TEC cooling for DDR3 arrives

THREE THINGS WORTH talking about were on display at the Corsair booth this year, a RAM cooler, USB backup button thingy and the first of a line of cases. One we have talked about, the other two are brand new.

TEC waterblock and backup button

The first one is for the truly hardcore out there, it is a waterblock with a TEC on it for the Dominator GT series of RAM. Those little red fins you see on top are actually screwed on, and you can pull them off, and screw this cooler on instead.

The TEC cools the RAM and the waterblock cools the TEC, easy enough to conceptualise. Corsair includes the screws, mounting widgets, and thermal pads. If the GT memory isn't fast enough for you, this might help.

Remember the one button backup we talked about at CES? The first shipments arrived a little late for us, but at CeBit they were all over the place. It is basically a USB cable with a button on. Put in your stick, press the button, and things get backed up. Personally, I would rather skip the software involved and copy the files manually, but it might work well for your technophobe friends.

Corsair Case

The last thing they had was a prototype for the first of a new line of cases. Corsair tends to start at the top and work down, not a bad strategy to cement a brand. The new cases will debut with what you see above in June, it doesn't have a name yet.

It seems to have all the correct bullet points, segments for heat zones, tool free everything, mountings for tons of fans, and a rear plate for cable routing. On top of this, they have a few nice touches, the rubber grommets that you run the cables through are fairly uncommon, as are the hot-plug drive bays in front. There is a back plate cutout as well for heatsink swapping with the mobo mounted, another nice but not unique touch.

In general, the Corsair case breaks no new ground, but it looks well done and solidly built. When the final version comes out in a few months, likely at Computex, we will see how it translates from prototype to production. Until then, it looks good enough. µ