Corsair’s first gaming laptop is the start of something good

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PC gaming needs a lot of things from C orsair Corsair. The Stream Deck command center is owned by the company. It will probably make a laptop: the A1600. Corsair whipped up the design in-house, and it has Corsair parts and features, including a built-in Slipstream receiver that pairs with Corsair gaming mice. It has a stream deck. It's kind of.

While I am impressed that Corsair was able to fit so much into an elegantly designed gaming laptop, it doesn't perform at the level that I expect of a machine that costs $2,999.99, with a slightly slower processor, 16 gigabytes. It will be powerful enough for most people, but compared to similarly priced gaming laptops with graphics cards, as well as some cheaper ones, this model isn't well-suited for the most demanding games.

The Stream Deck software is as good as ever, but the 10 touch-sensitive buttons don't change to reflect what you've changed, and the Stream Deck touch bar is occasionally buggy. The Stream Deck Mini starts at just $80. The quality of its speakers and webcams is disappointing. Accessorizing piecemeal will give you better results. I'm aware. Many gaming laptops are the same. It doesn't wear well for a laptop that costs $2,699 to start and is marketed as being the all-in-one machine to save you from buying so many accessories.

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Corsair didn't nail all of the major beats, but there's still a lot to admire. There is a small screen in the middle of the array of S-Keys that can be used to show the current stress levels of the system. It is cute, but it is not crucial. It would be nice to be able to see what the S-Keys are doing when you press them.

There is a sliding privacy cover on the1080p webcams. The video can be tailored with Elgato Camera Hub software, which offers more settings than any integrated laptop webcams I have tried. If you want to see how you look during a game stream or a zoom call, you should get a stand-aloneWebcam. Corsair deserves some credit for including one, even though some of the other companies don't.

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS
• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6800M
• RAM: 32GB DDR5 4800MHz (two user-replaceable slots
• Storage: 2TB M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD (two user-replaceable slots)
• Weight: 5.29 pounds (2.4kg)
• Dimensions: 14.01 x 11.28 x 0.78 inches (356 x 286.7 x 19.9mm)
• Display: 16-inch 16:10 QHD+ (2560 x 1600) IPS panel, 240Hz refresh rate, 3ms response time
• Wi-Fi: Dual-band Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax) 2x2 LAN
• Bluetooth v5.2
• Power adapter: 230W
• Battery capacity: 99Wh

The design of the laptop is similar to that of the MacBook Pro-a-like blade. Corsair's all-black aluminum design looks sophisticated and relatively simple, with a variety of S-Keys up top. It's a good idea to take a moment to appreciate the look. It is easy to put it in fingerprints and difficult to remove them.

The keyboard works well. Some Alienware laptops were the first to use Cherry's ultra-low-profile mechanical key switches. The ones used in the A1600 are not clicky and feel good to type on. The speaker grilles hug the keyboard and the power button has a fingerprint reader.

With or without the audio effect enabled, the speakers of the Voyager A1600 sound similar to most other laptop speakers. They work well in a pinch, but they lack bass delivery and the spatial audio effect isn't noticeable The Strix G17 is the best gaming laptop to use. Plug in some wired headphones or use a gaming headset for this one.

This is gargantuan and there is no need for too much trackpad. It is close in size to the one on the 16-inch Macbook Pro. It has a full range of Windows Precision gestures. It hides two things in its corners, one of which is useful to people other than me.

There is a lot that I like about this laptop, aside from the fact that it has a 16 inch display. It has a 16:10 aspect ratio, making it a bit taller than the majority of gaming laptops. Not every game supports this resolution, and since most modern TV shows and movies are shot in 16:9, you will experience letterboxing at some point.

The display has a fast refresh rate, 3ms response time, and adaptive sync support to make sure games don't show screen tearing. Corsair claims that this factory-calibrated display supports 100 percent of the sRGB color gamut and has a too-good-to- be-true peak brightness of 625 nits. I am not sure how Corsair got that 625-nit figure.

The Voyager A1600 has a variety of ports. On the left, you get a 3.5mm headphone jack, a power plug for its 230W adapter, and two fastusb4 type-c ports. There are three things on the right, one of which is a full-sizeSD card slot. The compatibility issue with connecting to some 4K displays should be fixed soon by the upcoming driver update fromAMD. If you have any of the headsets, mice, or keyboards mentioned on this page, Corsair built one of its Slipstream low-latency wireless dongles inside of the laptop to save you from using ausb port It would have been great if the laptop had HDMI and Ethernet ports.

It is almost a problem that there are so many software features. The first time you use the hub, it opens to point you in the right direction. There is a small rectangular screen near the S-Keys that you can see what kind of information is on the software that gives you the keys. You can pair compatible accessories with the Slipstream receiver.

If you want to change what the S-Keys do, you have to open the Stream Deck software, where you can drag and drop commands onto each key. You can use a button to switch between multiple S-Key profiles, like when you use an actual Stream Deck.

