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.

Corsair Announces New Fan/RGB Controller

Being firmly entrenched in the RGB craze for some time now, Corsair has announced their latest entry in the lighting and fan control market, the Corsair Commander Pro. The Commander Pro replaces the, now discontinued, Commander Mini and incorporates elements of the Lightning Node Pro and fan RGB hub while adding several new features. It's full list of features include 6 fan controllers, 4 thermistor connectors, 2 internal USB 2.0 connections and 2 RGB LED channels that support 4 RGB strips or 6 RGB HD fans each.

According to Corsair's announcement the Corsair Commander Pro "Available immediately from the CORSAIR worldwide network of authorized retailers and distributors" and although a quick search didn't turn anything up you can order it direct from them for 69.99.

An Unhappy Cyclops and Windows 10 Wallpaper

Has anyone noticed that Microsoft's new default user icon looks like an unhappy cyclops?

Maybe it's because he upgraded to Windows 10, has multiple monitors and can't set individual wallpapers. Fear not, my one-eyed friend, there's a way to get this done. Like many other Windows 8x features that appear to be missing in Windows 10, it's still there, just hidden but easy to find and no dubious third party apps are required.

• Bring up the "Run" command box by holding your Windows and R key

• Paste the following text in the box (no quotes): "control /name Microsoft.Personalization /page pageWallpaper"

• Hit Enter or click OK
• This will bring up the old style Desktop Background selection window
• Browse to where your desired photos are, right-click each photo, set it to the desired monitor and save changes

Seriously, Amazon?

In what I can only describe as an Apple-esque walled garden tactic, Amazon is going to stop allowing the sale of non Prime compatible devices like Chromecast and Apple TV, effective October 29. 

According to the Amazon Overlords:

“Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime,” a spokesperson said. “It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion. Roku, Xbox, PlayStation and Fire TV are excellent choices.”

So to start with Amazon is assuming their customers are idiots and can't properly research a purchase or read a product description. While I agree that there are a startling number of 85s* out there this argument just doesn't hold much water, Secondly, it's reported that fewer than 20% of Amazon users are Prime members so anyone wanting a cheap or convenient device to use other streaming services will just have to shop elsewhere.

Popular opinion is that this isn't tantamount to an antitrust violation, due to there being other outlets for purchase, although I imagine this will suck worse for Google as outlets for Apple products are far more ubiquitous but, in my opinion, this just comes off as a sleazy, underhanded move.

* 85 is an Alien 3 reference used to indicate someone has a low intelligence.

Back in the saddle, again.... again.

Many of you know about my on again, off again history with writing. All the way back to the early '00s, with PCExtremist.com and freelancing, I've wanted to both read about and get hands-on with technology and than share what I learn and how I feel about the experience with anyone that will listen. 

As my career started to take off I found less and less time to keep up with all all the diversity in tech news and had to focus on what I was relevant to success in my job and most of what I learned was either proprietary or confidential and not appropriate to share on a public forum.

In 2009 I started this blog in an attempt to rekindle my interest in flogging any hardware I could get my hands on and reporting on anything in the tech news I found of interest but over the years my dedication to this site has been spotty, at best, leading to complete silence since the end of 2012 mostly due to my dealing with spinal/neurological deficits, unemployment and the subsequent deep depression that followed.

I'm still unemployed but after a few surgeries, I'm feeling better physically than I have in a very long time. The emotional health thing is a daily maintenance task and I've been told to get off my butt and find hobbies other than feeling sorry for myself and melting my brain with the TV. Several people have said that writing again would both be good as a mental stimulus and as a possible way to showcase some of my talents to possible future employers... yay me.

This brings me full circle to the title of this (much longer than I intended) post in that I'm going to resume publishing content on this blog. I'm not sure with what, how much or how often I'll be assaulting the interned with my opinion but I'm hoping it will eventually several posts, daily. We'll see.

USS Enterprise to Boldly Go...

To be parted out. After over 50 years in service the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Enterprise is to be decommissioned and sold for scrap.

She'll start her final mission with a quick jaunt from US Naval Station Norfolk, in Virginia  to a nearby shipyard to have her fuel rods removed. From there she'll be towed down around the southern tip of South America and head northward to her final destination in Puget Sound, Washington. Once there her reactors will be removed and full cannibalization will commence. She's expected to yield 90K tons of scrap.

There were several attempts to save her and make her a floating museum but the process of removing the 8 nuclear reactors will cause significant damage to the flight deck and hull. The cost to replace this damage is prohibitive, according to the navy.

The USS Enterprise, know as Big E by her crew, is the second oldest ship in the Navy and the oldest combat vessel in service. Gray Lady, you will be missed.