Controlling VENGEANCE RGB with CORSAIR LINK

VENGEANCE RGB is here! And with the latest version of CORSAIR LINK (4.6.0.86), you can not only monitor the current performance of your DRAM, but directly control the lighting to best suit your rig!

So what will you need for VENGEANCE RGB? Here’s a quick list of requirements:

·         Intel Z170, Z270, or X99 motherboard

·         Version 11.6.0.1036 (or newer) of the Intel Management Engine driver (recommended if you have a 100 series or 200 series Intel motherboard)

·         CORSAIR LINK 4.6.0.86

·         SPD Write set to “Enabled” in BIOS (if using an ASUS motherboard)

Controlling Lighting in CORSAIR LINK
 

From the Home view of CORSAIR LINK, you can double click on any LED number within the DRAM tile to start customizing your VENGEANCE RGB.

In the “Configure LED” window, you can modify settings such as the LED name, the lighting mode, the speed of the lighting mode, and grouping settings.

When you click on the drop down next to “mode” you’ll notice four different lighting modes are available to choose from:

Static – the module or group of modules is assigned a single color

Color Pulse – the module or group of modules is assigned up to 7 colors to pulse through

Color Shift – the module or group of modules is assigned up to 7 colors to gradually shift through

Rainbow – the module or group of modules cycles through the entire color spectrum

Note: Once a lighting mode is applied in CORSAIR LINK it will be saved directly to the module, that way you don’t have to have CORSAIR LINK running for the lighting mode to be active!

LED Grouping

Each module of VENGEANCE RGB can be assigned its own unique lighting mode, but the fun doesn’t stop there, if you want a uniform look across a group of modules, you can create a group for synchronized lighting. A lighting group can be created by selecting the “Grouped” option in the configuration window and checking the box next to the desired modules. A group delay can be assigned as well as the direction of the effect, allowing you to create some unique effects that flow from module to module.

Note: CORSAIR LINK should be running in the background to synchronize more complex lighting modes.

And that’s it! VENGEANCE RGB unlocks a new way to further customize your build with advanced lighting effects, all without having to worry about managing extra wires. VENGEANCE RGB is available now in our web store.

Performance DRAM such as our Vengeance and Platinum series can be found at rated speeds of up to 4333MHz. However, you might notice that when you first install your RAM and boot to your system’s BIOS, the RAM is running at its standard speed (2133MHz/2400MHz in the case of DDR4 memory). Why does memory initially run at this slower speed?

*DDR4 memory running at its stock 2133MHz speed (shown as 1066.7MHz in CPU-Z).

To answer this question, we must consider the many different combinations of motherboards, processors, and memory that could be possible. A set of memory can be installed on numerous different processor/motherboard combinations, only some of which could actually handle the onboard changes needed for the memory modules to run at their rated speed. To avoid a bad combination resulting in an unbootable system, memory is set to run at a standard speed out of the box, which would put the modules within spec and work universally with all motherboards that support that type of memory.

blog_DRAM_XMP_vs_SPD-Content-2.BMP

Intel XMP (Extreme Memory Profile) is a predefined high performance profile that’s been tested to work with that particular module or set of modules. To enable XMP, you must install your high-performance memory on a motherboard that supports XMP in some form (usually an Intel Z or X-series chipset) and enable XMP within your motherboard's overclocking utility.

*DDR4 memory running at 3000MHz with XMP (shown as 1498.5MHz in CPU-Z).

If your motherboard supports overclocking, but doesn’t offer the ability to read the XMP of a module, as is the case with most AMD motherboards, the label on the modules will denote the rated speed, CAS timings, and voltage. These settings can be applied manually within the overclocking utility in your motherboard’s BIOS to enable the rated speed of the module, however, adjustments may need to be made for non-Intel platforms.

High speed memory can provide significant gains in various workloads from gaming to content creation. With the help of XMP, unlocking more performance can be as simple as turning it on in your system BIOS.

And then, I would argue, there’s competitive overclocker grade. The cream of the crop hardware. Price-performance simply isn’t a consideration; even practical performance may not be a consideration. It’s stuff that’s the best…period.

Like, for example, our Dominator Platinum Limited Edition Orange DDR4 kit, four 4GB DIMMs running at a staggering 3400MHz with latencies of 16-18-18-36 at 1.35V. Top of the line ICs assembled in a kit that pushes the limits of what the host platform itself can handle. This is memory that runs at such a high clock that your CPU may not even be able to crack it.

It also more or less requires a very specific motherboard: the GIGABYTE X99-SOC Champion.

This kit was developed in concert with Gigabyte’s motherboard, which goes down to four DIMM slots and offers a unique topology designed to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of your CPU and memory. The X99-SOC Champion also enables “Socket 2083” mode, adding pins to the socket that allows for more precise voltage control with your processor – a necessity when dealing with bleeding edge performance.

Even still, because of the variable quality of host CPUs and their memory controllers, XMP may not always work with this kit. For that reason, should you decide to walk this path, you may need to adjust your memory settings manually. Some chips will be able to handle the preferred 1.66x gear ratio to hit the kit’s rated 3400MHz speed, while others will require the lower 1.25x gear ratio. We’re providing settings here for either.

This memory, developed in conjunction with Gigabyte’s X99-SOC Champion motherboard and competitive overclocker Hi Cookie, has already been used to set records that will no doubt last for some time to come.

Or at least until we break them again.

Recently, the actual computer part of the Obsidian Series 750D “Yamamura” custom water-cooled system began having issues with random shutdowns and reboots, as detailed in this earlier blog. Ordinarily those types of problems are a frustration, but when your system looks like this…

…the increased difficulty of swapping any parts out, potentially requiring you to actually drain the loop entirely, may even make you question why you built your system up like this in the first place.

However, as any die-hard builder knows, part failure always has a silver lining: an excuse to upgrade. And that’s what I did, giving me a chance to rectify a few pain points in the original build, things I felt like I could’ve done or specced better. The system was already close to unimpeachable, but we can certainly do more.

Swapping the CPU, Motherboard, and DRAM

The only way to “upgrade” past Intel’s monstrous Core i7-4790K (overclocked to 4.7GHz in our build) is to change your platform entirely, so that’s what I did. While the i7-4790K tops out at between 120W and 130W when overclocked, the i7-5960X starts there and pulls considerably more when overclocking is applied. But that’s fine: Yamamura enjoys a custom liquid cooling system with massive heat capacity.

Changing the platform means swapping to the even more capable ASUS X99-DELUXE motherboard as well as jumping from DDR3 to DDR4. Latency does increase, but so does capacity and overall bandwidth. It’s a net gain, and our DDR4-2400 kit even includes an extra XMP profile that pushes the voltage to 1.35V and speed to 2666MHz.

Incidentally, due to the spacing of the video cards, we actually lose a little bit of bandwidth to the pair of GeForce GTX 980s. The slot arrangement results in the bottom GTX 980 only getting PCIe 3.0 x8 instead of the full sixteen lanes, but thankfully this produces virtually no measurable decrease in performance.

Upgrading the Storage

A lot of people didn’t care for the way the LG blu-ray burner broke up the front of Yamamura, and I can see why. At the same time, I also found myself needing a little bit more storage for a documentary I’m editing in my off hours. Thankfully, there’s a way to serve both masters, and it comes from SilverStone.

SilverStone produces a 5.25” drive bay adapter that can fit a slimline, slot-loading optical drive and four 2.5” drives. By purchasing a slimline, slot-loading blu-ray burner and installing a spare 512GB Force LX SSD we had in house, I was able to clean up the front of the case and increase storage.

Fingerprints notwithstanding, it's a lot cleaner than it was before.

