In 2001, when I first entered the computer builder world, enthusiast computing was really coming into its own. Sure, people had been building and overclocking for years, but with the Socket A platform, and thousands of new enthusiasts building rigs based on it, a new group of hardware manufacturers realized that there was a real, growing market for high performance products. We began seeing new names popping up monthly that we hadn't heard of, and performance hardware from older companies that usually weren't previously considered for enthusiasts' rigs.

But at that time, when you chose your overclocking system memory, there were basically three choices.Corsair, Mushkin, or someone else. Corsair memory had proven itself to overclockers to remain stable at high voltages and temperatures, and was significantly less expensive than Mushkin. By the end of the Socket A period, I'd guess that as many enthusiasts' rigs contained Corsair DDR RAM as all other brands combined.

Today, there are many brands of high performance system memory to choose from, with new names still occasionally surfacing, and most of them put out a good product. But Corsair is still around, still building fine extreme-performance memory, and still the #1 choice of many enthusiasts.

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