Editors’ Picks: Digital Discoveries
Tuan Nguyen, editor-in-chief, and Bo Moore, technology editor, get fired up about new machines
I recently had the chance to play with a very special system from Corsair, called the Corsair One—creative, I know. Sure, at first glance, it’s a highperformance gaming PC, packed tightly into a very svelte chassis made from aluminum. But what makes the Corsair One stand out isn’t its design or its performance; the Corsair One is special because it marks a major milestone in Corsair’s history books.
If you’ve been around the scene long enough, you’ll know that, originally, Corsair was primarily a DRAM module company. Then it started producing cases, and now it is a popular choice for all sorts of computer accessories. And I have to say, the company has been doing a damn good job in all of its product categories. Save for a few major bits, Corsair is now at the point where it makes almost every part of a complete computer. So, it makes perfect sense that the company is launching the Corsair One— this is what makes the system special.
As a raw machine, the Corsair One is very well designed. The engineers and designers over at Corsair have used every possible nook and cranny of the chassis, and the design elements are as functional as they are goodd looking. It’s extremely well made, and I’ve gotta give it to the company—I haven’t been this excited about a complete pre-built for a very long time. $1,800, www.corsair.com I’ve never been one for flashy RGB lighting arrays. I’ll take an understated, minimalist box over aggressive “gamer” stylings any day. But I might have found the thing to change my mind. I recently had the chance to go hands-on with iBuyPower’s new Snowblind PC, a pre-built system that really takes case aesthetics to the next level. In lieu of a traditional side panel, Snowblind has a semi-transparent LCD screen that can display everything from dynamic graphics to real-time hardware monitoring widgets.
The case’s side panel is a 1280x1024 LCD screen that uses the internal lighting of the case for backlighting. It connects to your GPU via a short DVI cable, so Windows recognizes it as a second (or third, or fourth) monitor that you can set to display widgets, graphics, or whatever you want. My favorite was leaving the panel mostly transparent— showing off the manicured insides—save for a handful of Rainmeter widgets displaying CPU usage, GPU load, and time.
Unfortunately, you can’t buy Snowblind as a standalone case—not yet, at least. At launch, it’s only available as a full, pre-built system from iBuyPower, starting at $1,549 for an Intel Core e i5 i5-7400, 7400, 8GB of RAM, a GeForcece GTX 1070 GPU, and 1TB of storage. Here’s hoping the standalone comes soon—I want to build inside one. $1,549, www. ibuypower.com