Companies are bringing out their big guns at CES, including Corsair, though its upgraded One desktops are only big in hardware specs—these are comparatively compact desktops that now ship with Intel's 9th generation Core processors and the latest RTX graphics from Nvidia. Even before the new hardware, the Corsair One was our compact choice among the best gaming PCs.
At the very top of the totem pole, the new Corsair One Pro i180 packs a Core i9-9920X processor with 12 cores and 24 threads of computing muscle. It's paired with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card, 32GB of DDR4-2666 memory, and a capacious 960GB NVMe solid state drive. There's also a 2TB hard drive inside.
This particular configuration is not aimed at gamers, though obviously it would play games just fine. Instead, Corsair is billing its top end model as a compact workstation PC, noting that it "puts the power and performance of a full-fledged workstation into a small form factor that occupies less than a third of the space of its larger, more traditional counterparts."
Fair enough, though it doesn't come cheap—it's priced a penny below $5,000. A lot of that cost obviously goes to the high-end hardware, though you're also paying a premium for the design. It's a 12-liter case, compared to a traditional 35-liter (or bigger) workstation tower.
"Smaller than a backpack, the Corsair One Pro i180 is at home right on top of your desk— not under it. Integrated RGB light pipes incorporated into the chassis round out the system’s distinct style, and also work in tandem with Corsair iCue software for fully customizable real-time system monitoring," Corsair says.
More than just a hardware upgrade, Corsair says it completely redesigned the interior layout with a patented convection-assisted liquid cooling system for both the CPU and GPU. Hot air is ultimately expelled out the top of the case. We can't say how well the cooling works with the new layout and hardware, though when we reviewed the previous Corsair One last year, cooling was not an issue.
Corsair also rolled out two other models that do take aim at gaming, the Corsair One i160 and i140. The Corsair One i160 is slightly tamer than the workstation config, with a Core i9-9900K processor, GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card, 32GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, and a 480GB NVMe SSD paired with a 2TB HDD. It's priced at $3,599.99.
The least expensive of the three is the Corsair One i140. It's still pricey though, at $2,999.99. For that you get a Core i7-9700K processor and GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card, along with same RAM and storage allotment as the i160.
The i140 configuration is available now in North America. Corsair's other two models will be available soon.
