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

theverge.com:

Corsair makes a lot of things that PC gamers need: RAM, storage, mice and keyboards, headsets, and more. The company also owns Elgato, the brand behind the Stream Deck command center. And now, perhaps inevitably, it makes a laptop: the Voyager A1600. Corsair whipped up the design in-house, and it’s packed with Corsair parts and features: Corsair RAM and solid-state drives, iCue support to sync your RGB LED effects across Corsair accessories, and a built-in low-latency Slipstream receiver inside that pairs with Corsair gaming mice, keyboards, and headsets. Oh, and it has a built-in Stream Deck. Kind of.

While I’m impressed that Corsair managed 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, as reviewed (it starts at $2,699.99, with a slightly slower CPU, 16GB of RAM instead of 32GB, and a 1TB SSD instead of 2TB). It will be powerful enough for most people, but compared to similarly priced gaming laptops with Nvidia GPUs, as well as some cheaper ones, this model’s Ryzen 9 6900HS CPU and Radeon RX 6800M GPU, as tested, aren’t well-suited for the most demanding games, especially when you pile on intense ray tracing effects or when performing creator-focused tasks like exporting video projects in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Not to mention, the Stream Deck touch bar — perhaps its standout feature — is sometimes buggy, and while the Stream Deck software is as good as ever, the 10 touch-sensitive buttons offer no feedback, and their icons don’t change to reflect what you’ve customized them to execute. It’s a bummer, especially since the six-button Stream Deck Mini starts at just $80. That disappointment extends to its webcam and speaker quality,