If you have a desktop computer on your desk, there is a good chance that you will find a Corsair product in or near the closet. The brand produces not only water coolers, cases, memory modules and power supplies, but also gaming headsets, keyboards, mice and monitors. as we are five years ago Already written, you don’t need more to build a computer, which a pirate introduces himself to. in file form pirate one i300 You can also order a full desktop from the brand.

So far, what was still missing was a pirate laptop. That will change in 2022. With the Voyager A1600, from now on for sale in Benelux, among other things, the brand is also entering this market. Of course, Corsair has benefited from the experience it has gained over the years. For example, the laptop has a mechanical keyboard with MX switches from German Cherry, which Corsair has been working together for years for its loose slopes, and there are Vengeance memory strips under the hood. Embedded software includes iCUE, which is also used to configure Corsair peripherals, and Elgato’s Stream Deck software. The manufacturer attempted to integrate some of the functionality of a separate Stream Deck accessory into the laptop, by means of an RGB-lit strip between the display and the keyboard along with ten touch-sensitive buttons.

Corsair turned to AMD for the most important components. The processor is a Ryzen 9 6900HS and the video card is also one of the fastest “red team” it’s offering right now: the Radeon RX6800M. With this combination of fast components and additional features, Corsair immediately sets itself up in terms of price, on the same level as more premium gaming laptops from manufacturers like ASUS and Acer. In the configuration as we tested, you pay at least 3,700 euros for the Voyager a1600. If you are completely concerned with CPU power and frame rates and less concerned with the rest of the performance, you can lose thousands of euros less.

Accommodation and connections

With its 16-inch screen, the Voyager a1600 will never be a small unit, but the body is remarkably deep. This is even if you don’t include the button bar, which protrudes more in the back. Although it’s a “top” 16:10 ratio, the screen still has a wide bezel at the bottom, and we’ve also seen the top bezel is less thin. The screen hinges are attached to the button bar, which folds down when opened, leaving plenty of empty space at the bottom, so the screen is higher when opened than on many other laptops, which is great if the thing in front of you is on Desk, but perhaps less ideal if you want to use it on a narrow flat table.

The Voyager a1600 may be wide and deep, but the casing is certainly not thick: less than 2cm. Weight is also limited at 2.4kg for a laptop of this spec, especially when you consider that Corsair has also put in a massive 99Wh battery. The casing is made largely of aluminum, with the edges around the screen made of plastic as usual. All black has a nice rough feel. The palm rest does not show finger grease very quickly, but the spots have a slightly greater hold on the valve. The base is solid. It is not easy to press into the space around the keyboard, and the casing does not give way when we hold it with both hands and try to twist it. The screen flap is more sluggish, but it doesn’t feel stiff.

If we look at the connections, it’s noticeable that the Voyager a1600 doesn’t have separate picture connections, like HDMI or Mini DisplayPort, found on many other gaming laptops. And there’s no Ethernet connection, which you’ll find plenty in this category. The Corsair laptop has two USB 4 ports with the same features as the Thunderbolt ports on Intel laptops. Consider a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 40 Gbit/s and an alternate DisplayPort 1.4 mode for connecting displays with resolutions up to 8K. The laptop also has a 10Gb/s USB-C port, a 5Gbit/s USB-A version, a 3.5mm combo jack, and a full-size SD card reader. There is also a separate power connection and Kensington lock on the left. It’s nice that all the ports are located somewhat at the back, so your hand isn’t obstructed by a spaghetti of loose cables. The warm air leaves only the back casing, so using a separate mouse is also comfortable in this regard.

Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

As a brand of peripherals, Corsair has become well known and successful over the years with mechanical keyboards, equipped with Cherry’s MX switches. Of course, that could not be missing in the brand’s first laptop. The Voyager a1600 is one of the first laptops with Cherry’s new MX Ultra Low Profile (ULP) touch switches, a new type of long lasting MX ULP toggle switch. Previous MX ULP Click keys for laptops made a loud clicking noise when turned on, similar to the MX Blue keys of desktop keyboards. The MX ULP Tactile adapters don’t do that and are similar to MX Browns as a result. The structure of the ULP keys is similar to the scissor keys you typically find on a laptop keyboard, but instead of a membrane that provides the necessary resistance, each MX ULP key contains a small spring. Of course, the mechanism also has cross-shaped gold contacts through which the stroke is recorded and from which the MX switches take their mechanical name of the X-Point.

