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By Jessie Lawrence, on November 16th, 2009
Hey all, I hope the weekend was awesome for everyone. We had a couple great product reviews last week:
First up, the guys over at Tech Power Up! gave the Corsair Obsidian Series 800D their editor’s choice and they had the following to say:
“…the Obsidian 800D is a worthy player in the high-end, full tower segment and I am looking forward to future cases from Corsair”
Next up, Bjorn3D reviewed the CMD8GX3M4A1600C8 Dominator DDR3 memory kit for P55 motherboards. En route to giving it their seal of approval, they were able to overclock the kit to a blistering 1900MHz using stock voltage at CL9!
“The Corsair Dominator 8GB DC DDR3 1600MHz kit showed us the advantage of running more ram and gave us a great performance boost, we plan on running 8GB on our test rig and that’s the best compliment you can give any product…”
Finally, every once in a while, there will be a case mod that comes along that blows us away. Bill Owen of Mnpctech.com built this masterpiece. It features our TWIN2X4096-6400C5 DDR2 memory kit and a Corsair Extreme Series X64 SSD drive.
 Bill Owens' Ion PC
By John Beekley, on November 12th, 2009
 Corsair Dominator DDR3 memory in Intel Blue Over the past few months, we’ve reached some key milestones in the technology transition from DDR2 to DDR3 memory. Both AMD and Intel have launched significant new processor platforms, AM3 and Lynnfield respectively, that both use DDR3 memory. At the same time, DDR2 pricing has come up while DDR3 has decreased—making DDR3 RAM not only higher in performance than DDR2, but also lower cost.
So, this makes it official… DDR3 is now THE memory for new builds, and DDR2 is now mainly for upgrades.
I’m sure you are wondering why the price of DDR2 memory has increased over the course of the year—the answer is actually very simple. For the past year or so, DDR2 memory has been a fantastic bargain for the consumer. In fact, at one point earlier this year, 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 memory could be had for less than $20! Unfortunately while this was great news for consumers, it turned out to be catastrophically bad news for the manufacturers. It cost far more to produce the memory than it could be sold for. Two words describe this scenario—“not sustainable”!
Continue reading DDR3… the New Memory of Choice!
By Michael Valera, on November 12th, 2009
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”:
By Mike Clements, on November 9th, 2009
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 Continue reading Corsair Cooling™ Hydro Series H50—Intel Back Plate Installation Guide
By Jessie Lawrence, on November 6th, 2009
I hope everyone had a fun and safe Halloween. This week, we had a couple reviews out there that will hopefully remind you all that while we’ve branched out into other products, we’re still the top dog when it comes to enthusiast memory.
First up, Futurelooks.com reviewed the 4GB Dominator DDR3 memory kit, CMD4GX3M2A1600C8 and they found it worthy of their Editor’s Choice award. They were also able to overclock the modules to 1728MHz at stock voltage and timings!
“This is thus far the strongest dual channel 1600MHz DDR3 memory to grace this test bench.”
Over at Overclock3D, they had a look at our Dominator DDR3 memory modules for the Intel P55 chipset, the CMD8GX3M4A1600C8 where they gave it their “Gamers Choice” award.
“High overclocking, aesthetically pleasing and backed up by Corsair’s award-winning support and warranty should make the buying decision all the easier.”
By Mike Clements, on November 5th, 2009
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 the topic. 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.
Many users want more from a new piece of equipment than a simple digital video recorder (DVR) and cable box combination can provide. The HTPC is the tool for expanding your complete media experience. In addition to Blu-ray playback, a HTPC can be utilized for a multitude of uses. With the proper supporting equipment you can stream video to your HDTV from the internet, or your media server. You can record HD content from unencrypted cable channels from 2 channels simultaneously, you can view over the air (OTA) broadcast television, and there is nothing more fun than using your wireless keyboard to amaze your friends who are still wondering how you got Windows 7 to run on your 51″ television. Read on and we’ll show you 2 great ways to get all this and more.
Read the full article here.
