I WANT to Recommend This... Corsair One (2019) Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,061 words · ~10 min read
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the Corsair one gaming system is basically like the pistol and halo
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combat evolved it's small and understated
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and totally overpowered now you might be thinking okay Linus
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yeah the one was pretty cool when it came out two years ago but what has it done for
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me lately how does it merit a re-review
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well since you asked although these two look very similar on the outside the
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internals have actually gotten a complete overhaul
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this one is rocking a liquid cooled core i9 9900k and a liquid cooled rtx 2080 ti
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so let's find out how Corsair did that
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before we go any further i need to talk about one area where Corsair totally
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dropped the ball here see the fins here on the original model
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they are slightly above the fan grill meaning that when you stroke them the
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one sings you this wonderful little tune
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as for the new one
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whole day ruined but seriously the build quality and
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design on display here is still fantastic every single part of it just
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feels so solid and in my opinion this
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machine just doesn't have a bad side it
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looks great in basically any situation from a professional studio where desk
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space is at a premium to the computer room of a well-off gamer where the
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addition of RGB lighting is sure to
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impress children of all ages now unless you have a particularly keen
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eye the old one and the new one which
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we'll be calling the deuce from now on to avoid confusion look nearly identical
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the front i o has been moved down and expanded the headphone jack here is a
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very welcome addition and the side
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actually has a bit of additional venting cut into it
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but really that's about it
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for now getting around to the back ah
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okay so now we're getting somewhere the motherboard is clearly in a different
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place and it looks like the position of the power supply has also changed so
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let's dive in then and figure out exactly what's going on here so pressing
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this button on the back allows us to remove the fan from the top
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that's the one right
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so pressing this button on the back
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so how are you doing this
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okay so pressing this button on the back allows us to remove the fan from the top
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here you can see it's uh there we go now it's unplugged it's 140 millimeters and
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takes care of the majority of the cooling pulling air in through the
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radiators that you can actually see on either side here and then exhausting it
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right up the top in our testing this results in nearly
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silent operation in many situations and
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even under full load the deuce is shockingly quiet with the two and a half
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inch hard drive and the quiet water pump competing to be the loudest or
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more like least quiet component removing these four screws then
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that's a marker uh i thought i had my screwdriver in my
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pocket i don't removing these four screws then
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allows our sides to slide down so here here here and
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here
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this gives us basically unfettered access to
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the guts so with it open we can see that there are
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two distinct thermal zones so this radiator on this side provides
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up to 300 watts of cooling power for our
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GPU and then this one over here which is
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actually a little bit smaller gives us about 165 watts for the CPU
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now this dual zone design isn't new but
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Corsair has actually flipped around which side the components are on and one
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benefit of that change is massively better cable management like
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let's start by looking at the GPU here i love
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how they were able to get all of the cabling along the edge over here see
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this it's all tucked in there nicely rather than just sprawling everything
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across the components and as for the motherboard well
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you can see the improvement on the motherboard side immediately because you
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can see the motherboard at all and the
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tubing to the radiators has also been shortened which is a surprisingly
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important improvement for anyone that might want to upgrade this machine in
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the future in the past when you were putting the one back together it was really easy to
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accidentally kink the tubing completely cutting off cooling to one of the sides
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not very user friendly moving back to the GPU we can actually see here that
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the water block is only responsible for
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cooling the GPU's core with vrm and
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power management being taken care of by this actively cooled heatsink this is
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actually not the first time i've seen a design like this there were some older
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they were called unisyncs back when d-tec first did it and you were expected
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to kind of like duct tape a fan to it there was like no
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official way to do it but it works really really well and there are a
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couple of reasons for that one it focuses all your cooling power on the
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GPU itself where there's actually a performance benefit to be gained and
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theoretically if you're a true enthusiast it's possible you'd be able
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to take it and then transplant it onto a future
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rtx 9000 or whatever the case may be as
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long as you could figure out some way to deal with the memory and the vrms now we
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can't say for sure how easy that's going to be but we do know that compared to a
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full cover block that is specific to the card there's a better chance you'd be
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able to reuse some of your components what we can also say for sure is that we
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got some outstanding cooling results out of this setup here
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in 3dmark the deuce was expectedly within our margin of error for
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performance compared to an air-cooled card with the temperatures leveling off
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in the high 70s after 45 minutes of gaming
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so what that means is that you might not have a massive amount of headroom for
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overclocking or anything but it also means that you can expect full boost
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clocks indefinitely while your system remains quieter than basically any
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air-cooled card let alone an air-cooled card in a tiny chassis like this
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moving over to the other side i just i feel like i have to bring this
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up again how impressive the improvements
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in cable routing are compared to the old model routine upgrades will be
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significantly easier this time around
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there's not a ton that you can upgrade out of the box since our config is
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already loaded for bear both RAM slots are populated for a total of 32 gigs the
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single two and a half inch drive bay is occupied by a two terabyte hard drive
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and the 480 gig m.2 SSD is located on
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the back of the motherboard which is probably actually easier to access by
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pulling off the graphics card but the really interesting thing over here is
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the CPU radiator which is actually smaller compared to the outgoing model
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this allows the compact 600 watt power
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supply to pull in fresh air from the outside rather than recycled warm air
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from inside the system so that means that it can actually operate much more
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efficiently which contributes to the overall quietness of our machine
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and then back to the size here Corsair claims
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that they actually managed to increase
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the cooling capacity since the new layout has a smaller rad but one that
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allows more air to be pulled through it so uh let's see how that works out for
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them actually looks like it's pretty well so our core i9 9900k stayed right
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at a blistering 4.7 gigahertz in games
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even after giving it plenty of time to heat up the coolant and our temperatures
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managed to hold comfortably around the mid 70s
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under a full synthetic load you will end up sacrificing some clock speed dropping
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down to about 3.8 gigahertz on all eight cores but
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that's actually what we expect from this CPU when Intel's power draw
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specifications are followed and it is an absolute beast
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so once again in the spec view perf productivity test the deuce throws up
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numbers that are nearly identical to what we saw from our open air test bench
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with the only real downer for productivity being the lack of an option
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for 10 gigabit Ethernet which if we're
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being honest is a must-have for professionals that are working with
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large heavy files like the 8k red footage that we deal with around here
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overall though the story remains the same the Corsair
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one is able to give you the performance of a top of the line gaming system in a
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compact package while somehow managing to remain quiet cool and sexy
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but of course with great design comes
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great cost and that really is the biggest downside of the deuce which
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starts at 3 thousand dollars for the i-140 with the
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better equipped i-160 that we've got here weighing in at an eye-watering 3600
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us dollars so
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let's put it aside for a second and change the subject a little bit
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this is the MSI trident x
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it isn't liquid cooled the build quality is
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fine but not exceptional it's bigger it
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gets a bit louder under load and it has half the RAM
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but it also reaches a similar level of
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gaming performance and costs 1
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000 us dollars less and it gets worse for the one in
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Corsair's own lineup you'll find the vengeance gaming pc that we reviewed
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recently now it does step the performance down a
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touch but you still get a 2 year warranty and you save 600
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not to mention that there's better upgradeability and that's ignoring the
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option of building your own pc which i guess puts me in sort of an awkward
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position doesn't it because the deuce gives me like a great big nerd direction
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and i think a world where everybody had one of these would be a better world and
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Corsair deserves fat stacks of cash for the engineering work not to mention the
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design work that has gone on here it's just that at this price you do need to
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have some serious disposable income to
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