Improving the Cooling and the Bling

While the original build called for a Dominator Airflow Platinum memory fan, we weren’t able to find clearance for one owing to the ASUS Z97-WS’s layout. Happily, the ASUS X99-DELUXE doesn’t have this problem, and that meant we could add two Dominator Airflow Platinums. Because they’re PWM controlled, they’re a perfect match for our old Corsair Link Cooling Node, and because they use the same RGB LED connector as our other lighting kits, a single Corsair Link Lighting Node is able to control them.

The end result isn’t just increased bling: even at minimum speeds, the airflow from the fans helps keep the DDR4 cool (with individual DIMMs peaking at just 38C), while also shaving at least 10C off of the power circuitry surrounding the memory slots. Getting fresh airflow into the motherboard’s VRMs never hurts.

Yamamura 1.5

I was immeasurably thankful that I didn’t have to drain the loop to make these upgrades, thus reaffirming my belief in flexible tubing. Hard acrylic is frequently argued as the way to go in modern builds, and people say it looks nicer, but it’s not functional. I use this computer on the daily, and I am possessed by a relentless appetite for tweaking the hardware.

Given just how bloody fast the Yamamura is now (and stable, mercifully), I don’t foresee making any major changes to the system until Skylake and Big Maxwell at the earliest, at which point there may be a newer, more exciting chassis to move into…

It’s been a little while since we’ve hit you with a review roundup. We’re in the calm before the storm: in just a couple short weeks, CES 2015 will be upon us, and the industry will spin up to full tilt again. But for now, we still have a doozy of a review roundup for you. The Corsair Gaming umbrella continues to gain traction with the series of high quality peripherals being released under it, while reviews still trickle in for our HXi power supplies.

Corsair Gaming H1500 and H2100

We’ll start with reviews of our USB-based gaming headset, the Corsair Gaming H1500. Guru3D, eTeknix, and Benchmark Reviews all gave it a listen, and every last one came away impressed.

Guru3D’s Hilbert Hagedoorn said “The Corsair Gaming H1500 shines in a nice deep and dynamic sounding bass, clear voices, and the treble that we increased a notch totally fits my personal sound flavor. These factors combined satisfy my personal audio flavor real fast.” He gave it a Recommended award.

While we’re at Guru3D, Hilbert also tried out our higher end wireless Corsair Gaming H2100 headset and gave it a Top Pick award, saying “For straight up gaming, the H2100 is tough to beat, the overall clarity and nice bass make it a killer headset.”

The reviewer at eTeknix shared a similar sentiment before giving it the Editor’s Choice award: “The Corsair Gaming H1500 is one of the best mid-budget gaming headsets available. It’s lightweight and comfortable to use for long gaming sessions, it has powerful and clear audio and it also has one of the best microphones I’ve tested. A solid all-round performance from Corsair.”

Finally, our friends at Benchmark Reviews called it “a lot of headset for the price” and “just what the doctor ordered for the budget gamer.” The H1500 walked away with their Golden Tachometer.

Corsair Gaming Mice and Keyboards

While I can’t technically say our keyboards are the best in the business, they have a habit of getting some pretty high accolades, and they’re being joined by our new RGB mice.

We’ll start with Slashgear, which took a pretty comprehensive look at our RGB keyboards along with our M65 RGB mouse and came away smiling, saying: “We came for the colorful madness of the RGB hook, we stayed for the highest-end precision delivered in-game. Both the keyboard collection and the mouse usher in Corsair Gaming with a bang.”

Next, Erik Fredriksen at TechnoBuffalo had this to say about our K70 RGB: “The customization options presented by the software put the K70 and its bigger and smaller siblings in a class of their own. If you want to do anything beyond simply typing, not much else can compare. The possibilities Corsair’s software presents are virtually endless in the hands of a creative user.”

Over at Vortez, Tony Le Bourne got his game on with the M65 RGB and found it worthy of a Gold award: “After spending some time with the Corsair Gaming M65 RGB, the performance has proved to be strong and satisfying, making a trusted weapon for all FPS enthusiasts.”

Finally, the optical version of our brand new Sabre RGB gaming mouse (a hit in its own right in the office) was reviewed at both Tweak.dk and Hardware Heaven and in both cases left with an award, with Tweak.dk giving it their “Great Product” award and Hardware Heaven giving it their Recommended award.

With the rash of quality Corsair Gaming hardware out of the way, we turn our attention to reviews of our HX1000i power supplies.

Corsair HX1000i Power Supply

The 1,000-watt, 80 Plus Platinum, Corsair Link-enabled beast that is the HX1000i was reviewed by both eTeknix and Hardwareluxx, and in both reviews, walked away an award-winner.

eTeknix’s Ryan Martin specifically concluded, “With silent operation, impressive performance and a selection of digital controls and monitoring the HX1000i offers a great cheaper alternative to Corsair’s premium AXi series.”

Corsair Cases

We also had three of our cases – including the recently launched Carbide Series 330R Titanium Edition – go out for review.

The new 330R Titanium adds an attractive new gunmetal-colored brushed aluminum finish to the door of the 330R along with built-in fan control, and Technic3D was happy enough with it to give it their Silver award.

The Tech Report revisited the Air 240 and discovered something you and I already knew: “With all of its stock fan mounts populated, the Carbide Series Air 240 delivers superb cooling performance.” That superb cooling performance, coupled with the killer feature set, earned our Air 240 a “Recommended” award.

Rounding out our case reviews, TechPowerUp goes hands on with our Obsidian Series 250D. They called it a “small chassis with a huge punch” and gave it a 9.5 score and an Editor’s Choice award.

Finally, the best of the rest: ConseilConfig.com reviewed our popular Hydro Series H75 liquid cooler (a perfect match for the HG10 bracket if ever there were one) and gave it a score of 4.1 out of five stars.

…and last but not least, the crew over at Madshrimps put the screws to our Vengeance LPX DDR4 and made it sing. They said “Tweaking potential is more than present and this kit can compete with other high end kits, which might be higher priced.” For that potential, it earned a Performance award.

Notebooks have become extremely inexpensive, almost staggeringly. While the netbook rush of yesteryear flooded the market with cheap, light laptops, those systems were nowhere near as capable as modern entry-level systems. Systems based on Intel’s Bay Trail platform and AMD’s Kabini platform and their derivatives offer a remarkably usable computing experience, a far cry from where we were three years ago.

Yet cheap laptops often hit their price points by cutting potentially more expensive components, components that can dramatically improve the user experience. Poor memory speed or capacity and slow mechanical storage keep prices low but can hamstring an otherwise capable machine. To demonstrate what a modest upgrade can do for you, we took Lenovo’s ThinkPad X140e and installed faster memory and an entry-level SSD and ran some performance tests.

The ThinkPad X140e comes equipped with AMD’s A4-5000 APU and Radeon HD 8330 integrated graphics; that’s a 1.5GHz quad core processor strapped to 128 of AMD’s GCN compute cores running at 500MHz. It’s not an especially fast chip; the four cores are based on AMD’s low performance, low power Jaguar architecture. There’s also only a single channel memory controller, so memory bandwidth is at a premium. Stock configuration includes 4GB of DDR3L-1600 running at CAS 11 and a punishingly slow 500GB, 5400-RPM mechanical hard disk.

Our upgrades are modest: a 60GB Force LS SSD is just $49.99 on our site, and this is arguably the best upgrade you can make. AMD’s memory controller on the A4-5000 is very limited; adding a second DIMM will force the memory speed down to just 1333MHz, while trying to use higher speed memory (we used an 8GB DDR3L-2133 CAS11 DIMM) can get you tighter timings but not much else. We tested with the memory upgraded (8GB of DDR3L-1600 CAS 9), and that helped a little bit, but unless you need the memory capacity you’ll probably be fine with just an SSD.

