Corsair Voyager a1600 Review | PCMag

The Corsair Voyager a1600 (begins at $2,532; $3,217 as examined) is the American firm’s first high-end gaming laptop. Its faultless aluminum construct and Cherry MX mechanical keyboard make a powerful first impression, and a streaming-focused contact macro bar is one thing we’ve seen from no different gaming laptop computer. Sadly, middling efficiency holds this pioneer again; its all-AMD {hardware} doesn’t stand as much as the Intel and Nvidia silicon within the Acer Predator Triton 500 SE, and for much less cash, the Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7. But when streaming and Crew Pink set your sails, the Voyager a1600 could but be your ship-of-the-line.

The Design: Trademark Corsair (However You Can Carry It)

Corsair’s stylish, trendy design language from its desktop elements and peripherals spills over into the Voyager a1600. This laptop computer is a visible standout and appears each bit its premium value.

(Credit score: Kyle Cobian)

Origin PC additionally sells variations of this identical laptop computer, branded underneath its personal identify. (Origin is a subsidiary of Corsair, acquired in 2019.) Our test-loan unit has a flashy UV lid print that is accessible when ordering by way of Origin.

(Credit score: Kyle Cobian)

The aluminum chassis has glorious craftsmanship and power. At 0.78 by 14 by 11.3 inches (HWD) and 5.3 kilos, it matches the elite Predator Triton 500 SE save for an inch better depth for its macro bar (to be mentioned shortly).

A cinematic 16-inch, 16:10 side ratio display screen differentiates the Voyager a1600 from laptops utilizing narrower 15.6-inch, 16:9 screens, such because the Alienware x15 and the Razer Blade 15 Advanced. A 2,560-by-1,600-pixel decision permits fantastic element with out being overly demanding for gaming.

(Credit score: Kyle Cobian)

This display screen has all of the gaming tech you could possibly ask for, together with a blistering 240Hz refresh rate, AMD FreeSync Premium frame-rate-smoothing, and an anti-glare floor. The image is first-rate; our DataColor SpyderX Elite registered 342 nits of peak brightness and 99% protection of the sRGB gamut.

A Streamer’s Secret Weapon: The Macro Bar

The Voyager a1600’s defining function is its macro bar. It has 10 contact buttons and a small middle show above the keyboard.

(Credit score: Kyle Cobian)

The bar is a shortcut strip aimed squarely at streamers. Corsair built-in the buttons with the Elgato Stream Deck app. (See our evaluation of the standalone Elgato Stream Deck, which is a useful programmable add-on button panel; Elgato is one other Corsair property.) However you should utilize the app to pull and drop shortcuts for nearly something, even your individual creations.

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The button colour is customizable within the Corsair iCUE app, which additionally controls the contact bar’s show. It will possibly present time, element temperatures, CPU utilization, and extra. Contact arrows on both facet allow you to change to different modes.

I discovered the macro bar genuinely helpful. As its shortcuts can be utilized for something, I even arrange an workplace profile to launch my ordinary apps and instructions. My nitpick is that the bar has no bodily separators between buttons and no audible or haptic suggestions. Although the buttons by no means did not register my contact, I nonetheless missed bodily reassurance of a faucet.

Above the show, a pointy 1080p webcam with a privateness shutter and a quad microphone array improve this laptop computer’s streaming focus. There’s additionally a devoted digicam app with all types of fine-tuning management, together with white steadiness, and the Elgato Stream Deck app has microphone shortcuts. Although the cam doesn’t help infrared for facial recognition, the Voyager a1600 has a fingerprint reader constructed into its energy button for getting round typed-password logins. Corsair will get a nod for together with a devoted energy button as a substitute of constructing it a keyboard key, which, after we see that form of design, all the time looks as if price slicing.

Dolby Atmos-tuned audio system, in the meantime, straddle the keyboard with ethereal sound however minimal bass. The Dolby Entry app has a number of equalizer settings and a dynamic mode (the default) in case you don’t care to tinker.

The Keyboard: A Cherry MX On Prime

Corsair’s experience designing keyboards additionally discovered its means into the Voyager a1600. The Cherry MX mechanical keys are a tactile delight, emitting subdued variations of the clicks and clacks you’d get from a desktop mechanical keyboard.

