I hate prebuilt gaming PCs — but the Corsair One i500 changed my mind

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The Corsair One i500 is an expensive gaming PC, but it still manages to feel worth every penny.

Corsair One i500 MSRP $4,700.00 Score Details “The Corsair One i500 is a small PC that screams premium and exceeds expectations.” Pros Cons I review some of the best gaming desktops, but I’ve never seriously considered buying one for myself. I like building my own PCs, and every time I approach a review, there’s an understanding that a prebuilt is created for a certain audience. The Corsair One i500 is challenging my position, however.

Some amount of the price here isn’t going into the raw components but rather the tightly designed case and high-quality parts that Corsair uses. You’re not getting some no-name components here. You’re getting Corsair Vengeance DDR5 memory with speeds capable of 6,000 MT/s, as well as a small form factor 1,000W Corsair power supply with an 80 Plus Gold certification.

Design and build quality The Corsair One i500 is a work of art, and I don’t say that lightly. I haven’t seen such a tightly, purposefully designed PC since the Falcon Northwest Tiki a few years ago. Everything has a place, and Corsair wraps up the flagship hardware inside a beautiful case with plenty of quality-of-life features.

Everything is tightly compacted inside the Corsair One i500, and it’s clearly not built for easy servicing. Under the magnetic dust filters, you’ll find a series of screws that open up the side panels, which reveal even more screws for fans mounted on nearly every edge of the PC. Corsair wastes no space inside the One i500, and that means getting inside is tough.

The most obvious compromise is the CPU. The Core i9-14900K is a beast, and not always in a good way. Corsair settles for a 120mm liquid cooler for the CPU, and that’s not enough to keep this chip cool under a full workload. I’ll dig into that more in the next section, but you can see from my Cinebench R24 below that the One i500 falls slightly short of the Falcon Northwest Talon with a similar configuration in both single and multi-core performance.

Nvidia’s DLSS 3 works wonders, too. In games like Returnal and Cyberpunk 2077, you’re able to crank all the graphics settings with ray tracing and still get frame rates in the triple digits. You might fall short of peak performance in some games and apps with the One i500, but the fact that Corsair is able to get close in such a slim form is incredible.

After 45 minutes, the RTX 4090 peaked at just 55 degrees and averaged about 48 degrees throughout the gameplay session. That’s because the GPU is liquid-cooled along with the CPU. It’s a showcase of what an efficient piece of hardware looks like when combined with liquid cooling. I can’t imagine how the Corsair One i500 would look with a more efficient CPU.

 

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The Recently Released Corsair One i500 Looks Positively Wood-PaneledHere at Forbes, I blog about video games, tech hardware and pop culture. It's a blast! I've also contributed work to Retro Gamer, TechRadar, GamesRadar, Wired, plus several gaming and nostalgia books from publisher Scholastic.
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