Gaming benchmarks were run at the laptop’s native 1366x768 resolution and low-to-minimum settings, and you can see they’re pretty much entirely limited by the APU itself. But productivity is where our upgrades shine: something as basic as Microsoft Office 2013 gets a very healthy speed bump, the SSD is worlds away in performance from the stock mechanical hard drive, and most impressively, we score an extra half hour worth of productive battery life.

While the memory upgrade is questionable and ultimately more of a convenience than anything else, switching from mechanical storage to solid state is highly recommended. This is something you probably already knew; common wisdom dictates that an SSD is the single biggest upgrade anyone can make to improve the user experience, and even an absolutely barebones, entry-level one is still going to make a big difference. With SSDs as inexpensive as they are now, there’s very little reason not to make the jump and eke more performance and more battery life out of your laptop.

Today’s review roundup is focused on DDR4. Now that they’ve had a chance to exist in the wild, reviewers have had time to play with our Vengeance LPX and Dominator Platinum DDR4 kits…and they liked what they saw. First blood was drawn stateside with TweakTown and Overclockers.com, and those reviews are in this earlier roundup. Today we’re expanding our net and tackling international coverage.

Before we visit the UK, a trip to Hardware Heaven sees our Vengeance LPX DDR4-2800 kit tested against competing kits and coming out the fastest.

That earned it a Recommended award.

Proclockers.com tested our more mainstream 2666MHz Vengeance LPX kit, but found that even that kit was able to hit 2900MHz with some coaxing.

The ability to go from fast to faster scored a Recommended award.

OCDrift.com tested our Dominator Platinum DDR4 at 2800MHz and just like Proclockers, they found there was still some gas in the tank as the kit took to 3000MHz C15 with ease. Keep reading and you’ll find this is a trend.

Starting with high performance and being able to go higher still earned the kit a Gold award.

Hexus.net used our Vengeance LPX DDR4-2800 kit exclusively in their review of Intel’s Haswell-E platform, then examined the kit on its own and handed off an “Approved” award in the process.

Overclock3D has spent an extensive amount of time with our Vengeance LPX kit as well, using it in their i7-5960X review and then featuring it in not

Continuing the trend, Hilbert Hagedoorn over at Guru3D also employed our Vengeance LPX for his maiden review of the Haswell-E platform.

Over at eurogamer.net, Richard Leadbetter saw fit to outfit his entire test platform for Haswell-E with Corsair kit. That includes an RM1000, an H105 to keep the i7-5960X frosty, and of course, Vengeance LPX DDR4. You can see that review here.

New friends over at Gaming Till Disconnected also came away happy with the Vengeance LPX kit; watch their video here.

As it turns out, even outside of English-speaking countries, Corsair DDR4 is the weapon of choice for maximizing performance and stability with Intel’s new platform. Those of you who don’t speak French may want to fire up Google Translate for this next set of reviews.

Reviewers from Clubic.com, Hardware.fr, 59Hardware, Ginjfo, Cowcotland, and multiple print publications all chose Corsair DDR4 for their X99 testbeds and Haswell-E CPU reviews.

The reviewer at OverClex who spent a little extra time with our Vengeance LPX 2800MHz DDR4 kit was pleasantly surprised to discover a little bit of Corsair’s secret sauce: our 2800MHz kit runs at 1.2V, but a secondary XMP profile will bump the voltage to 1.35V and the speed to a brisk 3000MHz C16. That turned out not even to be the limit: his kit went up to 3200MHz C15.

He gave it 4 out of 5 stars.

The reviewer at Overclocking Made in France also had a chance to play with our Vengeance LPX 2800MHz DDR4 kit, and just like his peer at OverClex, he was able to hit 3200MHz.

Another 4 out of 5 stars.

Finally, if you expand into the Nordic countries and elsewhere in Europe, you’ll see the same thing happening: reviewers sticking with reliable Corsair DDR4 for their X99 reviews and testing.

Swedish juggernauts Sweclockers used Vengeance LPX exclusively, as did Hardware.no and Tweak.dk. Likewise, over in Benelux, you’ll see the same choice at the incredibly popular Tweakers.net and especially Hardware.info, which used both Vengeance LPX and Dominator Platinum DDR4.

We have a good mix in this week's review roundup. A little something for everyone! Today we feature the Corsair Graphite 230T case, a Hydro Series H75 liquid CPU cooler, an RM1000 power supply and a Voyager Go 64GB flash drive.

Hardware Heaven take our 230T case and H75 cooler and find out how these two aggressively priced items perform together.

"With the 230T case we have a product which offers a rugged looking design which feels sturdy. We like the use of LED fans in a mid-range chassis and all the basics are covered such as USB 3.0 connectivity and tool free drive installs. We also like the inclusion of rubber mounts for fans, keeping vibrations to a minimum and the support for liquid coolers is a nice bonus."

"We had no issue installing our H75 in the 230T and the use of two fans for a push/pull configuration, mixed with the ability to individually tailor the fan profiles means we can set the system up to suit our needs. Overall the installation of the H75 was also easy, again tool free for the most part and build quality was decent."

Hardware Heaven awarded both components their Value Award.

Anadtech posted a review of our largest PSU from the RM Series: The RM1000.

"The RM1000 is highly efficient and remains so even when the ambient temperature increases significantly, which is infrequent even for very advanced designs. It also provides good quality power, with low voltage ripple even under heavy stress."

" It's not the cheapest 1000W unit with an 80 Plus Gold certification, but considering the quality and performance of the PSU, the price is justifiable. If you are the kind of user that wants a really powerful PSU tuned for low-noise operation, the RM1000 should find its way into the top few spots of your shortlist."

Finally, Kit Guru has a look at the Voyager Go 64GB On-The-Go flash drive.

"The Go is well priced for such a large capacity. When we factor in the diminutive dimensions, 64GB is a huge capacity and is likely to be more than enough for the average smartphone. If you are running out of space, then the Voyager Go makes for a great low cost addition to your mobile world."

They awarded the Voyager Go with their "Worth Considering" award.

If you spot a review of a Corsair product out on the Interwebs that you feel we missed, please don't hesitate to email me at jon.gerow@corsair.com and it could end up in our next review roundup!

EVGA is a well known producer of enthusiast motherboards and graphics cards. It's only logical that there are quite a few systems in the world that combine Corsair and EVGA products. Their user forum is always filled with pictures and build logs where members are displaying their handiwork.

I recently did a bit of browsing in that forum and found 2 really great looking systems. Users "district11" and "hakka69" have each posted threads and some excellent pictures.

District11 noted that this was his first PC build and we were impressed. He's built in the Carbide Series C70 case.

The tone of his lighting really compliments the Dominator Platinum heat spreaders.

The wire management is excellent, first build or not.

Here is the area where he does battle with his machine. It's very tidy, just like the system.

Hakka69 built his system in a Corsair Graphite Series 600T case.

The lighting in this system casts an eerie glow over the internals.

The front panel controls and readout are very clean.

Speaking of clean, this is a another tidy gaming and work area.

We'd like to thank both of these EVGA forum members for posting their systems We invite all of you to do the same in the Corsair forum and to enter the Corsair PC Domination PC System Building and Tuning Competition 2014 .

With that in mind, shamelessly cribbing from the Cracked style, here are five myths that simply aren’t true.

1. Silent Cases Mean Silent Builds

There’s a niche market for cases like the Carbide Series 330R and the Obsidian Series 550D along with competing cases like NZXT’s H series, Nanoxia’s Deep Silence enclosures, and Fractal Design's Define series. These cases include acoustic dampening foam and tend to be much more closed off than other cases to prevent sound from escaping.

The Obsidian Series 550D is a fantastic case, but you have to choose the right parts to really take advantage of it.

Two corrections need to be made here. First, a “non-silent” case (one with lots of airflow and no dampening foam) can, with proper fan optimization and smart building, be incredibly quiet. My Carbide Air 540 build at home is audible but not especially so, and that owes to judicious use of speed controlled fans (and a liquid cooling loop managed by Corsair Link). Second, “silent” cases can actually be louder if quiet parts aren’t selected and airflow isn’t optimized. A “silent” case doesn’t take normal components and hush their noise, it takes already quiet components and makes them borderline inaudible.

