Take Control With Corsair Commander Pro

 There's little doubt that custom lighting and cooling has become a significant part of the PC enthusiast culture and Corsair is no shrinking violet in this market and one of their latest offerings is the Commander Pro. Marketed as "the heart of your Corsair Link system" this appears to be a direct replacement for the now discontinued Corsair Commander Mini, it's a centralized control center for controlling and monitoring your RGB fans and strips, controlling fan speeds and monitoring temperatures.

Opening the packaging, things are tidy and well-presented, as we've come to expect from Corsair.

Inside the box is the Commander unit, four 4-pin fan extensions, two RGB hub cables, four thermistors and two pieces of 2-sided tape used to mount the Commander in your case. The Commander Pro has six 4-pin fan connectors with voltage and PWM control, four thermistor inputs, two RGB lighting channels and two USB 2.0 internal headers. Each lighting channel can control up to four lighting strips or six fans but controlling fan lighting requires an LED hub (not included). The Commander Pro plugs into an internal USB header and uses SATA for power.

To wrangle all of this hardware you're going to use the Corsair Link software. From there you can customize the color and effects of your lighting, the behavior of your fans and monitor the temperatures of your CPU, GPU, hard drives, motherboard sensors as well as up to 4 locations you can choose with the included thermistors.

All in all the Commander Pro is a handy little gadget and a must-get if you're stacking Corsair RGB products in your case but it's not all sunshine and rainbows. As I said earlier, to customize the fan lighting you need to purchase an additional device. Additionally, I would have liked more than four light strips per channel. If you're lighting a large case, this limitation could be problematic.

The Corsair Commander pro sells for 69.99 and is available at online retailers like Amazon,m Newegg and the Corsair store.

At Computex 2017, Gaming Laptops Lose Weight And A CPU Gains It

The gaming laptop, often an oxy-moron and frequently plagued by weight, heat and noise issues. When a vendor wants to put "real" desktop components in a laptop, heat is a significant issue and resolving it  usually involves copious amounts of copper and larger frames and howling to get air flowing over that copper and they still generated quite a bit of heat. In the old days we didn't even call them laptops, they were desktop alternatives. I had a Sager\Clevo rig with a desktop i7 CPU and SLI GPUs and it was the size of a small suitcase, was as heavy as a boat anchor and with the fans at full throttle, you'd think Dorothy's house was going to blow by

The alternative was for manufacturers to offer reduced power/voltage versions of their chips. They generated much less heat but this often came at a significant loss of performance. I have a laptop with a GTX 760m GPU and my backup system running a GTX 660 blows it out of the water.

NVIDIA is looking to break this paradigm with Max-Q technology. Simply put they're taking the best of their 1060, 1070 and 1080 chips, optimized game settings, cutting-edge airflow engineering and high-quality voltage control to produce the best possible performance at the optimal power level.

As a demonstration of this technological philosophy, Jensen Huang showed two laptops, side by side at Computex 2017. One was a 10 pound, 81mm gaming laptop from 3 years ago and one was a sleek, new 18mm thick laptop weighing only 5 pounds. The best chip, optimized settings and VRM aspect of this seem pretty straightforward so what intrigues me is the airflow engineering aspect of Max-Q. The ASUS ROG Zephyrus has a GTX 1080 GPU, is just shy of 5 pounds and is 17.9mm thin, when closed. When you open the lid the edges under the monitor side crack open a bit to increase airflow 30%. It's a really cool concept but I'm concerned about how robust that whole arrangement is.

MSI and Clevo had announced offerings running GTX 1070s at the time of the announcement but there aren't any details on how they manage heat and airflow.

Now to the elephant in the room, literally:
AMD is going after Intel i9 with the Ryzen Threadripper. According to AMD the Threadripper is their "revitalization of ultra-premium PCs for the high-end desktop market" and "targeted at the world's fastest ultra-premium desktop systems". What they left off their wire announcement is that it's a monster.

 I had thought the old Cyrix and 2011.V3 CPUs were as big as bricks could get but I was apparently wrong. I can't immediately find why this thing is the size of the side of a clapboard house but I'll keep my eyes on it.

Now of course if your laying the Monolith from 2001 on it's side in your rig your going to need a motherboard and cooler to go with it. For coolers, Noctua announced the TR4/SP3 heatsinks. Noctua produces some of the best heatpipe coolers out there so I imagine they'll do the job. I just wonder how much they weigh...

Finally, if I was assembling this boat anchor er...gaming rig, I'd put it all on an Asus ROG Zenith Extreme

The Zenith Extreme is a fairly typical example of hoe these CPUs will be mounted and shows that the mounting hardware is nearly as wide as the ram slots. The ASUS announcement alludes to it's bulk directly stating "AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper is a lot of CPU, and the ROG Zenith Extreme brings a lot of motherboard to match" That is no lie.