Yes it’s over a week since CES started and we are still posting stuff!
Corsair’s big news for CES consisted mainly of keyboards, power supplies and cases. So let’s start with the power supplies because that’s quick and awesome!
AX1500i
Oh yes you heard me right. Not content with the already amazing AX1200i, Corsair decided to up the ante. I’m not sure if this was just to one up EVGA & Lepa or if this was targeted at the recent coin mining craze on the latest AMD gpus, however the result is simply breathtaking.
Yes it looks like the AX1200i, yes it looks a bit longer, yes it has the fancy monitoring software via usb cable, yes the fan can turn off completely, yes it can support oodles and oodles of power. But that’s not what’s exciting. The exciting part is the efficiency. Now it’s not often you get to write that. This sucker is 94% efficient and that’s yes with 115V. For you people with real power that’s 96%. That’s above platinum rating and is hitting the yet to be formalized Titanium rating. And if that wasn’t enough it’s not just a peak efficiency in the middle of the spectrum that Corsair showed. It was shown at 94% efficient at both heavy and light loads. This efficiency means that for those of you running on a circuit with a low breaker current that there is additional headroom to use power before you trip the breaker. It also means quad SLI/CFX
This is going to be the *best* power supply in the world for *any* situation. Well except for when you need something small. The downside (of course) is the price. MSRP will be $450. There will be sleeved cables but of course they will be extra. Here are some sexy sexy pictures:
And one more running quad GPUs:
Cases
The biggest news for me was the Obsidian 250D. We’ve had the large 900D, the somewhat large 750D, the average 350D and now Corsair decided to do a miniITX case. The layout is similar to the CaseLabs S3 where the motherboard sits horizontally above the power supply and hard drives.
The left panel is ventilated to let the GPU breath and has an air filter. The top is windowed, and the right side is also ventilated to provide airflow for a thin radiator with one set of fans such as the H100:
As can be seen it’s tight. The specs claim full 240 radiator support:
But what they really mean is support for all in one units, not a real water cooling setup. This is where it differs from the S3 which can support 2x 240 rads while the 250D has little support for water cooling. The front bay however *might* be able to mount a large single radiator such as a 180mm:
Here it’s running a 140mm I believe, but the cutout is most definitely larger:
There are two USB3 ports, headphone & mic, one 5 1/4″ bay and then power and reset on the left side. With the panels off you can see the setup more clearly:
In the back there are 4 quick release HDD/SSD bays, bear in mind these are not prewired:
As always I like the Obsidian look, but the Obsidian product line is known for water cooling and this is basically an air cooling mITX case. Now I suspect it will do well as an air cooling case, but to be honest if I want an air cooled mITX case I probably want something smaller, maybe something like the EVGA Hadron for example which has a tiny PSU, a slim DVD drive, and is so compact it has that they have to supply a CPU cooler that can fit. My problem with the product is just that I don’t see a real market with it. If I want a powerful mITX case I would go a little bit larger and use an S3.
There was also a new case in the graphite series – the 760T:
It comes in white and black, fits eATX with 4 GPUs, and a 360 up top and also comes in black:
I’m glad that Corsair are offering more white cases, and the almost full plexi door is a nice touch. The style looks a bit disjointed and therefore cheapens it a bit. However it does tick all the boxes of a useful midrange case.
Speaking of white cases Corsair also showed off the recently announced Air 540 in white. I’m not a huge fan of the Air 540 in terms of design mainly because it’s an air cooling case, however the white was extremely sexy in person and the finish was impeccable:
If I wanted an air cooling cube case, this would be it!
Keyboards
Corsair had the K30 and K40 on display, both non mechanical keyboards and therefore not that exciting:
However the real news that meant that the Cherry guys were even on hand was the new full RGB customizable mechanical keyboard. They had a seperate dark room to show off the snazzy looking keyboard:
Now we’ve had customizable RGB keyboards before, but this one is different. Every single stinking is customizable, there are no grouped sections unless you want it to be. There will be a SDK and tools to support it, but essentially you can do anything with the LEDs. It’s freaking crazy and you really need to see the video to really appreciate it. However here’s a video of it in action:
Having said that, most likely you won’t bother with most of the fancy stuff and will probably just chose a color or simple fade that works for you:
They didn’t grow the keyboard to fit some useless macro keys on there which is good, but you can assign keys to macro functions anyway, and there are still some useful other buttons:
It will come with blue, red and brown cherry mx switches and it seems to me the only thing better would be a ten keyless version! Bear in mind this is a modified K90, the final version may not be exactly the same
Oh and Corsair announced the H105 which is a basically a H100 with a thicker rad. This will most likely perform a snippet better, but it doesn’t excite us in the way that a 360 or a lower FPI 60mm rad or a better pump/cpu block design would. Maybe we’ll see that next year.
