Corsair One i500 Review | PCMag

The original pillar-shaped Corsair One desktop caught our eye when it first debuted in 2017, and we’ve reviewed several iterations since. Corsair releases its biggest remix of the One concept, however, with the One i500 (starts at $3,599.99; $4,699.99 as tested), redesigning it into a roughly traditionally shaped—but still quite compact—gaming tower with a natural wood front panel. Even the base model of this PC is meant to be a premium buy for Corsair’s enthusiast shoppers, but we must say that even our pricier review model is a fair value for the parts and top-end build. The liquid-cooled 14th Gen Intel Core i9 CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU outmuscled larger and more expensive systems on our benchmark tests, and it’s even user-upgradable after purchase (barring the GPU). The Corsair One i500 merits an Editors’ Choice award among compact high-end gaming desktops for performance and design, particularly considering its outsize power.

Design: Wood You Be Interested in a New Look?

Most of the premium pre-built gaming PCs we review wow you with their glass side panels and fancy interior lighting, but the Corsair One i500 goes a decidedly different route. In addition to the compact size—which I’ll get into in greater detail—the aesthetic of this system is far more restrained and traditional.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

I have to start with the real-wood front panel, which has an individually distinct grain on every system. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it’s not everyone’s cup of tea; the flashier modern glass style of most cases is popular for a reason, while this perhaps evokes your parents’ wood-paneled basement. You can go for another version with lighter wood and a silver chassis, and an alternative with a metal front instead of wood, but the front panels are not removable or swappable.

Regardless of whether the wooden paneling is your jam, it stands out, it’s well-built, and is not alone in the arboreal revolution—the Fractal Design North case (and its XL version) has caught a lot of eyes and dollars over the past couple of years. I even built my own PC into the white version of that case, so I dig the concept. I can still understand the disappointment of having no view of the inside of such a high-end system, but you have plenty of options if that’s your preference. This tower is going for something different from the contemporary flash.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

You’ll find a hidden trick up the tower’s sleeve, though. That thin black strip that runs up the front of the panel is not just for show—it’s a touch-enabled input that lets you alter built-in chassis lighting. The lighting is pretty subtle on this tower (you’ll notice an RGB strip on each side of the front panel and some underlighting), and it can only be controlled in this way. Unusually, it isn’t controllable via Corsair’s iCUE software, meant to stand as its own original and simple feature for this tower.

How does it work? The bottom half of the strip, beneath the Corsair logo (and power button), is for changing the lighting effect, while the top half is for color. Holding and releasing the bottom segment changes among static, breathing, strobing, color cycle, rainbow, and starry night effects. If it’s set to static mode (since the other effects change colors on their own), sliding your finger through the top half of the strip gradually switches through colors. Additionally, you can turn all the case lighting off by holding the bottom strip for five seconds and sliding your finger across the bottom strip, lowering and raising the brightness.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

It took me only a moment to get used to how it operates, finding the right amount of pressure (and where to hold and press to change effects), but it worked like a charm before long. It’s an uncommon method of lighting control, to be sure, but I find something pleasing about the hands-on aspect and not dealing with software. However, this means you don’t have access to the usual millions of colors available with traditional RGB lighting—the front strip switches through red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and white.

Using the Corsair One i500: Still Compact, But More Upgrade Friendly

With this aesthetic, the i500 is meant to blend in and even look like furniture in a home office or living room, something the overall size of the tower contributes to, as well. It measures 15.3 by 7.6 by 11.8 inches (HWD), much smaller than the many full and even midsize ATX gaming towers we see, and it can fit in a smaller compartment or on the corner of your desk. You’ll find a subset of even smaller towers, like the Falcon Northwest Tiki system, but this is still a decidedly compact tower.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Bumping up from the size of the original Corsair One was a wise decision for upgradability and component options. The original design and subsequent editions were all about the small form factor, a column-shaped tower with a tiny footprint. While impressive, that footprint brought component and upgrade limitations. This new version looks like a full tower in comparison.

And so, the i500 has been expanded to this truncated tower shape, allowing Corsair to fit in standard parts, rather than a proprietary design, and leave room for end-user customization. I’ll get to our exact components in a moment, but the CPU, memory, and storage are all user-upgradable. Both the CPU and GPU are liquid-cooled, which is important for such powerful parts but particularly needed in a smaller case. You will not void the two-year warranty by doing maintenance or upgrades on these parts, and Corsair provides 24/7 tech support service available for its lifetime.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

You’ll find one caveat to this, however. While the tower can fit full-size parts and you are welcome to tinker, the limited space and liquid-cooling setup means that Corsair still cautions against changing or moving the graphics card, specifically. The likelihood of being unable to do it yourself, or of damaging something in the process, is high enough that you are encouraged to get in touch with Corsair and send the system in—the company techs will handle the upgrade. (This will likely incur additional costs.)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

This is a downside, though it may sound worse on paper than it is. It’s an expensive desktop with top-end GPU options, which you’ll unlikely need to upgrade anytime soon. If you want an eventual upgrade or your card needs to be swapped, sending the system in is irritating but ultimately acceptable once every few years. Still, it is a compromise on a fully end-user-upgradable desktop, and it’s a price to pay for the reduced size.

