The first stop at the Corsair catch-up was SSD's. Moving away from SandForce for their new "Neutron" drives, Corsair has instead selected a new LM87800 controller from Link-A-Media Devices. The controller is about on par with the fastest SandForce controllers, though in some scenarios the LAMD controller does come out ahead.
We were lucky enough to see some benchmark figures, and as you can see the Neutron GTX simply put is an exceptionally fast SSD. We're not sure about the performance of the vanilla Neutron, but our friends at Corsair said it will perform about the same as their current Force GT series.
After checking out the SSDs, we were shown a couple of cases, headphones and RAM kits. To be honest, not much is happening in those areas that we haven't already previewed in previous galleries or news stories, but Corsair did have another suprise for us. The brand new AX1200i PSU.
Don't let the name fool you, as this is not a simple refresh or respin of the existing AX1200 series power supply. Corsair has removed analogue capacitors and chokes, pulled out resistors and VRMs, instead replacing a lot of that with new digital power controllers. This ensures clean, efficient and most importantly steady power for power PC users and overclockers.
Due to most voltage regulation now being cleaned up and controlled via a digital controller, Corsair is able to give the users control over the PSU. Using the proprietary Corsair Link 2 software, the user can monitor power overall draw, temperatures, efficiency and even individual rail power consumption and loading. This means users can check how much power any individual component is using within their PC in real time. Very handy for overclockers wanting to keep the power bill down, and more importantly reviewers like us wanting accurate power draw measurements from CPUs and GPUs.
Another perk of using digital power control, is the ability to increase efficiency even further. Corsair has managed to earn an 80+ Platinum rating, and after using their Link software, we were able to confirm that the efficiency is indeed superb.
The technology used in the AX1200 today will no doubt be something other PSU manufactures will begin to build upon as it is not only useful for power efficiency, it's also a brilliant way for end users to monitor their power consumption.
