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  1. Home
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  3. Components

Touring Corsair: the ultimate PC parts maker for PC gamers

By Kevin Lee
published 14 June 2018

A glimpse inside Corsair's office and test rooms

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We recently had the unique opportunity to visit Corsair’s main headquarters located just north of Silicon Valley, in Fremont, California. We only expected a corporate building – augmented of course by the fun of PC gaming – but to our amazement inside is a competition-grade gaming room and even some testing areas where the company evaluates its products before release.

Join us as we take you inside Corsair’s hallowed halls where the company comes up with some of the best PC gaming components and peripherals in the industry.

  • TechRadar's fourth annual PC Gaming Week is officially here, celebrating our passion with in-depth and exclusive coverage of PC gaming from every angle. Visit our PC Gaming Week 2018 (opens in new tab) page to see all of the coverage in one place.
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Page 1 of 25

Upon entering, there is the usual reception area, but our attention immediately drifted to the right where Corsair essentially setup a small shop to show off its wares and, of course, sell some swag.

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Corsair’s full line of power supplies, fans, sleeved cables, CPU coolers and all its PC parts are on display.

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Page 3 of 25

Meanwhile, along another wall you'll find almost every single mouse, headset and keyboard peripheral Corsair has ever produced.

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Page 4 of 25

Just outside the store area, Corsair also setup a hydraulic racing chair in front of a decently-sized projector screen.

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Page 5 of 25

Amazingly, the whole thing is powered by the compact Corsair One gaming PC.

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Page 6 of 25

With a company name like Corsair, we expected a somewhat pirate-themed office. That said, it isn't overtly decorated like a maritime attraction or some sort of theme-restaurant.

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Page 7 of 25

The artwork hung around the office is truly inspiring. Sadly, they're not available for purchase.

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Page 8 of 25

In case you didn't know, Corsair has a running web comic series it publishes to its Twitter, Facebook and other social media. A running story board caught our eye as we walked around the office, and here's where the sausage is made.

When your GPU doesn't know how good its life is... #CORSAIRComics pic.twitter.com/lO6rcyavSMJuly 10, 2017

See more
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Page 9 of 25

We got to poke our heads into Corsair's video studio, where the company shoots many of it's promotional and how-to videos. On set, we got to take a look at the Corsair Obsidian 500D before its Computex 2018 debut.

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Page 10 of 25

Just outside of Corsair's gaming room, you'll find a bunch of cosmic-themed artwork fashioned after the Doctor Who series.

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Page 11 of 25

And just like the Tardis, Corsair's gaming room is way bigger on the inside than anything you could have imagined it being.

There is a total of 10 desks with completely custom built gaming rigs and all the PC peripherals your heart could desire. Corsair tells us it regularly hosts esports teams looking for a space to practice. The PC gaming hardware maker also regularly holds company meetings and other cordial events in the same space.

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Page 12 of 25

Dotted around the perimeter of Corsair's gaming room, you'll find a bunch of case mods and custom PCs builds. The one on the left features some Empire themed aesthetics that Star Wars fans will recognize, meanwhile the right was a custom liquid-cooling focused build.

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Page 13 of 25

More recently, Corsair sponsored several custom PC builds focused around Overwatch including this particular one dedicated to Lucio (opens in new tab).

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Page 14 of 25

The our biggest personal highlight of the custom PC builds is this Zenyatta-themed case mod.

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Page 15 of 25

The most extreme PC rig award goes to Corsair's Obsidian 1000D build. Corsair managed to pack in 25 fans, four AIO liquid-coolers, two motherboards, two processors, three graphics cards, dual power supplies, six SSD drives and a whole lot of sleeved cables into this massive dual-system case.

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Page 16 of 25

On a less extreme, but still very impressive note, Corsair shows us its latest cube case loaded up with a Micro-ATX system that can support dual graphics card configurations.

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Page 17 of 25

Moving onto the evaluation lab, this is where Corsair puts some of its products through testing to make sure they're up to snuff.

Bobby Kinstle, Senior Project Manager at Corsair, calls this first machine a wind tunnel, but it's really designed to measure volumetric flow and differential pressure. That's a bit of a mouthful, but basically in this part of the evaluation lab, Corsair tests its fans to see how well they can push to pull air in. 

Kinstle will both test the fans on their own or with a dust filter mesh in front of it as well as if users were to screw it to a liquid-cooling radiator.

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Next up, the Thermal Chamber looks a bit like a kiln or oven and that's basically what it is. Corsair mainly uses this device to measure the thermal resistance of its all-in-one liquid coolers to see how long it takes before they heat up.

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While this tall gray cabinet might look like a piece of medical equipment, it's actually a power supply tester. Kinstle demonstrated how it works by plugging in the machine's leads into a standard power supply and from there it'll stress test the PSU for hours for any fatal errors.

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Page 20 of 25

Of course, there are also plenty of standard test benches where Corsair simply tests how well their power supplies, fans, RAM and liquid-cooled graphics cards work.

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Page 21 of 25

Corsair didn't become the master of RGB lighting by chance, here the company is putting its new iCUE software through some rigorous use.

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Corsair also recently got into the business of selling its own pre-built systems including its most recent Corsair One Elite. During our visit, the company was giving all of its latest desktops a good benchmarking.

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Page 23 of 25

Corsair also puts all of its peripherals through a battery of tests as well as long term usage. On these shelves we found basically every keyboard, mouse and gaming headset the company has on the market.

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Page 24 of 25

And that's a wrap, folks. In case you missed it earlier, we also took this Corsair HQ visit opportunity to go deep into the development of their keyboards and mice. Be sure to stick around for even more features as PC Gaming Week 2018 rolls on.

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Kevin Lee
Kevin Lee

Kevin Lee was a former computing reporter at TechRadar. Kevin is now the SEO Updates Editor at IGN based in New York. He handles all of the best of tech buying guides while also dipping his hand in the entertainment and games evergreen content. Kevin has over eight years of experience in the tech and games publications with previous bylines at Polygon, PC World, and more. Outside of work, Kevin is major movie buff of cult and bad films. He also regularly plays flight & space sim and racing games. IRL he's a fan of archery, axe throwing, and board games.


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