Accessing the interior for the parts you can change is pretty easy, though not as simple as the average system. It starts by pulling off a magnetic dust filter, then unscrewing a few screws holding the side panel in place. After doing this, you’re greeted by a rather uninspiring wall of fans. To get past these, you need to remove a couple more screws on the far end so that the fan housing can swing free of the chassis from the hinged side. This, finally, gives a view of the motherboard.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

For expansion, the i500 has two free memory slots and one additional M.2 storage slot. You’ll also find a 2.5-inch drive bay available on the cable-management side of the case. The tower includes two USB Type-A ports, a USB Type-C port, and an audio jack on the bottom of the front panel for external connectivity. You won’t find any connections on the top panel, just ventilation, so the rest are located around the back via the motherboard’s rear-facing ports. This includes four 5Gbps USB-A ports, three 10Gbps USB-A connections, one USB-C port, an HDMI-out, and a DisplayPort connection. The board’s video-out ports support up to six independent displays, even if you’re more likely to use the GPU’s video outputs.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

One last inclusion is a detachable headset hanger, which you can move around to hang off either side of the tower. It will also match the color of the system you order—simple but effective. (Corsair sent us a 3D-printed version with the review unit, but the retail model will be molded plastic.)

Configurations: Cost, Components, and Models

Corsair sells two hardware configurations of this desktop in each chassis color palette. As referenced at the top, this is a premium system, at minimum, meant for Corsair’s enthusiast fans—you will find no budget or entry-level model here, and you can’t get this case on its own.

Our $4,699.99 unit (CS-9020036) is the more highly configured model, showcasing what this system can do. That includes an Intel Core i9-14900K processor (eight Performance cores, 16 Efficient cores, 32 threads), 64GB of memory, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, a 2TB SSD, and a 1000-watt 80 Plus Gold Corsair power supply. The Intel B760 motherboard supports 2.5Gbps Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The price is steep, to be sure, but it seems less so when you consider the components and engineering. Liquid-cooling solutions on both the processor and graphics cards are not cheap, but they should push the performance to a high level. The lighter color version (CS-9020037) of the same configuration is the same price.

The somewhat more palatable version is $3,599.99 in both colors (CS-9020038 for dark and CS-9020039 for light). It’s still a juiced-up system, only dropping down a tier in a few specs: It runs the same CPU and storage capacity but features an RTX 4080 Super GPU and 32GB of RAM.

Testing the Corsair One i500: A Liquid-Cooled Leader

To judge the performance of this powerhouse, we put it through our usual benchmark suite and stacked up the results against those of the following formidable desktops…

The most recent iteration of this product line we reviewed, the Corsair One i300 ($4,999 as tested), is an obvious inclusion. The Falcon Northwest Tiki ($5,416 as tested) is one of the few smaller systems that can perform at this level, making it a fine alternative for those seeking a super space saver. Stepping up in size, the Origin Genesis ($6,754 as tested) is a full-fat beast running the same CPU and GPU as the i500 (and happens to be built into a Corsair case, too), while the Velocity Micro Raptor Z95 ($4,499 as tested) is another highly efficient tower.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. 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 includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.

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 Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs 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).

Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, 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 various general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

Despite its physical stature compared with some of its rivals here, the i500 was a leader or near-leader on most of these tests. The liquid cooling presumably did its job well, as the i500 posted the highest score in a couple of tests and was otherwise near the top of the pack. This desktop (and all of those here) is primarily concerned with gaming, but in this price range and equipped with a Core i9 CPU, it’s equally ready for professional or hobbyist content creation and editing.

Of course, you’d expect top-end performance from this component mix, but an interesting note: The Genesis has the same core parts, and the i500 either met or beat its results in a smaller case. That’s what you want to see from this system—to know you’re not compromising on performance, or paying for parts that can’t reach their full potential because of the design. Mission accomplished, and all while running pretty quietly, too.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

For gaming desktops, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks. The former includes two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, the more modest Night Raid (suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and the more demanding Time Spy (suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). We then run two OpenGL exercises, rendered offscreen by the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which allows for different native display resolutions; more frames per second (fps) means higher performance.

Then we test with some games. Our real-world gaming benchmarks are those built into F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, tested at higher resolutions and quality settings than on gaming laptops. These three represent simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games, respectively. We run Valhalla and Siege twice each at Ultra quality (at both 1080p and 4K), while F1 2021 is run at 4K only, with and without AMD and Nvidia’s performance-boosting FSR and DLSS features turned on.

The outcomes here were similar to the content creation test and, if anything, were even better for the i500. This desktop was an outright graphics performance leader here, a testament to the job Corsair did in engineering and assembling it. The components and cooling setup worked in smooth conjunction, pushing some of the highest scores and frame rates we’ve seen on these benchmarks. Enthusiasts and professional users who need top-end graphics muscle for editing, rendering, and more can enjoy this space-saving solution without compromise.

Focusing on the actual game tests, the i500 proved to be as capable as the Genesis for high-refresh and 4K gaming. A 116fps frame rate on Valhalla in 4K is difficult to achieve, which you can see by most of the other systems here failing to reach or surpass 100fps. That’s also a massive improvement over the One i300, which was even more expensive as configured.

Verdict: Setting Sail With Style and Substance

To first say the obvious, yes, a desktop this expensive should give you blistering performance across the board. With that out of the way, this system punches above its weight (or, really, size), and it looks dapper while doing it. It’s not the smallest such PC we’ve seen, and it’s bigger than the original pillar-shaped Corsair One style, but the increased volume is used to massive effect. It’s a chart-topping PC that can now take and swap regular PC components with ease; you’ll just want to send it to Corsair for GPU upgrades.

You won’t need to improve the components in this desktop for some time, though. Your many dollars go far with the i500, and it will look handsome in your office setup. You can find more economical options with close performance levels, but as you saw from the price of the other test systems, you really can’t touch this much power for much less—the excellent Genesis is way more expensive. The Corsair One i500 is more than just a new piece of furniture; it’s one of the more reasonable deals for the parts and build, which flies in the face of what you’d expect from a premium prebuilt power PC. All that taken together, we grant the Corsair One i500 a hearty Editors’ Choice award among compact high-end gaming desktops.