(Credit score: Kyle Cobian)

The iCUE app presents per-key RGB lighting management and allows you to reassign keys. There are even settings to disable doubtlessly game-disrupting shortcuts reminiscent of Alt+Tab, Alt+F4, and, after all, the menu-popping Home windows key. You may create layered lighting results and save limitless profiles.

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The touchpad additionally stands out. It’s a whopping 6.1 by 3.9 inches, bigger than any I bear in mind seeing on a gaming laptop computer. It has a sturdy glass floor and exact clicking motion.

The 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports are an sudden bonus on an AMD laptop computer. Additionally unfold throughout the left and proper edges are a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Kind-A port, a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, an audio jack, and an SD card reader. The 230-watt energy adapter connects on the left.

(Credit score: Kyle Cobian)

(Credit score: Kyle Cobian)

The ports are correctly located in the direction of the rear so plugged-in peripherals’ cables don’t doubtlessly intrude in your house for mousing across the sides of this machine. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth are additionally inbuilt, as is, uniquely, a Corsair Slipstream(Opens in a new window) module. The Slipstream performance allows you to join supported Corsair peripherals and not using a dongle, sparing USB ports.

Bon Voyage: Testing the Corsair Voyager a1600

The Voyager a1600 seen and examined here’s a personalized model from Corsair’s Miami-based subsidiary Origin(Opens in a new window), a builder of high-performance PCs. A uncommon all-AMD gaming get-up, it has an eight-core, 3.2GHz (4.7GHz enhance) AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS processor, 32GB of DDR5-4800 dual-channel RAM, and a 12GB Radeon RX 6800M graphics card. It matches as much as two storage drives; ours has a single 2TB PCI Categorical 4.0 solid-state drive, particularly a Corsair MP600 Pro XT, loaded with Home windows 11 House. The laptop computer is backed by a one-year guarantee.

All-AMD {hardware} is refreshing in a market dominated by Intel and Nvidia. In actual fact, I discovered no different laptop computer providing a Ryzen 6000 collection CPU and a Radeon RX 6800M graphics at evaluation time. The Alienware m15 R7 is shut; it’s $2,699 with a Ryzen 9 6900HX and an 8GB GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. On the Intel facet, the Razer Blade 15 Superior instructions $3,299 with a Core i9-12900H, a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, and an OLED display screen, however you get simply 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD for that cash.

The Ryzen 9 6900HS CPU within the Voyager deserves a callout. It’s rated for 35 watts, not 45 watts just like the Ryzen 9 6900HX, so it seemingly received’t carry out as effectively. Nevertheless, gaming efficiency shouldn’t be affected a lot since video games hardly ever max CPU utilization for prolonged intervals.

The Voyager a1600 handles its warmth effectively as proven on this picture from our Flir One Pro throughout a 3DMark Time Spy stress check. The height temperature of 110 levels F isn’t in an space you’d put your fingers, and even that temperature is within the acceptable vary.

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Rear exhaust vents guarantee warmth is evaded the consumer. The followers are audible throughout a front room however no louder than these of different gaming laptops I’ve examined. Simply take care to not block the fan intakes on the underside.

(Credit score: Kyle Cobian)

Upgrading the Voyager a1600’s RAM and storage is feasible by eradicating the underside panel, secured by Philips-head screws. (Take care to notice the place the screws got here from, as they’re not all the identical measurement.) Inside you will discover two M.2 Kind-2280 slots and two SO-DIMM RAM slots. The latter settle for as much as 64GB of RAM (two 32GB modules). Customizing by way of Origin permits as much as 8TB whole storage (within the type of two 4TB M.2 drives).

Now onto testing, the place the Voyager a1600 faces the Acer Predator Triton 500 SE, the Lenovo Legion 5i Professional Gen 7, the MSI Vector GP66, and the Razer Blade 15 Superior Mannequin, all 15- to 16-inch gaming laptops with Intel Core-class processors and Nvidia RTX 30-series Ti graphics, so it’ll be an uphill battle for the Corsair.

Productiveness and Content material Creation Checks

Our first check is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a wide range of real-world productiveness and workplace workflows to measure general system efficiency and likewise features a storage subtest for the first drive. The Voyager a1600 made mincemeat of the principle check, the place we contemplate 4,000 factors an indication of strong productiveness, and its storage rating suggests its 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD is a fantastic performer.