The S-Key buttons can be used to play a sound effect or capture some gaming footage. The beginning of the rabbit hole is still to come. You can download plug-ins that allow the Stream Deck to be used in more than one app. Unlike the Stream Deck, this laptop's S-Keys can't swap icons to make it easier to tell what they do. You will have to fail repeatedly until you memorize your layout.

The Adrenalin software is used to distribute driver updates. When SmartShift Graphics or SmartShift Memory is working, the app needs a lot of work because it doesn't communicate well. It's hard to know if you're squeezing the most oomph out of a computer with this software or missing a secret setting that hides some extra performance.

In terms of gaming performance, the Voyager A1600 offers enough grunt to provide smooth 60-plus frames per second at its 16-inch display's native resolution in demanding open-world games. Resident Evil 3 remake can be run on high settings at over 100 frames per second. Neon White was a great game to play. It ran at over 200 frames per second and looked great on the high refresh rate display.

This laptop was not able to achieve 60 frames per second on high graphical settings without the use of ray tracing. The less system intensive environments ran at sub-20 frames per second with ray tracing switched on. That pales in comparison to my experience with ray tracing in Resident Evil 3, which ran at 55 frames per second. If ray tracing is important to you, you would be better off with a gaming laptop that has dedicated ray-tracing cores, like the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro, instead of a computer that doesn't.

Red Dead Redemption 2 and Horizon Zero Dawn ran between 65 and 80 frames per second, depending on the environment in which they were played. The performance is good, but the consoles are old. It is possible for some titles to get a small frame rate boost if they support FidelityFX Super Resolution. Depending on the scene, the settings in Resident Evil 3 and Horizon each saw an improvement of 20 frames per second. The visual artifacts created by the performance- boosting effect were not as noticeable as they could have been. I noticed ghosting in animations in RE3.

I wouldn't want to host the Voyager A1600 on my lap because it gets warm on its underside. The temperature was measured on the left and right side of my body. There were a lot of times when the fans weren't audible in games. Their fans whir at a higher-pitched noise than those in bigger laptops and their volume was nothing I hadn't heard before.

I ran my usual work apps, including a dozen Edge browser tabs, on the A1600. There is no big deal with the more intensive apps. Sometimes a combination of apps, the S-Keys, and the tiny display near the keyboard lock up for seemingly no reason, only for any command you previously made to happen all at once. This seems to be a bug since opening the Task Manager in Windows showed no problems.

If you need to quickly render videos on Adobe Premiere Pro, you shouldn't use this model. A five-minute, 33 second 4K video took anywhere from four minutes 10 seconds to seven minutes to render. If I were a professional video editor, I wouldn't trust this product because of the inconsistencies. One example is the $1,999 Legion 5 Pro that can run through this test in about two and a half minutes. Similar to ray tracing, this is an area where the competition doesn't match up to their rivals. In our testing, the CUDA technique used by Nvidia is faster than the OpenCL technique used by Advanced Micro Devices. The Puget benchmark shows that the exporting performance was so-so.

Despite its reputation for bringing long- lasting performance to power hungry gaming laptops, the battery life for the Voyager A1600 is not very good. Without the slim yet still a little bulky 230W wallcharger plugged in, it lasted for about four hours. With the optional SmartShift Eco mode switched on, the integrated graphics of the Ryzen 9 were in charge of the power of the display and apps. Monica Chin had an experience with a gaming laptop that lasted over nine hours on a charge. It is not apples to apples because the laptop has a more power-hungry QHD display and the one before it had a high definition display.

It takes over an hour for the laptop to be fully charged. It supports up to 100W charging, but it charges much slower than that. In most cases, the laptop won't be able to charge and play games at the same time, so it's great to have it as an option. It is capable in case you decide to play. I was getting an average of 45 frames per second in Neon White while connected to the PlugableUSB-C docking station. To run Elden Ring at 30 frames per second, I had to knock down the resolution and lower the settings. While charging and gaming, the battery percentage didn't fall.

I was surprised that the features of the A1600 didn't improve my work or play after using it for a week. The Stream Deck, the tiny rectangular screen near the keyboard, and all of the other software flourishes and conveniences don't feel worth the premium that Corsair is charging. It would be more acceptable in a machine with a price tag of $2,000. You can get more for your money with a host of options in our buying guide.

This is the first time the company has made a laptop. When it comes to handling demanding creator-focused tasks, it is still not possible to compete with the performance of a graphics card from the other side of the world. Even at the cost of a few extra millimeters of thickness, its design doesn't need drastic improvements to level up, just more ports, better speakers, and more power.

There are a number of things to agree to or decline upon setup of the Corsair A1600. Depending on the model, agreements are different. Others include Windows 11 Home.

There are mandatory policies for which an agreement is needed.

• A request for your region and keyboard layout
• Connect to Wi-Fi network
• Microsoft Software License Terms
• Sign into a Microsoft account
• Create a PIN

There are a lot of optional things to agree to.

• Set up Windows Hello
• Device privacy settings: Find My Device, Inking and Typing, Advertising ID, Location, Diagnostic data, Tailored experiences
• Microsoft 365 free trial
• Join Xbox Game Pass

There are mandatory and optional agreements.