In the Halloween spirit, Corsair and Tom's Hardware have teamed up for a contest. If you can guess how many Jelly Belly candy corn candies fit into our Corsair Obsidian Series 800D full tower case, you will win a ton of great prizes! The contest will run starting Monday, October 26, 2009 and will close on Friday, November 6, 2009. The grand prize is as follows:

• Corsair Obsidian Series 800D Case
• Corsair HX850W Power Supply
• Corsair Cooling™ Hydro Series H50 High-Performance CPU Cooler
• Corsair Extreme Series X128 SSD

Enter the contest @ Tom's Hardware and make your guess for a chance to win!

Five years ago when I started at Corsair, cases were either super-cheap plastic, or thin unpainted steel or aluminum. Innovation was pretty much at a standstill—fans were all 80mm or smaller, and cases were smaller because we hadn't yet reached the days of huge video cards, motherboards, and heat pipe based aircoolers.

A lot has changed since then. In the labs we used to talk about all the different cases we'd use for trade shows. "This would be great if..." and "Why didn't they just do this?" comments were bandied about by me and the other guys in the lab, as we tried to figure out how to make a case perfect. Isaac Newton said that "If I've seen further... it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." The Corsair Obsidian Series 800D is the result of this same sort of logic.

The guys from NCIX made a Corsair Dream PC using the Corsair Obsidian Series 800D, 6GB's of Corsair Dominator DDR3 memory, a Corsair Performance Series P128 solid-state drive, a Corsair Professional Series HX1000w modular power supply, and a Corsair Hydro Series H50 CPU cooler. Give it a look!

At Corsair, we're always looking for new and better ways to support our customers. We offer support in many different ways—Tech Support eXpress, forums, phone, and email. We even get the occasional snail mail! What it comes down to is this; we don't want our customer to struggle to find important information about our products.

We're starting a new video series, the Corsair Video FAQ. These will be short videos, demonstrating answers to our most frequently asked questions. We've already got a couple of these recorded and produced for your consumption below, but we'd like to hear what YOU want to see. Is there a Corsair product you have or are considering buying that you would like some assistance with? Comment below and if it makes sense, we'll queue it up for recording!

G4TV just reviewed the Corsair Flash Voyager™ GT 128GB and Flash Survivor™ 32GB USB Flash drives last night on Attack of the Show's "Gadget Pr0n" segment. They rated both of our drives a "Buy":

We caught this awesome video by Zachary Levi (from "Chuck" fame) on NBC last night. At about the 17-second mark, have a look at what's hidden under the $2 bill....

If you're looking for a simple, affordable way to upgrade your CPU cooling, the Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H50 High-Performance CPU Cooler is the perfect solution. In this video, Jeff Checchi shows you how easy it is in to install inside our Corsair Obsidian Series™ 800D full-tower case.

Introduction

Corsair launched the Hydro Series H50 high-performance CPU cooler in June 2009, and since then it has taken the cooling market by storm. It has won worldwide critical acclaim for its superior cooling performance, quiet operation, and ease of use. Installing a Corsair H50 in place of your existing CPU cooler will significantly reduce CPU temperatures and allow for higher overclocking flexibility, and will provide better cooling at lower noise levels. But, as good as the H50 is out-of-the-box, it is possible to increase its performance even further with a simple fan upgrade known as ‘Push-Pull’, which uses two identical fans to increase airflow. We will compare the cooling performance of the H50 in single-fan and push-pull mode to that of a Noctua NH-U12P HSF, also in single- and dual-fan configurations. The test system will use an Intel Core i7-870 (Lynnfield) processor at stock settings, overclocked to 4133MHz with Hyper-Threading Off (max frequency) and overclocked to 4GHz with Hyper-Threading On (max multi-threaded performance). The results, summarized below, show that the Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H50 in a push-pull configuration outperforms the standard H50 by up to 4^oC in the overclocking tests. In addition, it significantly outperforms the Noctua NH-U12P, with temperature reductions of up to 12^oC. This is a significant reduction that will increase overclocking headroom, as well as allowing for minimal noise levels while maintaining low CPU temperatures.

Our new Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H50 Intel® back plate design is similar to the old one, but has been changed somewhat to make it more versatile. It's an easy installation, as seen below.

First, the parts:

Back Plate with Socket 1366, 1156, and 775 Positions and Adjustable Threaded Insert

The Retaining Ring