Hey how's it going? Dave2D here.
So, a few months ago at CES I was at a Corsair presentation
and they were going to reveal a product
and, based on the emails that were kind of going back and forth between Corsair and I,
I thought that they were going to reveal some super secret laptop.
It wasn't.
It was this thing, which is way better than a super secret laptop.
This is my dream computer.
This is called Corsair One.
It's a pre-built 12 liter computer that holds a full-size GPU.
Now for comparison of size, this is a 2013 Mac Pro, it's around five and a half or six liters.
The average ITX case is around 18 to 20 liters.
My micro ATX case is around 40 liters, it's pretty big.
The Corsair One is 12 liters, it's small.
On the exterior, it's a smooth black finish, really good build quality,
none of the edges are nasty sharp or anything.
Aesthetically I like it.
It's not for everyone, but I think they did a good job on the design.
There's some lighting up front but Corsair One against the grain and,
instead of falling the whole RGB trend we're seeing everywhere, it only lights up in blue.
You can control the brightness and timing settings in software.
The sides have these triangular perforations.
They're for airflow and you'll see in a minute why there's so many of them.
The I/O is pretty good, I mean it's a desktop PC,
running full-size graphics card.
On the back we have audio jacks, AC Wi-Fi, Ethernet, the very important PS2 port and 6 USB ports,
one of them being Type C, but it's not Thunderbolt 3.
Up front we have HDMI 2.0 and a USB 3.1 which is perfect for VR setups.
A lot of companies have made small gaming PCs, but to see what makes this one special
you have to go inside.
Opening it up is pretty easy, you press a switch and the top grille pops off.
Underneath this grille is the main fan.
It's a corsair Maglev fan these things are awesome,
lots of airflow and really quiet.
You remove some screws and then you're inside.
So this system is water cooled by two separate loops.
On the CPU side there's one loop that uses a thin 240 millimeter rad.
This is cooling a Kaby Lake 7700K and you'll notice there's no fans on this radiator.
The airflow to cool this thing is primarily coming from that maglev fan at the top.
And then on the other side the GPU side there's another loop with its own rad,
so this one's also a thin 240 millimeter rad.
The GPU in this unit - the review unit - is a water-cooled GTX 1080
but the base model has an air-cooled GTX 1070.
So we have three fans:
the big Maglev fan up top, the fan on the GPU side and then the fan inside the power supply,
which looks like a SF400 from Corsair.
These are supposed to be enough to cool this entire system through assisted convection,
so cool air sucks in through the sides and then hot air rises out.
The motherboard is on one side, the GPU instead of just slotting in, like it normally would,
is connected using a riser and then there's a PCIe ribbon that folds over to the other side.
The 16 gigs of ram are easy to replace.
If you want to put in an NVMe drive there is an M.2 slot behind the motherboard.
And there's two 2,5 inch drive bays.
But if you want to replace any of this stuff: the motherboard, the CPU, the GPU,
just about everything, I mean it's not going to be easy, it's a pretty cramped case, but it can be done.
So I have to be honest,
when I first saw this thing at CES,
I mean it looks pretty cool and it's super small and it's very quiet,
but I wasn't sure how the performance would be because it's super packed in there
and a GTX 1080 and a 7700K get really hot.
Now these components have been benchmarked a million times,
so I'm not going to bore you with too many numbers,
but the performance was as expected for the CPU and GPU combination.
Fan noise on idle is pretty quiet, it's not completely silent like a Mac Pro, but you can't really hear it.
On maximum load, and we're not talking with the game here,
we're talking like the stress test, it's definitely audible,
but considering the horsepower the system has it's still very quiet.
Playing games on this thing is a blast.
My G-Sync monitor is 1440p, so that's the resolution I play on.
Even poorly optimized games run well on this thing because of how powerful the hardware is
and Witcher 3, still one of the most demanding game on the market right now,
runs nicely and this is with Hairworks on and, even when playing a game like this,
the fans are still pretty quiet.
The next thing I did was overclock it, and this is where I was most impressed.
The 7700K was able to hit 5 GHz comfortably
and the GTX1080, I was able to get it running at around 1900 MHz.
The CPU temperatures were a little warm during these stress tests but this is a solid overclock
and honestly I think I could have gone further but I got sucked into playing some games.
So, I usually play Overwatch on low settings for max frame rates,
but here I'm running it on ultra graphics at 1440p with the CPU at 5 GHz and the GPU over 1900 megahertz
even after hours of gaming,
temperatures were comfortable, system was stable and everything was still quiet.
The overclocking potential in the system is really impressive.
Video editing is also really nice on this thing. It's fast and it's quiet.
I work with 5k footage and this thing does a fantastic job with it.
For VR, the Corsair One obviously handles very really nicely,
the GTX1070 and the 1080 are well above the recommended specs for VR titles right now
and because the chassis is so small you can just leave it out without being too much of an eyesore.
So, I had the system sitting in my living room for two weeks and my wife didn't care,
because it's small and quiet.
The performance on this thing is awesome and it's not just fast components,
because anyone can just stick fast components into a case,
but they have it properly cooled so there's no throttling and there's still room for overclocking
and the whole while they're doing it in a small case, that's super quiet.
Now in terms of pricing, the base model starts at $1,800
but the one I like the most is the Corsair One Pro, the one with the GTX 1080
and that costs $2,200, which is a lot of money for a desktop PC.
Now some people are gonna be like:
"why would you buy this thing, when you just build your own custom PC for like seven dollars"
but I actually want to know how much does it actually cost to build a 12 liter ITX system with these specs.
So, I went to PC part picker, loaded up the configurator.
Now you got to pony up for a 12 liter case that can fit a GTX 1080 there's not many of them and
they're not cheap.
Once you get all the parts, I'm coming in at around $1,800 and that doesn't include the second rad
that you would need to water cool the GPU.
Once you get one of those and a maglev fan to kind of cool everything down the way they did it,
it's going to be like 1950 or more, most likely more.
So, when you compare the price for $2,200 that Corsair built it,
they're going to slap a 2 year warranty on it,
it's engineered properly, it's not that much of a premium,
we're talking like 10/12 percent more than 1950, that's pretty solid.
So, if you're looking for a small ITX system, I would highly recommend checking this thing out.
I mean, ITX systems aren't for everyone, but if you are, take a look at this one,
because you can custom build your own, but it won't be nearly as - like - complete as this,
- like - coming out of the box, obviously, but building something that has this kind of thermal performance
with this kind of fan noise is very difficult, if you do it yourself, in this form factor.
That's the end of this video.
Hope you guys enjoyed it.
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See you guys next time.