2. Always Get a High Wattage Power Supply

Users routinely overestimate their power supply needs by a large margin, and this owes partially to the glut of poor quality, inefficient, high-wattage power supplies in the market at low price points. Buying a cheap power supply invites disaster, full stop, and the reality is that even a 400W power supply from a reputable brand is likely to perform better and last longer than a 600W power supply from a junk brand.

An efficient power supply like our CS650M will often be more than enough for a basic user's build.

But you need to understand how much wattage your system is going to want as well. My desktop system runs three SSDs, Corsair Link, a blu-ray burner, an overclocked i7-4770K, two GTX 780s, a watercooling loop with nine fans, 32GB of RAM, and a high-end PLX-enabled motherboard. Under sustained, extreme load, it pulls close to 700W. That’s an incredibly beefy system, and it could live pretty happily on just an AX760i, or an AX860i on the safe side. Most systems are going to run a single high performance graphics card and a single CPU; for most users, 500W is actually going to be fine, and 600W/650W will be plenty for room to grow.

With all that said, there are corner cases where you’d want a massive power supply. Our AXi and RM Series power supplies are very efficient and designed to run without active cooling at low loads; it’s only after they hit about 50% of their capacity that the fan even starts to spin up. They’re very quiet even at peak load, but if you want absolute silence, take your peak consumption (add up the TDPs of your parts) and boost it by about 1/3. That AXi or RM power supply will likely never need to spin up the fan.

3. DDR3-1600 is Fast Enough

Once common wisdom becomes entrenched in a community, it’s very difficult to unseat it, even if the science proves otherwise. 1600MHz DDR3 has been the standard for PC building for an eternity in tech years, but for systems built off of Intel’s Haswell architecture or one of AMD’s FM2/FM2+ APUs, it can actually bottleneck performance. We’ve investigated this on Kaveri, on Haswell, and in Battlefield 4.

The graphics cores on AMD’s APUs are notoriously memory bandwidth starved, but the CPU cores are essentially fine even at DDR3-1333 because they’re just not powerful enough to take full advantage of the bandwidth available. The same is not true of Intel’s Haswell chips.

The Dominator Platinums are fancy and look great, but even Vengeance or Vengeance Pro DIMMs are fine...as long as you're at DDR3-1866 or better.

Depending on the application being used or where the bottleneck in your system is, DDR3-1600 may very well be fine for an i7-4770K or i5-4670K. But as you overclock, the applications and games that are bottlenecked will only become more bottlenecked and may prevent you from seeing as much of a performance improvement as you’d hoped. Bottom line: for modern chips, you’re best off at least bumping up to DDR3-1866.

4. Bigger is Better For CPU Coolers

We have competitors releasing liquid coolers with 360mm radiators for the CPU soon, but we haven’t announced one and honestly, I wouldn’t expect us to. Why? Frankly, because 360mm is excessive and offers virtually no benefit for the cost. If a 120mm radiator is more than adequate for keeping a 200W+ GPU under 60C, why would we need 360mm for a 130W+ CPU? Even heavily overclocked, the CPU isn’t liable to push that level of capacity. To give you a clearer understanding, I’ve invited one of our thermal engineers, Bobby Kinstle, to explain:

“Heat transfers most efficiently when there is a large temperature difference between two regions.  As DeltaT diminishes, then heatsink area must increase to increase heat transfer.  Liquid cooling works very well because it has a very large radiator with large surface area.  It works so well, in fact, that in many cases the coolant is able to drop all of its heat into the air and return to the loop at or near ambient.  When the radiators reach a certain size, then the coolant temperature drops to the point where it’s no longer able to transfer heat into the radiator efficiently.  At this point, making the radiator larger won’t help at all.

The Hydro Series H110 is already overkill for most processors outside of an LGA2011 chip or one of AMD's 220W FX parts.

Heat transfer is non linear.  For this reason a small radiator (40mmx120mm) could easily cool a 300W GPU with enough airflow and a high enough coolant temperature.  In the case of most our coolers, the coolant temperature is less than 10C above ambient, so doubling the size of the radiator often only translates in a few % points increased performance.  Tripling the size of the radiator under these circumstances only diminishes the returns even further.”

5. “Why Didn’t <Manufacturer> Include <X, Y, Z>?”

This is an incredibly tough one to grok if you’ve never worked inside the industry. I’ve reviewed a lot of hardware where I was mystified by certain design decisions. One of my biggest ones was with the Corsair Hydro Series H90; that cooler performs much, much better with two fans, so why wasn’t anyone shipping a 140mm dual fan liquid cooler? The answer is simple: it would be too expensive. Not just too expensive for the company, but too expensive for the end user. At that point, the manufacturing cost gets perilously close to the 240mm Hydro Series H100i.

A second fan radically improves the H90's performance, but including it actually winds up being too costly.

Honestly, “prohibitively expensive” winds up being the answer to a lot of the “why” questions. Around here we’re typically willing to spend up if the investment is worth it, if it gets us features or performance that we know our users want. Sometimes the increase is just too great, though; you end up with a fantastic product that has to be priced essentially out of competition. Every design that isn’t an AX1500i or Obsidian Series 900D is essentially an exercise in compromise so that we don’t wind up releasing a “Homer" (for all you Simpsons nerds out there.)

The other possibility is that we simply weren’t certain how well a product would be received. People have asked for different sizes of the Carbide Air 540, but the Carbide Air 540 was an experiment. Development takes a remarkably long time, and we can’t start planning a successor until we’ve gotten feedback from our customers. By the same token, our K series keyboards and our fans all sold well beyond expectations, leaving us playing catch up.

The important takeaway is that the people designing the products you enjoy are smart, and there are usually very good reasons why they didn’t come out the way you wanted or expected.

The prevailing wisdom in the enthusiast community has been, for generations, that DDR3-1600 is the sweet spot and that faster memory offers at best extremely limited performance improvement and that at worst, it’s snake oil. There’s an element of truth to that; AMD’s Bulldozer architecture and its derivatives see arguably minimal benefit from faster memory, and Ivy Bridge and its predecessors actually were just fine at DDR3-1600. So the idea that the paradigm might have shifted is tough to swallow because it goes against wisdom that’s been ingrained for years, a veritable lifetime in our industry.

Except that it has. DDR3-1600 is quite simply no longer enough for modern chips outside of Ivy Bridge-E and Vishera. That Kaveri benefits from faster memory (at least on the GPU side) is a foregone conclusion that was confirmed by our testing. AnandTech already exhaustively detailed performance scaling with different memory speeds on Haswell, and I’ve studied the effect of memory speed on Battlefield 4’s performance. Between our work and AnandTech’s extremely thorough research, you’d think there would finally be a pervasive understanding of the benefit of faster memory on Haswell, but that hasn’t been the case.

I originally went into this testing specifically trying to determine whether or not overclocking would increase the strain enough on Haswell’s memory controller to justify higher speed memory. In testing, I discovered fairly conclusively that DDR3-1600 essentially leaves performance on the table even at stock clocks.