By Gareth Ogden, on November 4th, 2009
 Corsair Flash Voyager GT - speedy, rugged, great-looking, and now with a dedicated Linux Boot partition! In my previous blog posting I covered how to install a Live Boot Linux distribution to a 32GB Flash Voyager GT USB flash drive using Unetbootin, but this isn’t the only way to create a Live Boot USB drive. A quick trip to Pendrivelinux.com will reveal a treasure trove of mini-guides for different distributions of Linux, which are very useful in the event that Unetbootin doesn’t work for you.
For example, I’ve found that Unetbootin fails to correctly install the Syslinux boot files to a USB drive that has been turned into a Fixed drive and split into multiple partitions, as described in my blog post Create separate partitions on your Corsair USB flash drive. I don’t why this doesn’t work, so if any Linux gurus out there can explain how to get this working then that would be great!
Continue reading Live Boot Linux Mint KDE from a multi-partitioned Corsair Flash Voyager™ GT
By Gareth Ogden, on November 3rd, 2009
 One of the many great uses for the latest range of high-capacity, high-speed Corsair Flash Voyager GT USB flash drives is to use one as a Live Boot drive for one of the numerous portable distributions of Linux. You might think that a USB flash drive won’t be fast enough to use as a system drive, but thanks to the rapid read and writes speeds of the new Flash Voyager GTs, running an OS directly from the drive is surprisingly smooth. And using the free application Unetbootin, it’s also incredibly simple. We’ll show you how.
The benefit to a USB Live Boot drive is that you can essentially carry around a complete operating system with applications on your Flash Voyager GT. This can be useful for simple troubleshooting tasks, for example if your current OS decides to ‘misbehave’, or to hot-desk between multiple computers and not only carry around all your important data, but use the same desktop environment too.
Continue reading Boot and run Linux from a Flash Voyager™ GT USB flash drive using Unetbootin
By Gareth Ogden, on November 2nd, 2009
 In the same way that it can be helpful to create multiple partitions on a large hard disk drive or SSD in order to better manage your data—for example a DATA partition and WINDOWS partition—it’s also helpful to do the same with high-capacity flash drives. For example, WORK and PERSONAL partitions, or a separate MUSIC partition, or even a BOOT partition for a Live Boot USB drive.
However, while it’s a simple task to partition a hard disk drive or SSD, it’s not quite so easy to partition a USB drive. This is simply because the former is considered a ‘Removable Storage Device’ by Windows, and Windows does not allow for multiple partitions on removable devices. A neat little trick to get around this is to simply turn your removable USB drive into a fixed logical disk drive by ‘flipping’ the removable bit in the firmware. This is the digital flag that tells Windows whether the drive is ‘fixed’ or ‘removable’. You can do this using the Lexar BootIt utility, available from here.
Continue reading Create separate partitions on your Corsair USB flash drive
By Jessie Lawrence, on October 30th, 2009
Another week, and we’ve got more product reviews to share!
On Monday,Tweaknews.net reviewed the Corsair Professional Series HX750W power supply and had some fine things to say about it:
“Corsair’s new HX750W ATX modular power supply certainly doesn’t disappoint. With excellent performance, quiet operation and a very innovative features set, this PSU could easily find a home in the most demanding systems.”
Today, OC3D posted their review of our new CMD8GX3M4A1600C8 Dominator GT DDR3 memory kit for the Intel P55 platform:
“All in all, if you are looking for a larger than standard 4GB kit, the 8GB Corsair Dominator GT kit is certainly a kit that will suit your needs. Higher overclcoking, aesthetically pleasing and backed up by Corsairs award winning support and warranty should make the buying decision all the easier.”
Finally, we’re starting to see some really inspired work by customers who have built their rigs with the Corsair Obsidian Series 800D full tower case:
- In the [H]ardForums, we found this rig by “dugn.” We liked his build because it’s clean and easy on the eyes with some subtle mods to make it stand out.
- Over at Xtremesystems, they take hardware to the very edge (and over it at times). Here’s a beautifully done water-cooled system using the 800D by “BlackHouse.”
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