Corsair Voyager a1600 Review | PCMag

The Corsair Voyager a1600 (starts at $2,532; $3,217 as tested) is the American company’s first high-end gaming laptop. Its faultless aluminum build and Cherry MX mechanical keyboard make a strong first impression, and a streaming-focused touch macro bar is something we’ve seen from no other gaming laptop. Unfortunately, middling performance holds this pioneer back; its all-AMD hardware doesn’t stand up to the Intel and Nvidia silicon in the Acer Predator Triton 500 SE, and for less money, the Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7. But if streaming and Team Red set your sails, the Voyager a1600 may yet be your ship-of-the-line.

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

Corsair’s classy, modern design language from its desktop components and peripherals spills over into the Voyager a1600. This laptop is a visual standout and looks every bit its premium price.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Origin PC also sells versions of this same laptop, branded under its own name. (Origin is a subsidiary of Corsair, acquired in 2019.) Our test-loan unit has a flashy UV lid print that's available when ordering through Origin.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The aluminum chassis has excellent craftsmanship and strength. At 0.78 by 14 by 11.3 inches (HWD) and 5.3 pounds, it matches the elite Predator Triton 500 SE save for an inch greater depth for its macro bar (to be discussed shortly).

A cinematic 16-inch, 16:10 aspect ratio screen differentiates the Voyager a1600 from laptops using narrower 15.6-inch, 16:9 screens, such as the Alienware x15 and the Razer Blade 15 Advanced. A 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution allows fine detail without being overly demanding for gaming.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

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

A Streamer's Secret Weapon: The Macro Bar

The Voyager a1600’s defining feature is its macro bar. It has 10 touch buttons and a small center display above the keyboard.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The bar is a shortcut strip aimed squarely at streamers. Corsair integrated the buttons with the Elgato Stream Deck app. (See our review of the standalone Elgato Stream Deck, which is a handy programmable add-on button panel; Elgato is another Corsair property.) But you can use the app to drag and drop shortcuts for almost anything, even your own creations.

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The button color is customizable in the Corsair iCUE app, which also controls the touch bar’s display. It can show time, component temperatures, CPU usage, and more. Touch arrows on either side let you switch to other modes.

I found the macro bar genuinely useful. As its shortcuts can be used for anything, I even set up an office profile to launch my usual apps and commands. My nitpick is that the bar has no physical separators between buttons and no audible or haptic feedback. Though the buttons never failed to register my touch, I still missed physical reassurance of a tap.

Above the display, a sharp 1080p webcam with a privacy shutter and a quad microphone array enhance this laptop’s streaming focus. There’s also a dedicated camera app with all kinds of fine-tuning control, including white balance, and the Elgato Stream Deck app has microphone shortcuts. Though the cam doesn’t support infrared for facial recognition, the Voyager a1600 has a fingerprint reader built into its power button for getting around typed-password logins. Corsair gets a nod for including a dedicated power button instead of making it a keyboard key, which, when we see that kind of design, always seems like cost cutting.

Dolby Atmos-tuned speakers, meanwhile, straddle the keyboard with airy sound but minimal bass. The Dolby Access app has several equalizer settings and a dynamic mode (the default) if you don’t care to tinker.

The Keyboard: A Cherry MX On Top

Corsair’s expertise designing keyboards also found its way into the Voyager a1600. The Cherry MX mechanical keys are a tactile delight, emitting subdued versions of the clicks and clacks you’d get from a desktop mechanical keyboard.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The iCUE app offers per-key RGB lighting control and lets you reassign keys. There are even settings to disable potentially game-disrupting shortcuts such as Alt+Tab, Alt+F4, and, of course, the menu-popping Windows key. You can create layered lighting effects and save unlimited profiles.

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The touchpad also stands out. It’s a whopping 6.1 by 3.9 inches, larger than any I remember seeing on a gaming laptop. It has a sturdy glass surface and precise clicking action.

The two Thunderbolt 4 ports are an unexpected bonus on an AMD laptop. Also spread across the left and right edges are a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, an audio jack, and an SD card reader. The 230-watt power adapter connects on the left.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The ports are properly situated towards the rear so plugged-in peripherals' cables don’t potentially intrude on your space for mousing around the sides of this machine. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth are also built in, as is, uniquely, a Corsair Slipstream(Opens in a new window) module. The Slipstream functionality lets you connect supported Corsair peripherals without a dongle, sparing USB ports.

Bon Voyage: Testing the Corsair Voyager a1600

The Voyager a1600 seen and tested here is a customized version from Corsair’s Miami-based subsidiary Origin(Opens in a new window), a builder of high-performance PCs. A rare all-AMD gaming get-up, it has an eight-core, 3.2GHz (4.7GHz boost) AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS processor, 32GB of DDR5-4800 dual-channel RAM, and a 12GB Radeon RX 6800M graphics card. It fits up to two storage drives; ours has a single 2TB PCI Express 4.0 solid-state drive, specifically a Corsair MP600 Pro XT, loaded with Windows 11 Home. The laptop is backed by a one-year warranty.

