Introduction

As the title suggest, it has been quite a long time since Corsair has made something so elegant yet still so awesome in the originality of the design and concepts included into it that I can't really see any reason not to own one. For a line like that to come from a guy like me is really saying something. The original submission of the Obsidian series, the 800D spent three full years on my desk with many and I mean many various build inside of it over that time. For the basis of this review I am speaking of only the Obsidian series and there were also great cases in the Graphite and Carbide series, mainly the 600T and the 500R stick out for those, but back to the topic at hand.

In my opinion Corsair set the bar so high with what the 800D offered and how sleek and sexy it looked sitting anywhere, that it was a real shame it came before all of the other cases I mentioned. Now the hot swap bays are gone and of course we are now speaking of a mid-tower chassis, but in the simplest of terms, this is what I would expect to come from all the handy things that evolved over the line of Corsair cases.

This yet keeping enough of the original in materials and aesthetic appeal and yet still finds a way to keep on giving with a few innovative and "now why did I think about that" aspects for other companies to try and copy. I guarantee that is going to happen to one feature in particular and that is the ingenious, yet simple solution to most cases with a front door on them and that's that they don't swing in the right direction for every situation.

I don't want to give away too much before you get to see the images along with what I am discussing. As I mentioned, some of the features may not be so "new" to the market, but it is more about the total package in this design. Yes, you have seen a few of these things before, but not like this. Nor do they have the attention to the fine details that the Corsair 550D from the Obsidian series seems to be able to pack into one design.

Get comfortable because this mid-tower has a ton to offer and I am going to cover it all. Hopefully by the end of this review you will see why I am starting off so strongly with this chassis. I know if I were in the buyer's market, this chassis has a lot of offer any builder out there and with the options housed within it, this is a chassis that if you do buy it, it will be part of your decor for years to come.

Today we take a look at the newest cooler from Noctua. This time Noctua is showing the Small Form Factor users some love with their new NH-L12 extra low profile CPU cooler. The NH-L12 is a low-profile cooler for Small Form Factor cases and HTPC environments. Join us as we see just small this cooler is and how the new Noctua NH-L12 performs.

Introduction

Given the short timing of this project we're just going to dive right in and get to work on this one. Just a month ago OCZ Technology released their new flagship consumer SSD, the Vertex 4. In our testing we observed a rather strange issue when reading data from the drives provided by OCZ. The issue had to do with single read requests for data, a single command. Both the 256GB and 512GB models provided to us would only read at around 200MB/s. This hampered the drives in several benchmarks and was even observed in several real-world tasks. The 200MB/s limit was surpassed when asking the drive to read two files, then up to 400MB/s. Three files read further increased the Vertex 4 performance to their maximum read limits. The ability to multitask with native command queuing (NCQ) is a great feature, but one that most consumers rarely take advantage of... we are just single task creatures, performing one step at a time.

When it comes to OCZ's house brand Indilinx, firmware changes, when needed, will be rapid. OCZ doesn't need to wait for a third party to get involved. As you know by now, Indilinx Infused at this time doesn't mean 100% Indilinx, but rather Indilinx programming and firmware sitting atop Marvell silicon. We suspected as much while testing the OCZ Octane, but without proof or a State of Solid State article between then and now, we kept our speculations to ourselves. Either way, none of this really matters because Marvell just makes the hardware and the SSD manufacturers come up with the rest. This is why every SSD based on Marvell controllers perform differently, from the Crucial C300 to the Corsair Performance 3; the changes in performance and behavior are pretty broad.

When it comes to the Vertex 4 update that should be available soon, the 128GB model gets the largest performance boost. This performance increase has more to do with the write speed than it does the 200MB/s read limit that we suspect the 128GB drive shared with the larger models we reviewed. Going back to the point made in the last paragraph, none of the other SSDs from other manufactures using Marvell controllers have achieved anywhere near 400MB/s write speed in a 128GB model. At the same time this article gets published online, our 128GB Vertex 4 will arrive. We hoped to tackle all three models in this article, but UPS cut off times aren't as flexible as we'd like.

Today we're focusing on the two largest Vertex 4 drives that are now shipping - 256GB and 512GB. In our previous review we concluded that both drives felt faster than what the benchmarks showed, but the 200MB/s read limit with a single request hurt the benchmark scores. We also noted that in some tasks the limited read at a single request did pop up in some real-world areas like Quick PAR and WinRAR.

Let's take a look and see the progress OCZ was able to make with their Indilinx Infused Vertex 4 in just a single month's time.