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Though the Corsair One has been around for several years now and impressed us in the past, I have never actually tested one myself, so I was eager to get going once the sample arrived.
Right from the off, it is hard not to be impressed with the technical prowess of this machine. It's using some of the fastest components on the market, in a 10-litre chassis, with two liquid coolers and just a single 140mm fan. It sounds bonkers but the fact is there – it works, and it works very well. Noise levels are a particular highlight, and if you stick to gaming – which the Corsair One is designed for – temperatures are similarly impressive, particularly from the graphics card. If nothing else, it is a mighty feat of engineering on Corsair's part.
We did have a slight mishap with our review sample, as it was shipped with a pre-release BIOS that capped the CPU power limit at 180W, when Corsair intended the limit to be 165W. Updating to the latest BIOS fixed this, and we are told that all retail units will have the latest BIOS anyway, but it did give us some extra test results to look at as part of this review.
On that note, we also compared the Corsair One to a fully-fledged mid-tower desktop, with the same CPU and an RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition graphics card. We found that the 165W CPU power limit does result in slightly reduced performance in certain situations, specifically all-core workloads such as Cinebench and Blender. The Corsair One was only able to operate at 4.4-4.5GHz in such scenarios, when we'd expect a ‘normal' i9-12900K to hold at 4.9GHz in a traditional desktop.
For gaming however, the Corsair One is highly capable. We observed near identical gaming performance between the Corsair One and our own test system over ten games, with just a 3% average difference as a result of slightly fluctuating GPU clock speeds. For a machine this small to offer basically as much gaming performance as something with over three time the volume is mighty impressive if you ask me.
The one real question mark I have over the Corsair One, in terms of its hardware, is the ability to upgrade the components, something which sets PCs apart from console. Yes, the Corsair One can technically be upgraded, but I don't know how practical that would prove, especially if you want to swap-in a next-generation graphics card, which would be the first thing a user is likely to want to switch. The bespoke cooling setup used for the RTX 3080 Ti is highly unlikely to work on a next-gen card, and installing an air-cooled GPU that will likely draw a lot of power, into a chassis this small, does not seem like a good idea – though I would hope to be proved wrong on that point.
Pricing is also an interesting area to discuss. At the start of this review process, the Corsair One i300 model I have here was listed on Corsair's website for a penny under £4800. Even factoring in the unique nature of the Corsair One and the R&D costs associated, that is an extremely high price to pay for such hardware, and we were able to price together a DIY system for less than £3000 with a near identical spec. We also noticed some pricing discrepancies on Corsair website, with our SKU priced at £1000 higher than an otherwise identical model, but with an RTX 3080 (non-Ti) – so Corsair was effectively charging a grand for a 3080 Ti over a 3080.
We reached out to Corsair with our concerns and after a fair amount of discussion, we noticed the pricing dropped on June 22nd, with the model we have here is currently listed at £3999. This is listed as a ‘special price', will the deal lasting until July 3rd, at which point the pricing will revert to the £4799 figure.
In any case, we are more than happy to recommend the Corsair One i300 as a platform – it is incredibly well designed and is highly performant, despite its diminutive form-factor. We would, however, caveat that recommendation by advising our readers to look closely at the spec and pricing of the different models available. If it were my money, for instance, opting for the RTX 3080 model, with 32GB DDR5 instead of 64GB, at a savings of £500 would make a lot more sense to me.
You can see the different Corsair One options on Corsair's website HERE.
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Pros
- Sleek and compact design.
- High quality materials used.
- Unique cooling setup performs well.
- Gaming performance basically matches that of a full-size desktop machine.
- Excellent array of ports and connectors.
Cons
- Pricing looked out of whack until we spoke with Corsair.
- Upgrading the GPU is possible but would likely be a non-starter for the next-generation of graphics cards.
KitGuru says: On a technical level, it's hard not to be impressed with the Corsair One. Just keep a close eye on pricing if you do want to buy one, so you're not paying over the odds for certain components.