All-AMD hardware is refreshing in a market dominated by Intel and Nvidia. In fact, I found no other laptop offering a Ryzen 6000 series CPU and a Radeon RX 6800M graphics at review time. The Alienware m15 R7 is close; it’s $2,699 with a Ryzen 9 6900HX and an 8GB GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. On the Intel side, the Razer Blade 15 Advanced commands $3,299 with a Core i9-12900H, a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, and an OLED screen, but you get just 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD for that money.

The Ryzen 9 6900HS CPU in the Voyager deserves a callout. It’s rated for 35 watts, not 45 watts like the Ryzen 9 6900HX, so it likely won’t perform as well. However, gaming performance shouldn’t be affected much since games rarely max CPU usage for extended periods.

The Voyager a1600 handles its heat well as shown in this image from our Flir One Pro during a 3DMark Time Spy stress test. The peak temperature of 110 degrees F isn’t in an area you’d put your hands, and even that temperature is in the acceptable range.

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Rear exhaust vents ensure heat is kept away from the user. The fans are audible across a living room but no louder than those of other gaming laptops I’ve tested. Just take care not to block the fan intakes on the underside.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Upgrading the Voyager a1600’s RAM and storage is possible by removing the bottom panel, secured by Philips-head screws. (Take care to note where the screws came from, as they’re not all the same size.) Inside you will find two M.2 Type-2280 slots and two SO-DIMM RAM slots. The latter accept up to 64GB of RAM (two 32GB modules). Customizing through Origin allows up to 8TB total storage (in the form of two 4TB M.2 drives).

Now onto testing, where the Voyager a1600 faces the Acer Predator Triton 500 SE, the Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7, the MSI Vector GP66, and the Razer Blade 15 Advanced Model, 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.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. The Voyager a1600 made mincemeat of the main test, where we consider 4,000 points a sign of solid productivity, and its storage score suggests its 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD is a fine performer.

Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop(Opens in a new window), which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

CPU performance is the Voyager a1600’s weakness. The Ryzen 9 6900HS is a 35-watt chip as I noted, and though Intel’s power ratings aren’t the same, the Core H-class chips carry a 45-watt base power and can clearly stretch their legs more. The Voyager a1600 would have ideally used a 45-watt Ryzen HX-class chip, but that would have meant more heat.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

For Windows PCs, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming tests. The former includes two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Also looped into that group is the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL performance.

Moving on, our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege representing simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games, respectively. On laptops, Valhalla and Siege are run twice (Valhalla at Medium and Ultra quality, Siege at Low and Ultra quality), while F1 2021 is run once at Ultra 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 competitive across the board. The Razer underperformed for its hardware (likely power and/or thermal-induced throttling) but the others, especially the Lenovo and MSI, are more in line with expectations for this elite tier. The only semi-bright side is that the Radeon RX 6800M has a larger 12GB frame buffer than the 8GB RTX 3070 Ti.

We run the real-world gaming benchmarks at 1,920 by 1,080 pixels for comparisons’ sake, but you’ll want to play at the Voyager a1600’s native 2,560 by 1,600 pixels for the sharpest picture, where I saw 44fps in both F1 2021 (Ultra, AMD FSR enabled) and Assassin’s Creed (Ultra) and 93fps in Rainbow Six (Ultra). The sub-60fps in the former two suggests the settings are too demanding; the games weren’t unplayable, but you’d want to reduce the quality settings a bit to clear 60fps on average.

Battery and Display Tests

PCMag tests laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with screen brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting are turned off during the test.

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) at the screen's 50% and peak settings.

Almost five and a half hours of unplugged life is acceptable for a modern high-end gaming laptop. The MSI didn’t achieve half that, though the Lenovo showed much better stamina. On the display side, the Voyager a1600 showed solid color reproduction and satisfactory peak brightness. Its 50% brightness is downright dim, though, and that’s the setting we use to test battery life, so expect a noticeable drop in runtime if you increase brightness much past that mark.

Heavy on Features, Light on Power

Corsair’s Voyager a1600 makes inroads into perhaps the toughest laptop segment: high-end gaming. Impeccable quality, excellent input devices, lots of connectivity, that dedicated macro bar with Elgato synergy, and a great screen are just some of its highlights. In fact, this first from Corsair excels everywhere but raw performance.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Its all-AMD hardware is commendable but just isn’t competitive 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 remains a favorite and the Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 performs better for lots less. Overall, though, there’s no denying that the Voyager a1600 is capable, and this is an impressive debut by Corsair; it needs a performance booster to widen its appeal.