For testing I ran Intel’s Core i7-4770K at stock speeds and overclocked to 4.5GHz. A 32GB (4x8GB) kit of our Dominator Platinum DDR3-2400 was used to scale from DDR3-1600 CAS 9 to DDR3-2400 CAS 10. Test system specs are as follows:

• Intel Core i7-4770K CPU
  • Stock Speed (3.5GHz nominal, turbo to 3.7GHz on four cores or 3.9GHz on one core)
  • Overclocked (4.5GHz, 45x100 BClk, 4GHz Northbridge
• Gigabyte G1.Sniper 5 Motherboard
• 4x8GB Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR3-2400
  • DDR3-1600 (9-9-9-24 CR2)
  • DDR3-1866 (9-9-9-24 CR2)
  • DDR3-2133 (10-11-11-31 CR2)
  • DDR3-2400 (10-12-12-32 CR2)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Overclocked (980MHz nominal, boost to 1150MHz, 7GHz GDDR5)
• 240GB & 480GB Neutron GTX SSDs (for Adobe testing)

I very deliberately chose a mixture of synthetic and real world benchmarks. Cherry picked synthetics can admittedly overstate the importance of higher speed memory; I wanted tangible, demonstrable, practical benefits.

Overclocking the CPU itself had virtually no effect on memory bandwidth, producing results essentially within the margin of error. We’re just going to measure the raw amount of bandwidth made available to the i7 as memory clocks increase.

There’s a very steady increase in bandwidth going from step to step, but read speed tapers off moving from DDR3-2133 to DDR3-2400. This isn’t surprising; Kaveri also started to get shaky around DDR3-2400. Discovering Haswell’s memory controller’s “breaking point” may be worth looking into in the future.  Nonetheless, we’re seeing roughly 18% improvements in raw memory bandwidth at each step until DDR3-2400.

Now we’ll see if that translates at all in the two synthetic benchmarks I’ve included. First up is the x264 HD 5.0 benchmark, which absolutely hammers the CPU.

This benchmark is almost entirely CPU limited, but there are trends to point out: overclocking increases the effect memory bandwidth has on performance (proving the initial hypothesis), and the jump from DDR3-1600 to DDR3-1866 is the most significant. The second pass sits almost entirely on the CPU and absolutely hammers it, but the first pass is able to eke out small gains.

The next synthetic is the built-in benchmark in 7-Zip. WinRAR has long been a stronghold of fast memory, but I haven’t used it in ages; 7-Zip is free, fast, and it works.

7-Zip shows modest but steady increases in performance as memory speed goes up, with an unusual jump at DDR3-2400 at stock. These aren’t the kinds of massive gains you might see in WinRAR, but they’re definitely present.

Where things really get interesting are with my two big practical benchmarks: Adobe Media Encoder CC and StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm.

Both of these benchmarks were run with CUDA acceleration enabled in Mercury Playback Engine, and both of them see substantial improvements in running time. The AVCHD encode is able to shave off about 10 seconds, while you can save a full minute with the HDV encode. In fact, on the HDV encode, running the stock CPU with DDR3-2133 or DDR3-2400 instead of DDR3-1600 actually gets you pretty close to the 4.5GHz overclock with DDR3-1600.

The Hail Mary in the group is StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm. Testing was done at 1080p with all of the settings maxed out, so it at least looks the same way it might on your home system. This is also one of the few games that could theoretically benefit from a framerate higher than 60fps, and any kind of demonstrable performance benefit on the CPU/memory side is valuable.

If you run the i7 at stock with DDR3-2400, it’s basically as fast as a 4.5GHz i7 with DDR3-1600. Bump the 4.5GHz chip’s memory to DDR3-1866 and it starts to soar. Getting roughly 10fps out of something as simple as faster memory is staggering.

When we take a look at the performance results holistically, we see our real world benchmarks are able to eke out a minimum of 5% improved performance by going up to DDR3-2133; even going up to DDR3-1866 still nets a solid jump. DDR3-2400 still has plenty to offer in some cases. Add overclocking to the mix and the performance gaps widen even more.

As far as I’m concerned, the conclusion is simple: DDR3-1600 isn’t enough for Haswell, and it leaves performance on the table. This testing was done with DDR3-1600 CAS 9, when DDR3-1600 CAS 11 is actually exceedingly common and thus even slower. If we’re willing to overclock every component in our system to extract as much as five or ten percent more performance, it seems absurd at this point to cheap out on memory. You can get 16GB of DDR3-1866 CAS 9 for nearly the same price as 16GB of DDR3-1600 CAS 9 on our web store, and DDR3-2133 CAS 10 or CAS 11 isn’t much more than that.

With Haswell I continue to be convinced that DDR3-1866 is the new entry level, and that DDR3-2133 is really the sweet spot. Performance improvements from DDR3-2133 to expensive DDR3-2400 are less consistent, and Haswell’s IMC itself starts to get a little shaky there. I may do more testing in the future to determine where the IMC’s limit is; my experience was that under some circumstances, there’s a slight performance regression from DDR3-2400 when you get to DDR3-3000 (which is an absolutely ridiculous speed). In the meantime, the conclusion remains clear: for modern and especially high performance Haswell and Kaveri systems, DDR3-1600 isn’t enough.

Typically, breaking overclocking world records requires using two power supplies because, quite frankly, once you start seriously overclocking hardware, your power requirements increase exponentially.

Our very own Ronaldo Buassali, and his partner in crimes against stock speeds Jacson Schenckel, traded in their two Corsair AX1200i's for a single AX1500i and used it to power the following hardware:

Motherboard: ASUS Rampage 4 Black Edition
Processor: Intel Core i7-4930K running at 6,068 MHz
RAM: Corsair Dominator 16 GB Platinum clocked at 2,666 MHz
Video Card: 2 x ASUS GTX 780Ti DCUII (heavily modded)
Storage: Corsair Neutron GTX 480GB SSD

Using liquid nitrogen to cool the CPU and both graphics cards, the guys were able to get the highest score on 3DMark 11 for dual GPUs, with a score of 33626 marks, and second place in 3DMark Vantage (first place amongst those using 780Ti graphics cards) with a score of 88747 marks.

The numbers don't lie.. and you have to love the "better than 99% of all results" remark.

These are screenshots showing the broken world records on HWBot's website. Click for larger images.

The Core i7 4930K typically runs at 3.4 GHz, but with the help of some very skillful use of liquid nitrogen, the CPU was able to run at 6068 MHz. The stock clock speeds of the Asus GTX 780Ti is 836 MHz for the GPU core and 1502 MHz for the memory. With Ronaldo's modifications and the liquid nitrogen cooling, the cards were running at a blazing 1730 MHz on the GPU core and 1960 MHz on the RAM.

Here's a close up of Ronaldo's handywork on the two Asus GTX 780Ti cards.

This activity frequently pulled more than 1570W AC from the wall, but with the Corsair AX1500i doing the AC to DC duties, this was a relative walk in the park.

So kick back and relax to the musical stylings of Iron Maiden as we watch this record getting broken in real time:

Everyone at Corsair wants to congratulate Ronaldo and Jacson and, needless to say, we're very happy with these results. And the fact that this world record was accomplished with one of Corsair's newest power supplies, the digital AX1500i 80 Plus Titanium 1500W power supply, is just icing on this liquid nitrogen cooled cake!

We’ve demonstrated how powerful an Obsidian 250D build can be with our custom liquid cooled “God Lives Underwater” system. If you’re going to pull out all the stops and try to cram as much powerful hardware as you conceivably can into a single system, the 250D will let you do that, but what about more specialized, purpose-built machines? Where budget isn’t necessarily your top priority so much as just choosing the right hardware for the job?

As it turns out, the 250D is also fantastic for a more specific task. I moonlight as a…we’ll say very independent filmmaker. But I haven’t been able to really sit down and focus on writing for myself for some time, and my primary rig with three 24” monitors and two GTX 780s in SLI makes it hard to find the discipline to work for myself. I needed to create something that would take me out of that space and allow me to focus solely on the task of screenwriting, and since I’m a huge geek, that naturally means building another machine.

But we’re talking about something specialized: it’s just as important to measure what this machine can’t do as what it can. The last thing I need is Steam running in the background or even the temptation to load up another game or chat client or what have you. As it turns out, while 2014 will not be the year of Linux on the desktop, Ubuntu Linux at least offers the potential to create a task-oriented system that lets me focus on what’s important.

