INTRODUCTION

   As some of you may be aware for well over a decade now many into overclocking have used compact external screens to monitor the frequencies, temperatures and voltages of both their CPUs and graphics cards. Of course, they are not alone in going to such lengths since online MMO players have also used such devices to monitor the health and status of their online characters (who here remembers the popular G15 and G19 keyboards by Logitech roughly a decade ago?). Today devices like the Stream Deck by Elgato allow people (streamers primarily) to even use several tiny LCD buttons as program shortcuts. Both solutions have but a single goal, to provide a faster and more convenient way for the end user to perform specific tasks. The just released iCUE Nexus Companion Touch Screen by CORSAIR, which I’ve been using for the past week, is a tiny device which actually does all of the above.

   Founded in 1994, CORSAIR has grown from pioneering the high-performance DRAM market into one of the world’s leading providers of high-performance gaming and streaming products. CORSAIR offers a complete range of products to equip gamers, enthusiasts, and esports athletes, including mechanical keyboards, precision gaming mice, wireless headsets, premium PC components, and the CORSAIR ONE fully-integrated gaming PC. With a company-wide commitment to quality, innovative design, advanced features and high-performance, CORSAIR products have won thousands of media and industry awards, earning their place in gamers’ hands and PCs following years of development and engineering by a team dedicated to building great products that they themselves would want to use. In 2018 CORSAIR acquired Elgato Gaming, a manufacturer of streaming products. In 2019 CORSAIR acquired Origin Computers, a manufacturer of custom high-performance gaming PCs and laptops, and SCUF Gaming, an innovator and creator of high-performance gaming controllers.

   The iCUE Nexus is basically an 5" inch 50:3 ratio LCD screen which is also touch capacitive (single point) and sports a resolution of 640x480p with a frame rate of 24fps and 262k colors. The screen is placed inside a piece of hard plastic which you can either mount on your CORSAIR keyboards via 3 bundled brackets (like the K70 RGB MK.2 and the K95 RGB Platinum – thus the companion part of the name) or on a plastic standalone base. You can place up to 6 virtual buttons and 256 different swipe-to-navigate screens on the iCUE Nexus from which you can launch games and applications, monitor the health of your system components, adjust settings of your CORSAIR iCUE compatible devices, create macros and finally you can also download graphics screens with specific in-game commands for various game titles. So, the iCUE Nexus is actually very similar to the Stream Deck series, only significantly smaller and the only thing left is to see if it's just as good.