What’s New Corsair?

Corsair has jumped into the lounge room gaming pool with a big splash. Not one to do things by halves, lets have a quick recap of what’s new from Corsair in the wake of Computex!

It’s hard to know where to start so we’ll just have to go in the order of awesomeness (in our opinion). Lounge room gaming is something that we’ve been looking at for a while but the major vendors have only really dabbled around the edges to date. There has been a notable absence of serious gaming keyboard and mouse support to really bring true PC Gaming to the couch. After seeing some of the new kit from Corsair, we really like where they are going with this.

The Bulldog

Mini-beast gaming at last. Corsair has created the Bulldog for mini ITX gaming but made sure to leave enough clearance underneath and inside to give adequate airflow to high end components. The Bulldog comes with a 600W SFX power supply and a H5 SF water cooler for your CPU. It can accommodate fans of 92mm and 120mm but perhaps the most impressive thing to note is that it will support a Corsair water cooled graphics card with a 120mm radiator. Holding either 1×2.5″ & 1×3.5″ or 3×2.5″ drives, storage shouldn’t be an issue. The marketing material makes a big deal of 4K gaming and it makes sense, 4K TVs are getting much more affordable and to drive those pixels, you need serious GPU grunt. The Bulldog can accommodate full sized graphics cards to fit the bill so labelling a PC case with “4K” isn’t as long a bow to draw as it might seem.

Whilst not the smallest ITX case on the market, the Bulldog has a neat footprint with clearance underneath for air intake, loads of room inside and could well be Lounge room Gaming done right. We are hoping to get our hands on one for a review in the future so stay tuned.

Specifications from Corsair listed below:

  • Warranty: Five years for case, cooling, and PSU
  • Weight: 5kg
  • Color: Black
  • Case Form Factor: Mini-ITX SFF Chassis
  • Dimensions: 381mm x 457mm x 133mm 
  • Case Motherboard Support: Mini-ITX
  • Maximum GPU Length: 300mm 
  • Maximum CPU Cooler Height: 90mm
  • Maximum PSU Length: 190mm
  • Case Expansion Slots: 2
  • Case Drive Bays: (x1) 2.5″, (x1) 3.5″ or (x3) 2.5″
  • Case Material: Steel
  • Case Power Supply: SFX12V Only (SF600 600-Watt 80 Plus Gold SFX12V power supply included)
  • External Connections: (x2) USB 3.0, (x1) Headphone Port, (x1) Microphone Port 
  • Fan Mount Locations: (x2) 92mm, (x1) 120mm
  • Fans Included: (x2) 92mm
  • Radiator Mount Locations: Bottom 120mm
  • Compatible Corsair Liquid Coolers: H5 SF, H55, H60, H75 (Hydro Series H5 SF cooler included

The Lapdog

Most of us have been there – balancing a keyboard on our laps and trying to work a mouse on an uneven space next to us with a completely ‘unco’ result. There have been some better results with ironing boards, coffee tables and some other 

Corsair look to have taken a genuine shot at this dilemma with the appropriately named Lapdog. Obviously, this ties in with the Bulldog and is made for lounge rooms. The Lapdog houses a tenkeyless K65 keyboard or a tenkey style K70 keyboard and has an 11″x11″ mouse pad on it. Not small, this is obviously built for function and the dimensions look about right to us. There is memory foam on the bottom of the Lapdog and we are tipping this to be a popular weapon of choice for PC gamers in the battle against consoles.

The feature list includes:

  • Powered USB 3.0 hub for  keyboard, mouse, USB Headset, game controllers and flash drives
  • A hidden compartment to neatly stash away cables
  • fast charging for smart phones or tables

Contents and Specifications

Package contents

  • LAPDOG Gaming Control Center
  • Detachable memory foam lap cushion
  • 12V AC charger
  • 16ft (5m) connection cable
  • Quick start guide

Technical specifications

  • Designed to work with Corsair K70/K65 series keyboards
  • Large 11″ x 11″ mouse pad area
  • Removable memory foam lap cushion
  • Built-in 4-port USB 3.0 hub
  • Additional ports for USB headset and game controllers
  • Durable aluminium surface
  • Dedicated cable compartment
  • Support for USB fast-charging

The Lapdog looks the good on paper but the real test will be to see how ergonomic couch gaming can be – after all, a couch is one of the least ‘ergonomic’ environments around. Corsair have a long running successful product history so we expect that they have done their research and we’ll be watching this one with interest.

Dominator LED RAM

This limited edition is limited to only 500 of each kit and will only be available from Corsair.com. This means that most of us will have more chance of getting our hands on dragon’s blood or unicorn tears but the few snippets that we saw coming out of Computex looked pretty bad-ass. With only 500 kits in each style, we don’t expect these to last long, let alone have much presence down here in the land of Oz.

Corsair Vengeance LED RAM

For those of us who won’t be getting the Limited Edition Dominator LED RAM, Corsair will be releasing Corsair Vengeance LED RAM. Corsair haven’t announced the availability of this one yet either but we hear that it’s soon. The LEDs will be available in red or white on a black heat spreader so the options are pretty simple if not perhaps a little limited but we expect that if it sells well, then hopefully we will see some more options in the future. This RAM doesn’t need any additional power and the LEDs are powered off the DIMM slot. Reports are that the light effects will be controllable via software so that the lucky owners can set brightness and other effects for a unique result.

We say “Bring it on Corsair! Give us the bling.”

Corsair Rapidfire Keyboard

Available now with a new cherry key that’s exclusive to Corsair called the Speed Key. True to it’s name, the SpeedKey has an actuation point of 1.2mm which is higher up (therefore earlier to actuate) than the standard Cherry switch actuation point of 2mm. The Rapidfire keyboard also has a lower signal time to the PC in ms than previous models and also uses the Corsair Strafe font for a clearer effect with the back-light. Corsair also confirmed that the Rapidfire has 100% anti-ghosting with full N-key rollover. The new K70, K70 RGB and K65 RGB keyboards are all listed as having the Cherry MX SpeedKeys.

Check out the promo video below for more.

All up, Corsair has some pretty snazzy kit hitting the shelves in the very near future – we hope to have some reviews as a follow up in due course. There has never been a better time to jazz up that lounge room!

 

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