I didn’t need to go bargain basement, but I wanted to order only what I needed. With that in mind, this is the parts list I went with:

• AMD A4-4000 APU (Richland, 3GHz dual-core, Radeon HD 7480D)
• Gigabyte F2A88XN-WIFI (A88 chipset, mini-ITX)
• Corsair 60GB Force LS SATA 6Gbps SSD
• 4GB (2x2GB) Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1600
• Corsair RM450 450W 80 Plus Gold Quiet PSU
• Obsidian Series 250D Enclosure

Not pictured, but almost more important, is the keyboard I chose to invest in: the Vengeance K70 with Cherry MX Blue switches. I continue to maintain that the Cherry MX Blue is the ideal mechanical switch for writing because the tactile response and audible click when it actuates just feel and sound like work being done.

Note that I’m using the stock cooler that comes with the A4-4000, and that I’ve removed the side intake from the 250D. We want to minimize noise as much as possible, and the A4-4000 isn’t really going to be pushed particularly hard. We’re not gaming, we’re not rendering video, we’re just running Firefox and CeltX on Ubuntu. As a result, the system’s pretty silent.

Where things took a turn is where they always do: actually getting Linux to run properly. The fly in the ointment is that I’m using two 1080p panels that have been rotated to portrait and placed on a dual-monitor stand. Since we’re again talking about specializing for writing, portrait mode for the current draft and previous draft is ideal. This should’ve been easier to put together, but Catalyst Control Center is buried in menus, while the main display configuration dialogue would simply spit out errors whenever I tried to set up the display rotations. The open source Gallium3D driver is also an absolute mess, resulting in substantial artifacting; you’re pretty much required to use the closed source driver from AMD, and that’s ignoring the nightmarish task that is installing…well…anything in Linux.

After a tremendous amount of work, I was able to get things running the way I wanted them to. Heaven help me, I hope never to see the command “sudo” again.

The next problem was that Linux, in general, was incredibly sluggish. This owed less to the underlying hardware and more to the sad, sorry state of drivers on the platform. Moving windows was unpleasant, and the fact that there’s a VSync toggle for the desktop speaks volumes.

Ultimately I was able to get everything running, but the dirty secret is that it just wasn’t enjoyable at all to use. Linux was so fraught and required so many compromises that I wound up formatting and installing Windows 7 instead, and the resulting system ran much, much smoother. This is essentially the key to Microsoft’s foothold: most of the time, it just works, and it works logically.

What I’m left with is a fantastic little workstation dedicated to its one specific task that functions beautifully, and I was able to practice at least a little restraint and not install anything I didn’t need. I’ve been able to get work done and get some of my writing mojo back, and hopefully soon I can start putting that Film degree to good use again.

I'm used to having devices with micro SD card slots in them. For long trips, I would often copy movies or music over to the memory card and then insert the SD card into my phone. Yes, most phones have ample memory for enough music and movies for a trip around the world (unless you cram your phone up with apps), but I like to have choices available to me. While I'm in the airport, I might think I'd want to watch Star Trek: Into Darkness, but once I'm actually in the air, I may only be in the mood for Meet the Millers. One minute I might be in the mood for Black Sabbath, and the next minute be in the mood for Adele. Admittedly, more and more people use cloud services for documents, photos, music and movies, but we don't always have access to the cloud... especially on a plane or when you land in a foreign land and haven't had a chance to swap out your phone's SIM card (assuming your phone is even unlocked). It's just nice to be able to stream the data to your phone somehow without having a connection to the Internet.

Scanning this code takes you to an OTG compatibility table. You might notice that some popular phones and tablets are not yet on this list. But, like I said, fear not. That's what I'm here for. The devices listed have native OTG support, in that any memory you plug into them automatically "plugs and plays" with no additional software or action from the user. Very much in the same way you get a pop up on your PC when you plug in a thumb drive or SD card. 

So let's tear into the package.... 

The nicest thing about the Voyager Go, even the 64GB model shown above, is it is super small. How small?

REALLY small. See that little leash on it? USE IT. This thing will fall through a hole in your pocket faster than a India 10 Paise. I'm not saying to tie something to it like how gas stations keep track of bathroom keys, but.... 

When you plug it into your USB port (which will require trying to plug in one way, then turning around and trying another way, then turning around again and inserting it because that's how plugging in any USB device seems to work), you'll be prompted the same way you are when you plug in any other kind of thumb drive.

First thing's first, and this goes for any memory OTG you plan to use on your phone, make sure you're using a FAT32 file system. The Voyager Go is formatted with FAT32 by default, and I know it sounds obvious, but I've seen some instances where someone had a loaded up flash drive, used disk management software to wipe it clean and ended up changing the file system. Just sayin'.

Now copy over your files. Make sure your phone actually has an app installed that supports the file format you're planning on copying over to your Voyager Go. For example: Android's built in media player doesn't support AVI files, so you'll want to install a program like MX Player. 

And it plugs into your phone, like so:

But if your phone is a Nexus (except for Nexus 4... sorry) or Motorola, you're not going to see anything pop up on screen. But I'm going to show you how we fix that!

If you have a Nexus 5 phone, Nexus 7 tablet, Nexus 10 tablet or a Galaxy Nexus phone you can use one of the following programs. 

If you have a Motorola Moto G or Moto X, the following applies to you as well, but with some caveats...

If you have a Moto G with Android 4.3 or a Moto X with Android 4.2, you can use a Voyager Go without 3rd party software, but you're only going to be able to read from the Voyager Go. Use your file explorer to navigate to "/storage/usbdisk_1.1.1/" and you'll find your media there. Even if you DID have Nexus Media Importer, you still won't be able to write to the Voyager Go unless you root your phone. 

If your Moto G or Moto X has Android 4.4, you can use one of the following programs to read from and WRITE TO the Voyager Go. 

Using Nexus Media Importer

In the previous Voyager Go blog, Dustin made mention of the "Nexus Media Importer" app. It costs $3.99 on Google Play. Once you install it, it will immediately pop up when you plug in the Voyager Go. It will ask you if you want to use this program by default. Say yes and this is what you will see next:

Once here, you have many options. Click on the three dots in the upper right and select "connect". If you select "Importer" and "USB:002:0:Corsair Voyager Go", you are able to import files from the Voyager Go to the phone. If you select "Exporter" and the Voyager Go, you can copy files from the phone to the Voyager Go, but only if you are using a Nexus device (except Nexus 4) or your Motorola Moto is running Android 4.4 (aka "Kit Kat"). If you're using Android 4.3 on a Motorola Moto G or X, you'll be able to make these selections, but will not be able to actually copy files to the Voyager Go.

Once you've made the selection of writing to or reading from the Voyager Go, sweep the black menu bar off to the left to expose the folder view (the gray area that's "behind" then menu). In export mode, it will show the phone's file structure on the on top and the Voyager Go on the bottom. 

In import mode, it will reverse these as shown below:

November 30th, 1979 must be somebody's birthday at Corsair. 

Select the files you want to copy, move, rename, etc. and click the down arrow to the right. This will give you a menu of choices.

Notice that one of the choices is "stream" I f I want to listen to music or watch a movie that's stored on my Voyager Go, I don't want to have to copy it on and off the phone. That's a pain and what if I don't have enough room on the phone? 

Today, I happen to have the 1981 Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy BBC mini-series copied onto my Voyager Go (which I think is WAY better than the 2005 feature film). I simply tap on the H2G2 folder, tap the episode I want to watch, tap the down arrow in the corner, go down to stream, and....

Voila! Show time!

Using OTG Disk Explorer

The next program I'm going to discuss is the "OTG Disk Explorer". Some things about it are nicer than Nexus Media Importer where other things aren't. So have a read and decide for yourself which one you'd like. That said, I will say that OTG Disk Explorer has a lite version that's free, but it limits itself to 30MB files, which allows you to play most music files, but not movies. The full "Pro" version is only $2.95, so it's not exactly a huge investment. 