It’s a good idea to click on the Voyager a1600. According to Cherry, the MX ULP Tactile switches offer relatively plenty of travel, around 1.8mm. The touch feels more visible than a regular membrane keyboard, with the resistance being less noticeable the moment the touch is registered. Due to the sturdy chassis, the bottom also feels solid. Clicking feels noisier than a regular laptop keyboard, so it’s not really quiet, but no great example, the MX Brown key. Remarkably, not all Voyager a1600 switches were fitted with mechanical switches by Corsair. Under the top row of function keys and arrow keys are rubber domes. You feel this difference if you pay attention, because the operation is less direct. Underneath every switch, even the small ones, is a Corsair Capellix RGB LED. You can make it light up in all the colors of the rainbow with the help of iCUE software.

The Voyager a1600’s touchpad is a MacBook-like size. The surface is nice and smooth and the buttons below give a good click. Nice touchpad you might say, but it’s practically a bit disappointing. A pirate has no such good palm rejection Built like Apple, which makes touches more likely to be misrecognized. For example, the mouse arrow moves so hard because the system thinks you’re swiping two fingers. Placing your palm on the touchpad when tapping will make palm rejection work Yes, but it can happen that you accidentally press the buttons and a right or left mouse click is recorded. In the upper corners of the touchpad there are two virtual buttons to reduce unwanted touches. Double clicking the button on the left completely disables the touchpad, while the button on the right only disables the right mouse button and the right side of the touch-sensitive surface. It takes a while to get used to it; The mouse pointer stops moving somewhere and you can only right-click with two fingers. It’s also not really a solution if you run the touchpad with the left.

While biometric login options are becoming common in cheaper consumer laptops, a fingerprint scanner or camera with facial recognition technology is not yet common even in expensive gaming laptops. Both options are present with the Voyager a1600. The camera in the top frame has above-average quality, a higher resolution of 1080p than most laptops, and there are four noise-canceling microphones for broadcasting. Corsair provides software for adjusting the brightness and white balance of a camera image. Interestingly, the Effects settings tab asks for an Nvidia video card. So you can’t use it on this entire AMD laptop. Another detail that could be improved is the very soft slide on which you can cover the camera.For audio, the Voyager a1600 has two 20mm drivers in the grilles adjacent to the keyboard. They sound good, but we’ve heard laptop speakers produce more bass. At least the sound stage is beautiful and spacious, helped by the direct placement of the listener and Dolby Atmos software.

S . key

Voyager a1600 is equipped with a kind of ‘deck stream-low fat’. Between the screen and the housing there is a bar with ten touch-sensitive buttons, with a small screen in the middle. Just like with the Stream Deck, which you can buy as a separate button pad for your computer, you can assign each button to a specific action. By default, some shortcuts are assigned to many of the available applications like iCUE, the laptop claps you with a right button press. You can also play all kinds of other sound effects via the Elgato software, which you can also use with the separate Stream Deck, but in addition to those games there are also more serious applications. For example, you can assign functionality in programs like OBS, Twitch, and Xsplit to a button, where you can download more options from the Stream Deck store. You can also perform several actions at the same time associated with a single keystroke, for example starting a stream and turning on the Philips Hue lighting at the same time. The function of saving all keys in a profile and switching between different profiles is also possible.

An important drawback compared to the real Stream Deck is that there is no screen for each button, only a pattern numbered from S1 to S10. This makes it easy to guess the function of each key, especially if you are working with multiple profiles. Given the high price of the laptop, we wonder why Corsair hasn’t integrated an Apple Touch Bar-like display. For some reason, Corsair provided the capacitive buttons with RGB, so you can give each key a different color in the iCUE software. Unfortunately, color response to a specific event, such as receiving a donation in a stream, does not appear to be possible.

The small LCD screen in the middle of the keys is also a missed opportunity with the current software version. It can only be used for three different widgets: a clock, a processor load graph, or a battery indicator, possibly combined with a background image of your choice. You can set different views and switch between them using the arrow keys next to the screen, but we still have all the functionality. Hopefully Corsair will be able to provide more options on the screen in the future, where you can, for example, show the same things on them as on screens built into separate real Stream Deck buttons.