Our different three benchmarks give attention to the CPU, utilizing all accessible cores and threads, to charge a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 makes use of that firm’s Cinema 4D engine to render a posh scene, whereas Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Professional simulates widespread apps starting from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine studying. Lastly, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to transform a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p decision (decrease instances are higher).

Our ultimate productiveness check is Puget Techniques’ PugetBench for Photoshop(Opens in a new window), which makes use of the Artistic Cloud model 22 of Adobe’s well-known picture editor to charge a PC’s efficiency for content material creation and multimedia purposes. It is an automatic extension that executes a wide range of normal and GPU-accelerated Photoshop duties starting from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving a picture to making use of masks, gradient fills, and filters.

CPU efficiency is the Voyager a1600’s weak spot. The Ryzen 9 6900HS is a 35-watt chip as I famous, and although Intel’s energy rankings aren’t the identical, the Core H-class chips carry a 45-watt base energy and may clearly stretch their legs extra. The Voyager a1600 would have ideally used a 45-watt Ryzen HX-class chip, however that may have meant extra warmth.

Graphics and Gaming Checks

For Home windows PCs, we run each artificial and real-world gaming checks. The previous contains two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night time Raid (extra modest, appropriate for methods with built-in graphics) and Time Spy (extra demanding, appropriate for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Additionally looped into that group is the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL efficiency.

Shifting on, our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of F1 2021, Murderer’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege representing simulation, open-world action-adventure, and aggressive/esports shooter video games, respectively. On laptops, Valhalla and Siege are run twice (Valhalla at Medium and Extremely high quality, Siege at Low and Extremely high quality), whereas F1 2021 is run as soon as at Extremely high quality settings and, for Nvidia GeForce RTX laptops, a second time with Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing turned on.

The Voyager a1600 struggled to be aggressive throughout the board. The Razer underperformed for its {hardware} (seemingly energy and/or thermal-induced throttling) however the others, particularly the Lenovo and MSI, are extra in step with expectations for this elite tier. The one semi-bright facet is that the Radeon RX 6800M has a bigger 12GB body buffer than the 8GB RTX 3070 Ti.

We run the real-world gaming benchmarks at 1,920 by 1,080 pixels for comparisons’ sake, however you’ll need to play on the Voyager a1600’s native 2,560 by 1,600 pixels for the sharpest image, the place I noticed 44fps in each F1 2021 (Extremely, AMD FSR enabled) and Murderer’s Creed (Extremely) and 93fps in Rainbow Six (Extremely). The sub-60fps within the former two suggests the settings are too demanding; the video games weren’t unplayable, however you’d need to cut back the standard settings a bit to clear 60fps on common.

Battery and Show Checks

PCMag checks laptops’ battery life by taking part in a domestically saved 720p video file (the open-source Blender film Tears of Metal) with display screen brightness at 50% and audio quantity at 100% till the system quits. Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting are turned off through the check.

We additionally use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software program to measure a laptop computer display screen’s colour saturation—what proportion of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 colour gamuts or palettes the show can present—and its brightness in nits (candelas per sq. meter) on the display screen’s 50% and peak settings.

Virtually 5 and a half hours of unplugged life is suitable for a contemporary high-end gaming laptop computer. The MSI didn’t obtain half that, although the Lenovo confirmed significantly better stamina. On the show facet, the Voyager a1600 confirmed strong colour copy and passable peak brightness. Its 50% brightness is downright dim, although, and that’s the setting we use to check battery life, so anticipate a noticeable drop in runtime in case you improve brightness a lot previous that mark.

Heavy on Options, Mild on Energy

Corsair’s Voyager a1600 makes inroads into maybe the hardest laptop computer section: high-end gaming. Impeccable high quality, glorious enter gadgets, a lot of connectivity, that devoted macro bar with Elgato synergy, and an awesome display screen are simply a few of its highlights. In actual fact, this primary from Corsair excels in all places however uncooked efficiency.

(Credit score: Kyle Cobian)

Its all-AMD {hardware} is commendable however simply isn’t aggressive with the Intel Core H-class processors and Nvidia RTX 30 Ti graphics silicon that dominates like-priced gaming laptops. The Acer Predator Triton 500 SE stays a favourite and the Lenovo Legion 5i Professional Gen 7 performs higher for tons much less. General, although, there’s no denying that the Voyager a1600 is succesful, and that is a powerful debut by Corsair; it wants a efficiency booster to widen its enchantment.