First things first, when you plug in the Voyager Go with OTG Disk Explorer installed on your phone, it only pops up with a permissions window asking if you want to allow OTG Disk Explorer to access your device, but it doesn't actually start the program as well, which is something Nexus Media Importer did. You have to actually tap on the icon for the program and get it running first. A minor inconvenience. 

Once you're in OTG Disk Explorer, you see whatever folders are on your Voyager Go.

Here, you can see my H2G2 folder. Click on that and it will take you into the next folder.

Probably the biggest thing that bugs me about OTG Disk Explorer is the font size. My far-sighted mom would love it... but for me it just looks too chunky. At least my fat fingers couldn't possibly tap the wrong file.

Once you highlight the file you want, simply select "open" to stream the movie or music, or "download" to copy it onto the phone.

If you select "download", you don't get to choose where the file is downloaded to. In fact, the program doesn't even tell you where it's downloading to. But after snooping around, I found the file I selected copied over to the "download" folder in the phone's root directory (makes sense, right).

Another drawback with OTG Disk Explorer is that it doesn't allow you to copy to the Voyager Go. But that might not be a big deal for a lot of people as I feel it's more likely you're going to be streaming things from the Voyager Go, and not just copying a bunch of stuff off the phone onto the Voyager Go. If I have a bunch of pictures to move off my phone, I usually wait until I can plug the phone into my laptop and I'll just copy over that way. So if you're like me, you might decide saving the $1 over Nexus Media Importer is worth the trade off. 

Using Total Commander with USB Stick Plugin

For our final demonstration, we're going to use a combination of Total Commander and USB Stick Plugin. This gives you an even lesser expensive option, but do try the free trial first to make sure there are no compatibility issues and that you like the interface.

First, install Total Commander. Total Commander is a free file system browser for Android. Next, install USB Stick Plugin. The full version is only 99 cents, but there's a free version as well. This program was specifically written as a plug in for Total Commander. Once this is done, when you fire up Total Commander, you should see "USB-Stick Plugin" towards the bottom of the list.

If you click on it now, without plugging in the Voyager Go, you'll just see a place holder text file that says "waiting for USB stick to be attached." But plug in the Voyager Go and you'll get a permissions window.

This should only pop up once. Tap on "start Total Commander" and you'll see whatever files and folders you have on your Voyager Go.

Once again, I have my H2G2 folder. If I tap on it, I can see all of my episodes of Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

When I click on the episode I want to watch, I am presnted by a menu:

"Play" (foreground)" allows me to stream the video, while my other options allow me to copy the file off of the Voyager Go and onto the phone.

And, unlike OTG Disk Explorer, Total Commander with the USB Stick Plugin will allow you to write to the Voyager Go as well (if you do not have a Motorola Moto G or X running Android 4.3). It's a bit kludgy, but it does work. Simply browse the phones folder hierarchy for the file you want to copy or move. When you find the file, tap and hold your finger down on the file. A menu with several options will show up. Most of these are fairly self explainatory, like rname, delete, etc. If you want to copy to the Voyager Go, you want to copy to clipboard first. If you want to move a file to the Voyager Go, you want to cut to clipboard first. After you make your selection, browse back to the first screen where "USB-Stick Plugin" is shown. Click on that icon, then tap and hold your finger down on "::VolumeInfo::[FAT32]'Corsair'..." (assuming your Voyager Go's name is still the default "Corsair"). Select "Paste here" and the file will move onto the Voyager Go. 

At the end of the day, we can see there are many options for phones that do not have native OTG support. Some of the programs operate cleaner than the others while others don't look as slick, but any one of them can help you access your Voyager Go, eliminating memory limitations to your phone or tablet.

Selecting the memory to use for your build or even just to upgrade your system can probably seem a bit daunting. You need to figure out what capacity you want, what speed, how many sticks you’ll need, and potentially even which version as mobile Haswell systems overwhelmingly require DDR3L as opposed to standard voltage DDR3.

If you break the process down to the individual specs, though, it becomes much easier. We offer a tremendously varied selection of memory, so you really can just figure out which combination of specs you require and we should have that available.

Number of Slots Available

The first thing you want to know is how many memory slots you have available. If you have a notebook, odds are you’ll only have two memory slots to work with. On the desktop, you’ll typically have four. That excludes Intel’s i7-38xx, i7-39xx, i7-48xx, and i7-49xx lines of chips, which will often be in motherboards that support eight. If you’re not completely certain, you can always pop the side off of your case and check.

Capacity

Once you know how many slots you have available total, you can get an idea of how much memory you can actually fit into your system. Note that while you can always augment existing memory with new memory, we recommend against doing so as it’s not guaranteed to be compatible and may produce system instability.

The highest density stick of memory you can get is 8GB, so assuming you have the standard four slots available, you’ll be able to max out at a staggering 32GB. Typically you want to install memory in pairs, excepting the i7 models I specified earlier, which should have memory installed in fours.

So the question then becomes: how much do you actually need? That’s actually pretty simple.

4GB: Bare minimum. Adequate only for word processing, e-mail, and using the internet.

8GB: Standard. Minimum required for gaming.

16GB: Ideal for gaming and most systems and tasks.

32GB+: Any kind of system intensive, workstation-grade tasks; programming, virtual machines, photo and video editing and compositing. When you get to this point, you’re better off just installing as much memory in your system as it will accept.

Speed

The nice thing about how memory works is that if you buy memory specced for a high speed and your system can’t handle it, it will simply clock down to where you need it. With that said, here’s a pretty basic rundown of memory speed.

DDR3-1066 or DDR3-1333: Too slow for any modern system.

DDR3-1600: Bare minimum. This is fine for any Intel system bought prior to 2013, or an Intel Core i7-38xx, i7-39xx, i7-48xx, or i7-49xx.

DDR3-1866: Minimum for an AMD A-series processor or Intel 4^th Generation CPU.

DDR3-2000+: An AMD A-series processor will make use of the fastest memory you can plug into it, but Intel chips see diminishing returns in performance after DDR3-2133. Anything after that is enthusiast-class memory.

DDR3 or DDR3L

This is fairly simple: on the desktop, with rare exception, you’re fine with conventional DDR3. On any notebook released within the last year, you will likely need DDR3L, which runs at a lower voltage.

Series

We have several different series of memory, and all are covered under our lifetime warranty. Each is for a specific purpose. If you’re on a Mac, that narrows things down entirely to our line of Mac memory, but for desktop users the options are broader. Notebook users also have their choice of ValueSelect and Vengeance SO-DIMMs.

ValueSelect: Barebones memory, suited to basic systems.

XMS3: Budget mainstream memory. Suitable for most systems, but not designed to run at high speeds.

Vengeance/Vengeance LP: Mainstream memory. Ideal for performance systems, and mild overclocking. Note that for systems that have large coolers on the CPU, Vengeance LP (for Low Profile) may be necessary to avoid clearance issues.

Vengeance Pro: High end mainstream memory. Ideal for overclocking.

Dominator Platinum: The best of the best, highest-quality memory we offer. Primarily for enthusiast builds.

Bringing it All Together

Once you’ve gone through and figured out which of each spec you need or want, you can pretty much compile them together and find the right kit for your system. As I mentioned, we have just about any combination of specs you could be looking for, although higher-density kits at extreme high speeds (beyond DDR3-2400) are extremely rare to downright nonexistent, as it’s difficult to get high density memory to run at those blistering speeds. That’s not an issue for 99.9% of users, who will likely hit their performance ceiling at DDR3-2133, but the users who want the absolute fastest or most overclockable memory they can get may have to choose between speed and capacity, and under those circumstances you generally want to prefer capacity as those extreme kits tend to be for users who are specifically and knowingly seeking them out.

