I was just curious what it would look like once I removed the metal shroud. It’s very similar to the Samsung 128GB drive, but it’s kinda interesting to note that this MLC X25-M 80GB drive uses 20 4GB chips to achieve its capacity, rather than 8 16GB flash chips.

Also of note is the big Intel controller that is at least partially responsible for the terrific write speeds of this model. Expect a tech tips that covers a little bit about Intel’s mainstream series SSD as well as RAID performance!

It looks like they don’t have a “warranty void if removed sticker” on this drive, so one of the first things I did was open it up, but it’s taken me unti now to get around to posting it up.

As you can see it’s 100% Samsung inside. It seems like kind of a strange branding exercise that Corsair would call their own drive out as “Samsung”, since Samsung is not only a supplier, but also a competitor. I guess it’s not that different from Kingston calling out their drives as “Intel”. Speaking of Intel, we’ll be covering a couple of the Intel SSD drives in an upcoming Tech Tips, so stay tuned!!

I’m not really going anywhere with this, but I just thought it was really cool. One of our Corsair contacts sent me a link that showed my feature in their media section of the website, but I didn’t realize I was actually one of the links on the front page.

The video also got a lot of positive comments on YouTube as well. It’s just awesome to see Tech Tips really gaining some traction.

So a few weeks ago I picked up a Parkzone Vapor remote control airplane because I had a few bucks lying around and I’ve always wanted to have one. I’d spent a fair amount of time on the simulator so I was pretty sure I was ready for flying. My first 30+ flights went well, but not this one.

You can’t really see it very well, but that’s my plane well above the street lamps. The little tiny glowing red dot in the top left of the photo. I wanted to climb the tree, but that just wasn’t going to be realistic, so all that was left to do was throw things at it until I could get it down.

After about 30 or os tosses I connected with one of the branch chunks I was throwing… More than I wanted to. When it came down, I was lucky that all I had knocked off was the rudder, so my total damage was about $20. The lesson I learned was “don’t fly above the fog in the middle of the night near a big tree”… It may not be applicable to other areas of my life, but at least this won’t happen again.

I got this message through my NCIXcom YouTube channel where I post NCIX Tech Tips videos.

ive started putting together my first rig and so far ive only gotten the case and the psu (cosmos-s, real power modular 850w) now for the next step i need your wisdom and advice… i was thinking about something along the lines of:
EVGA x-58 3-SLi
PNY 9800 GT XLR8 OC SVGA ( X2 )
INTEL CORE I7-920
6 Gb of corsair dominator Ram

what afvise do you have and will this support three 22″screens comfortably??

The only real changes that I would recommend making to this configuration are the video cards and the 6GB of Dominator RAM.

If you want to play modern games on 1680×1050 monitors (running on all three monitors), then you’ll need one more powerful graphics card to go with a 9800GT. Something like a GTX 280 would be a good fit with the recent price drops. That way you can run the more powerful card with two monitors and the less powerful card with only one. Another configuration option here would be to run 3 9800GTs so all three screens will be equally powered.

If you don’t need top performance in 3D applications on all three screens, then a 9800GT is overkill for your extra monitors. You’d be better off spending your money on one good GPU and then a super cheap one. Something to be aware of is that running multi-monitor in SLI (in 2D… 3D is still limited to only one monitor) is limited to 2 monitors. You can only plug in one additional monitor to the same video card as your SLI focus display.

For the RAM, I would just recommend going with regular XMS3 unless you’re planning on some serious overclocking. Core i7 is not very sensitive to higher memory bandwidth (or lower latencies), so inexpensive memory may save you a few dollars to spend on higher end GPUs.

I saw the listing at work today, but what I didn’t realize is that absolutely no one seems to have any information on the product.

The specs list it as “Sequential Read/Write 90 MB/s read / 70 MB/s write” so I’m assuming it’s an MLC design (the price is too low for SLC anyway), but I’m not sure how accurate it is based on the fact that it says “Crucial” in it at one point…

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=35881&vpn=CMFSSD-128GBG1D&manufacture=CORSAIR

It’s not even listed on Corsair’s site, but it looks like you can buy it now. Stay tuned because there may be a video coming on this product!

Wow. Three video posts in a row here! We’ve been very busy with these GPU launches, and we’re very proud of the results (except for maybe Monitor Man… You’ll have to watch the video to see what I’m talking about :p).

Check it out!

Another Tech Tips already! We actually shot these both on the same day (you can kinda tell from the fact that the horrible zit is still on my chin… I refuse to wear make-up for this) and that’s been part of what’s made this such a busy launch.

A lot goes into a product launch besides fun things like YouTube videos, so I’m glad we still had time to get these out the door. I hope you enjoy part II of our January 8th launch videos.

We just released a new NCIX Tech Tips about the Phenom II & AMD Dragon platform.

I failed and got the required chipset wrong (should be 790GX, not 790FX), but other than that, I’m very happy with the results. Hopefully you enjoy the video!

Phenom II is a lot of things. Performance leader is not one of them. What it is though, is a return to value and competition with Intel’s mid-range at stock, and competition with Intel’s high end when overclocked.

The Phenom II really reminds me of the Barton core. It’s not the fastest, but it’s fast enough at the right price. I did some quick & dirty benchmarks of the Phenom II 940 Black against Intel’s latest and greatest Intel Core i7 just to get a point of reference for cost to performance. Forgive my fail Excel graphs…

So basically with a little bit of overclocking, enthusiasts can get about 90% of the performance of a Core i7 Extreme 965 for a fraction of the cost. Sure you can do it on the Intel side too, but at least AMD is an option again.