll be making an appearance at PDXLAN in Portland, Oregon. PDXLAN is a 500 person LAN event and runs July 16-19. We'll be there the 17th and 18th. Come by, say hi, and compete in the system build-off competition that we're sponsoring. We're giving away all the components necessary to build your very own Corsair Dream PC!

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!