Corsair’s One i600 (starts at $4,499.99, as tested) small-form-factor gaming desktop features dual AIO coolers for its powerful Intel Core Ultra 9 and Nvidia RTX 5080 silicon combination, so you know it's a serious performer. Of course, that kind of power will cost you in any box, and building a tight-packed marvel like this doesn't come cheap. The i600 delivers impressive speeds for gaming, content creation, and productivity, performing effectively within the tight confines of a 21-liter aluminum chassis. If you have the scratch for a no-compromise machine in such a small frame, it’s worth the investment. Just don’t expect to tinker much with it, since that slim chassis leaves little room for much else. Still, for setting a performance standard in its class and a high bar for build quality, the Corsair One i600 earns our Editors' Choice award among high-end gaming desktops.

Configurations: High Standards, Even in Its Base Model

The Corsair One i600 is available in two dual-liquid-cooled slim tower configurations. The entry-level model costs $4,499 for a powerful combination of an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 (16GB) graphics card. A chunky of 64GB of memory, a hearty 4TB solid-state drive, and a Windows 11 Home license round out the package in our review configuration.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Upgrading to the RTX 5090 model increases the price to $6,499, boosting the system RAM to 96GB, and adds a 2TB SSD backup drive. This model also ships with Windows 11 Pro installed, rather than the Home version of the operating system.

The Corsair One i600 base model is often on sale for $3,999, which is a much more palatable price for an RTX 5080 desktop. It is still on the high end, but that’s because the default configuration is exceptionally well-equipped. Few base-model PCs ship with 64GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD, after all. That, alongside the dual AIO coolers, helps account for the i600’s hefty starting price.

Design: A Sleek, Mighty Mini-Tower

The Corsair One is a sleek, minimalist gaming tower, shaped more like a skyscraper than your average gaming rig. It’s tall and thin, with most of the detailing concentrated on the top vents, and featuring just a few RGB light strips on the front, positioned on either side of the Corsair logo.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Corsair's custom chassis is primarily made of black aluminum, with mesh panels on the sides for enhanced airflow. However, you can opt for a dark wood finish on the front panels if you prefer a more understated appearance. The wood finish gives the Corsair One a more professional workstation feel, while the standard black metal fits a more traditional gamer aesthetic.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Our review unit came in the default black metal case, which is still a far cry from the RGB assault of other gaming rigs. It pulls off a sleek look regardless of the finish you choose.

Upgradability: A Small-Footprint Squeeze for DIY-ers

The Corsair One i600, like its predecessors, is a challenging PC to upgrade or repair. Due to its compact 21-liter case, all components are tightly packed into a slim chassis, making it challenging to access or replace the parts inside. Add in the i600’s dual AIO cooling system, and upgrades become even more difficult to manage. (A liquid-cooled graphics card, especially, requires a heat sink compatible with the new bare board.)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Corsair made it a bit tricky to open the One chassis, as it requires a screwdriver. It’s just two screws to remove the side panel, but that only gets you as far as the case fans, which require a different gauge screwdriver to remove. Once you can actually access the guts of the Corsair One, you can upgrade your RAM kit or add an NVMe or SATA SSD. However, upgrading your motherboard or GPU is a bit more challenging, as the Corsair One chassis is tightly packed.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

If you were considering the AMD-based Corsair One A600, you could always upgrade the CPU alone in a few years, since AMD upgrades CPU sockets far less frequently than Intel. Unfortunately, with the i600, the CPU will presumably only be able to upgrade to not yet released, next-generation "Arrow Lake Refresh" CPUs, as Intel is expected to change processor sockets for its following "Nova Lake" generation, expected in late 2026 or early 2027. That puts a hard ceiling on CPU upgrades.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Then again, the Corsair One is hardly a hobbyist PC; you aren’t throwing down more than $4,000 for a work in progress. Considering its powerful starting components, the One i600 should be potent enough to last for a few generations before you need to worry about upgrades. At that point, it’ll probably be easier to just buy a new PC rather than try to source parts that can fit this particular chassis.