Today, laptop memory is relatively inexpensive. Prices have fallen since 1066Mhz was considered "high-end laptop memory", and now most laptops come with 1333MHz memory as standard. In the past, the vast majority of laptop memory upgrades were done by gamers and enthusiasts who were willing to shell out the extra premium, while "everyday" users held back. Now, everyone can enjoy the benefits of upgrading their SODIMMs without experiencing sticker shock. This blog will demonstrate how to upgrade your SODIMMs, followed by a representation of the performance differences between stock laptop memory and Corsair Vengeance™ laptop memory.

Lenovo TP T420 (Samsung) 1333MHz 4GB SODIMM

Corsair Vengeance 1333MHz 4GB SODIMM

Corsair enthusiasts tend to default to a 64-bit operating system in order to benefit from the massive memory utilization capacity. Some laptop buyers, however, still have computers with a 32-bit operating system, capable of only utilizing a shade over 3GB of memory. For this reason, I used a popular Lenovo Thinkpad T420 laptop with a 64-bit fresh-install of Microsoft Windows 7. This way, I would be able to provide data for both 4GB and 8GB kits on the same system foundation, giving me the most reliable representation of performance data.

4GB Corsair Vengeance Memory Kit (1x4GB Module)

8GB Corsair Vengeance Memory Kit (2x4GB Modules)

INSTALLATION

Laptop memory installation is quite simple. As every laptop model is different, the location and the how-to-get-to-that-location need to be identified in the laptop’s specific manual, but the physical installation is the same as shown below:

Step 1: Push away tabs shown via red arrows. Module will lift freely from the socket.

Step 2: Remove and replace module.

Step 3: Press module downwards in order to snap in place.

Note that we recommend that you use matched pairs of SODIMMs for a given system, rather than mix and match.

BENCHMARKS AND TESTS: Super Pi and Aida64 Extreme Edition

In order to represent the various performance capabilities of each SODIMM kit, I used two proglaptop memorys: Super Pi and Aida64 Extreme Edition. Super Pi is a program that calculates a designated number of digits of Pi as fast as possible. It’s a good benchmark to represent real-world performance. Aida64 Extreme Edition, on the other hand, measures the absolute parameters of a computer’s hardware components, providing the fastest speeds which were recorded in real-time.

Super Pi

Super Pi can calculate up to thirty-two-million digits of pi (32,000,000), with one-million digits and thirty-two-million as the standard for benchmark testing. In this performance test, I ran Super Pi on all calculations of pi up until one-million, then skipping onto thirty-two-million. You will notice that the times are almost identical in the smaller iterations and the difference in performance increases as you increase the number of calculated digits.

SINGLE 4GB MODULE SUPER PI TEST RUN

Stock Samsung 4GB 1333MHz

Corsair Vengeance 4GB 1333MHz

Corsair Vengeance 4GB 1866MHz

Corsair Vengeance 4GB 1600MHz

8GB KIT (DUAL 4GB MODULE) SUPER PI TEST RUN (Only Corsair Vengeance, as laptop only came with 1x4GB module)

VENGEANCE 8GB (2x4GB) 1333MHz

VENGEANCE 8GB (2x4GB) 1600MHz

VENGEANCE 8GB (2x4GB) 1866MHz

Aida64 Extreme Edition — [The most average test run out of four total test runs were chosen for each kit shown below.]

Aida64 Extreme Edition is a very comprehensive benchmarking programthat provides much more specific data regarding your hardware. For this, it made sense to use the Cache and Memory Benchmark tool, which calculates the Read, Write, Copy and Latency speeds of the Memory, L1 Cache, L2 Cache and L3 Cache. This test also identifies the CPU type, clock, FSB, multiplier and stepping values, along with the Memory Bus, Memory Type, Chipset, Motherboard and DRAM FSB Ratio. The results provided by this benchmark shows just how big of a difference upgrading your SODIMM will make.

STOCK SAMSUNG 4GB 1333MHz

CORSAIR VENGEANCE 4GB 1333MHz

CORSAIR VENGEANCE 4GB 1600MHz

CORSAIR VENGEANCE 4GB 1866MHz

CORSAIR VENGEANCE 8GB 1333MHz

CORSAIR VENGEANCE 8GB 1600MHz

CORSAIR VENGEANCE 8GB 1866MHz

As you can see, there is a big difference between the various speeds of memory, and an even bigger difference when you increase the total capacity. Even within the same speeds, you can see a difference between the stock 1333MHz memory and the Corsair 1333MHz memory.

I hope that this blog has proven to be useful, both as a how-to guide for upgrading your laptop's SODIMM memory and as a means to educate users on the benefits you get thereafter.

Intel® has made several changes when it comes to memory for the new 2nd generation Intel Core™ i7 processors (Sandy Bridge-E). Corsair has launched new Quad Channel DDR3 memory kits specifically designed for Intel’s new X79 motherboards. Intel has added the ability to run quad channel with up to eight DIMMs for a total of 64GB of memory. All the Corsair memory upgrade kits designed for X79 feature four modules and support XMP Profile 1.3.

Intel also added native support of 1600MHz memory modules and a 2400MHz memory divider. This means that every Sandy Bridge-E CPU can run memory at 1600MHz. Not every CPU can run the memory over 1600MHz, but with mine I was able to hit nearly 2600MHz. The 2400MHz divider is geared towards overclockers and enthusiasts and allows them to run our CMGTX8 memory modules without changing the base clock frequency.

If you are unsure of which kit is for you, we have put together a Memory Buyer’s Guide below.

You can also see what memory is compatible with your motherboard by using our memory finder. An example from our memory finder is shown below:

If you have an idea of what memory you want for X79, all of the current kits are listed below. You can also view all of the kits here.

Hopefully this clears up any questions you have on which kit is right for you. If you have any further questions please contact Technical Support.

When it comes to choosing the right memory for your system there are three main factors to consider regarding performance. These factors are memory frequency, latency and density. This presentation will briefly go over these performance factors and also explain Intel® XMP (Extreme Memory Profile). With XMP the days of trial and error memory overclocking are gone. XMP allows guaranteed overclocked memory performance to be enabled with the “flick of a switch”, while still allowing expert users the option of manual configuration and tweaks, beyond the officially tested and guaranteed overclocked settings.

Click the picture below to launch the presentation:

AMD recently launched their AMD Fusion™ APU's which integrate a GPU on the CPU. You might be asking yourself what is an APU? It is AMD's new Accelerated Processing Unit that combines a CPU and GPU on one chip. The GPU on the APU chip shares the system memory with the CPU. This makes memory frequency crucial to get the most out of your integrated GPU.

Gigabyte™ posted some results they got when they tested an AMD A8350 APU on a GIGABYTE A75-UD4H using Corsair Dominator® GT memory. They tested four different DirectX 11 titles with five different memory frequencies ranging from 1333MHz to 2400MHz. In one case going from the default 1333MHz to 2400MHz they almost doubled their frame rates!

PC Perspective ran some tests with Corsair Dominator DDR3 memory with their modules clocked all the way up to 1866MHz. All five gaming tests saw an increase in frames per second when overclocking the memory. Here is what Ryan Shrout of PC Perspective had to say:

"Look at those AMD results, the differences are actually quite impressive. The boost from 1333 to 1600 MHz produced the most dramatic results though the jump to 1866 MHz (but at slightly slower timings) still brought performance up."

From the results above you can see high speed memory makes a large impact on the graphics performance using AMD's new chips. Motherboard manufacturers like Gigabyte have options on their AMD boards supporting frequencies up to 1866MHz and even 2400MHz when overclocked! Add in some high frequency Corsair Dominator or Vengeance™ DDR3 memory modules and you can get the best performance when using the integrated GPU on AMD's APU.