Corsair punts technology to monitor your kit

Outs missing Link

Corsair has had a good showing at this year's CES, headlining with a new technology for controlling and monitoring all the components of a PC's cooling, power, and processing subsystems: Corsair Link.

Developed in conjunction with liquid-cooling specialist CoolIT Systems, Corsair Link is a system that will become standard across all Corsair components - starting with the Dominator and Dominator GT memory modules with the Airflow Pro air-cooling system and the just-launched Hydro Series H60 liquid-cooling system, and expanding out to encompass the company's PSU and CPU cooler ranges - and allows for in-depth control and monitoring from a PC interface.

The Corsair Link technology adds a port to all compatible products, which can be hooked up to the Link Controller, an add-in device that reports data including temperature, fan speed, voltage, overall power consumption, as well as pump speed and liquid coolant temperature for liquid cooling systems back to a software interface on the host PC.

The technology goes beyond simple monitoring, however, allowing users to set up profiles that can change device properties and alert when things aren't going as expected. In an example, Corsair suggests a high performance profile which, when activated, would run all cooling fans at maximum speed, increase the speed of the radiator fan on the company's H60 liquid cooling system, keep an eye on the temperature of both the CPU and the fluid in the cooling loop, and even change the in-case lighting to a more impressive colour.

Likewise, a lower performance setting could drop the fan speeds down to a minimum and turn any in-case lighting down or off, making the system more pleasant to use for day-to-day computing.

Andy Paul, chief executive at Corsair, announced the product at CES by stating: "We’ve been developing the underlying Corsair Link hardware technology for more than a year, and we are confident that users will be very happy with the results."

Corsair's Link technology has a certain familiarity about it: back in 2007 Nvidia launched a similar initiative, dubbed the Enthusiast System Architecture, which it offered as a royalty-free standard for inter-component communications based on the USB human interface device class. Sadly, the technology never took off - something Corsair is hoping to correct with this modern equivalent.

The Corsair Link Controller, and associated software, is expected to hit the retail channels in the second quarter of this year - but the company is keeping the price quiet for now.