Software: As Minimalist As It Gets

Like most gaming rigs, the Corsair One has its own proprietary software preinstalled out of the box. One of these apps is the Corsair Diagnostics tool, which helps identify problems with your PC. The other is the Corsair One dashboard, which allows you to control your thermal profile and RGB lighting.

The two Corsair apps are relatively thin in terms of content, so they don’t occupy a lot of drive space and aren’t even approaching the realm of bloatware. Even the Corsair One dashboard is as minimal as it gets, providing just the bare bones of RGB lighting controls and thermal profiles. Corsair also kept its Windows 11 install clean, with only the standard Windows applications preinstalled, so you don’t need to clear out any preinstalled antivirus software or app trials.

Most other proprietary applications offer additional features, including software and driver update recommendations, as well as support bots; however, I don’t miss any of that. In fact, it’s refreshing to see such a streamlined set of control software on a high-end gaming PC.

Performance Testing: A Tiny Tough Guy

Despite its small size, the Corsair One series packs a powerful punch, and the i600 is no exception. We subjected this Corsair mini-tower to our gauntlet of benchmarks, comparing its performance with that of a host of competitors, starting with the directly comparable, albeit much bigger, Alienware Area-51 ($4,649.99 as tested). The slightly less powerful 2025 Alienware Aurora ($2,299.99 as tested) represents the top of the midrange. Finally, the 2025 Asus ROG NUC ($2,799 as tested) and the Lenovo Legion Tower 5 Gen 10 ($1,879.99 as tested) round out our midrange comparisons. As noted, the Alienware Area-51 is pretty much the diametric opposite of the Corsair One in terms of footprint, so we included the less powerful Legion Tower and Asus ROG NUC mini PC for a better understanding of how well the Corsair leverages its powerful components in that ultra-slim chassis.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, tests a system's performance in productivity applications, ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput.

Three more tests we use are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.

Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.

The Corsair One i600 didn't suffer a significant performance hit despite its constrained chassis, a testament to its multi-factor cooling system. On general productivity benchmarks, the Corsair One was either neck-and-neck with the Alienware Area-51 or a healthy notch ahead. Notably, the Asus ROG NUC's mobile CPU performed surprisingly well compared with the desktop chips. The most important point is that the Corsair One outperformed the Area-51 in all six productivity benchmarks, despite its smaller size.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We challenge all desktops' graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. We then turn to Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance in a synthetic environment.

Our real-world gaming testing is based on the in-game benchmarks of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at full HD (1080p), 2K (1440p), and 4K (2160p) resolutions—represent competitive shooters, open-world games, and simulation games, respectively. Each game runs at high detail or the highest available settings.

We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Extreme graphics preset on desktops. Because the test can produce triple-digit frame rates even on low-end PCs, this approach promotes results to evaluate high-frame-rate performance. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs to their limit, so we run it on the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 2024 measures GPUs’ ability to render high-polygon-count models and densely detailed environments at fast speeds.

While the Corsair One i600 is a compact 21-liter gaming rig, it drew maximum performance out of its Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and RTX 5080 combo in our graphics and gaming benchmarks, thanks to its dual AIO coolers. In fact, it outperformed the Alienware Area-51 in F1 2024 at 1080p and was within just a few frames per second of the Alienware on most other gaming benchmarks, including Cyberpunk 2077 at higher resolutions.

As expected, the Corsair One i600 outperformed the other desktops in all gaming benchmarks, particularly at 4K resolution. RTX 5090 systems, like the Corsair Vengeance a5100, still take the lead, but you should expect that from Nvidia’s much pricier flagship GPU running in a much bigger box. Regardless, the Corsair One managed to push a remarkable amount of power through a relatively small desktop chassis, which was impressive to see in our gaming benchmarks.