Corsair ONE i164 Compact Gaming PC Review

When Corsair reached out to us to see if we’d like to take the ONE i164 for a spin, we didn’t expect to love it as much as we came to. It has some obvious caveats that come with a fixed form-factor design, but for a lot of people, that’s not going to matter. What will matter is having a tuned PC that runs at peak frequency and doesn’t make a racket while doing it. The fact it looks good helps, too.

As mentioned earlier, we assumed wrong that the ONE would allow the CPU and GPU to run hotter as a trade-off for noise level, and looking back, we were foolish to believe that. The fact is, the ONE PC has a great design, one that’s efficient enough to require just a single exhaust fan. Situations would be quite different if the CPU and GPU weren’t both liquid cooled.

After we began testing the ONE, and found that the performance was identical to our own DIY test PC, we became all the more impressed by it. As the shot below shows, the ONE is seriously small in comparison to a modest ATX PC. It’s also light, making it seriously easy to transport. You might even call it “cute”, but that’s almost unfair given what beastly hardware is found inside its frame.

Ultimately, the Corsair ONE ran both the CPU and GPU cooler than our DIY rig. The GPU running hotter in our own machine is to be expected, given we’re air-cooling it, but it was interesting that the CPU even managed to get 2°C hotter in our own rig – even with a good Corsair AIO on top of it. This just makes the ONE look all the more impressive.

Our focus on performance on the previous page revolved mostly around creator use, and it’s only due to time that gaming results weren’t also tabulated. Because we validated that the performance delivered by the i164 matches our own previously tested gear, we’d again encourage checking out our most recent GPU review to see what the RTX 2080 Ti manages to pull off in eight games at three resolutions.

In lieu of doing more mindless benchmarking, we instead decided to actually use the ONE for a fair bit of gaming – about twenty hours in total. Five of those hours were spent in Destiny 2 in one single session, and based on that, we can say that the PC will hold up very well for such long sessions. For fun, we used Wi-Fi during that same session, and not once did we encounter an issue with either the game, or Discord conversation (using a headset connected to its Bluetooth).

The great part about that particular game session is that we put the mic right beside the ONE as it was running, to see if our chat buddy could pick up on any noise. That didn’t happen, thanks in large part to the fact that the ONE has its exhaust fan on top of the PC, likely well above your desktop mic input.

Regarding networks, the lack of 10Gb Ethernet is slightly disappointing, but not entirely surprising. There are no spare PCIe ports to add a dedicated card, and ITX boards with 10GbE are rare. Not everyone will need that kind of network though, and there is still the option of using one of the USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports with a 10GbE Ethernet adapter.

The fact that this rig is silent shouldn’t come as a surprise. It was an outright focus of Corsair’s. The company wants you to put the ONE on your desk, not under it. It should be out in the open, looking good, and have its USB ports and the like be readily available. As someone who records the odd voice-over, I can honestly say my own personal rig is much noisier than I’d like, so the thought of recording and editing with a much more modest (but still super fast) PC like this one is hugely alluring.

Of course, you’re going to have to want to separate with $3,500 USD for this particular ONE, which is going to be a hard budget to hit for a lot of people. A less expensive option exists with the 9700K and RTX 2080 for those who want the same design but may not want to go all-out (and Corsair also has the Vengeance series for even more attractive pricing). With this i164, the RTX 2080 Ti represents a third of its cost on its own, and that’s if we’re talking about air-cooled cards, not liquid-cooled ones. With the CPU (~$500), GPU (~$1,200), memory, storage, and motherboard together, and the costs add up fast, so the price premium on this one doesn’t seem as bad as we first thought when we jumped in.

There is no bloatware that we could detect, things such as trial software and the ever-present anti-virus suites that get in the way. This results in a clean system without stuff running in the background degrading performance, but it also means there’s no price offset as well. This is typically done with a lot of low-end (and some high-end) prebuilt systems to offset the cost.

Naturally, if you are a DIYer and are not concerned with noise or an all-in-one design, building your own machine is going to be less expensive, but it still won’t likely match the ONE in certain ways, such as with noise, possibly temperatures (unless you go liquid for the GPU), and most critically, hit the same form-factor. We’ve reviewed a handful of small ITX systems in the past, and none of them aimed to deliver top-end desktop performance like this ONE does.

If you’re interested in a prebuilt ITX system, and don’t mind the obvious caveats that come with it, Corsair’s ONE is an excellent choice. It takes up very little space, and delivers high-end performance with the most modest of noise-levels. It’s almost disconcerting to get so much power out of an unassuming PC.

Pros

• Top-end PC performance in a small form-factor.
• Its single exhaust fan keeps quiet, is modest even while gaming.
• Reasonable CPU temperatures, great GPU temperatures.
• Front HDMI port simplifies VR setups.
• Support for three displays out-of-the-box.
• Wi-Fi is fast (60MB/s+), stable.
• Just a splash of RGB.
• No software bloat. Just Corsair’s two utilities (Diagnostics, iCUE).
• Easy to open up for cleaning, but does require the removal of some screws.

Cons

• Limited upgradeability.
• No reset button (does it matter?).
• Wi-Fi antennas will be pointed in different directions if USB devices are plugged in above them.
• No air filters.
• Carries a price premium, at $3,499 USD.

Corsair ONE i164 Compact PC