Everyone, Maingear has created a beast in its new SHIFT series. These systems are massive towers of gaming and computing powering. You won’t find any design nonsense here. Every aspect of these boys were designed with performance in mind and it shows.

The Shift line has two slightly different systems available. the Intel P55 line comes with a Core i7 800 series, up to 8GB of RAM, a Intel Kingsberg P55 Extreme Series motherboard, and your choice of graphics card. Customizing starts at $2,199 for this line.

Got a little more disposable income, eh? The Intel X58 line starts at $2,599 but it comes packing a Core i7 900 series, an X58 SLI motherboard and up to 12 GB of RAM. Both options of course come with the standard optical drive options, Razer speakers, liquid cooling, and Windows 7.

Yeah, these computers are serious. We just can’t wait to see how serious they are once the benchmarks start rolling in.

For high performance drives, SSD seems to be where it’s at these days. Corsair is at the forefront of the market, and just announced three new drives that definitely bring speed to the party. Now if they could only increase the capacity without being Extreme!ly expensive.

So three new drives, in 32 GB, 64 GB and 128 GB. But the real news in the speed. The real news though is the speed. They all have a 230 mb/sec read and 170 mb/sec write rate. That’s the kind of speed that used to be limited to arrays — these should be perfect for HD video editing tasks. Of course, no word on pricing yet, but you can pretty much bet it won’t be cheap.

From the press release:

Fremont, CA. July 16th, 2009.- Corsair®, a worldwide leader in high-performance computer memory, power supplies and flash memory products, including solid-state drives, today announced the Extreme Series X32, X64 and X128 high-performance SSDs, in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB densities respectively.

Built using the renowned Indilinx Barefoot controller and Samsung MLC NAND flash memory, the Extreme Series has been designed to offer the highest performance currently available on the market, with read speeds of up to 240MB/s and write speeds of up to 170MB/s.

“The combination of the Indilinx Barefoot controller, Samsung flash memory, and 64MB of on-board cache delivers blistering, stutter-free performance, eliminating the bottleneck imposed by traditional mechanical hard disks,” said Jim Carlton, VP of Marketing at Corsair. “The new Extreme Series SSDs are ideal for use as primary drives in desktop and notebooks systems, and also for RAID 0 configurations in high-performance desktops for enthusiasts who want extreme performance.”

All Extreme Series SSDs feature end-user upgradable firmware to allow for new features to be added, such as the upcoming TRIM command for Windows 7 and other operating systems, which maintains optimal performance over time. Firmware upgrades and support for the Extreme Series SSDs will be available via Corsair’s website, and drives can be updated without the need to wipe data from the SSD, ensuring seamless upgrades.

The Corsair Extreme Series X32, X64 and X128 solid-state drives are available immediately from Corsair’s authorized distributors and resellers worldwide, and are backed by a Two-Year Limited Warranty. Complete customer support via telephone, email, forum and Tech Support Express is also available.

For more information on Corsair solid-state drives, please visit the Corsair SSD product page

By Andrew Liszewski

This morning Corsair launched a new ‘extreme’ series of solid-state drives that use the Indilinx Barefoot controller, Samsung MLC NAND flash memory and 64MB of on-board cache to achieve read speeds of up to 240MB/sec and and write speeds of up to 170MB/sec. The drives will come in 3 capacities including 32GB, 64GB and 128GB and should be available worldwide immediately. While they’re obviously not the biggest SSDs on the market, if speed is your priority I’m sure these will work quite nicely.

[ Corsair SSDs ]