Corsair’s new One i500 desktop is tiny, pricey, and gorgeous

It’s been seven years since Corsair introduced its first pre-built gaming PC, the teeny-tiny One with a striking columnar design. While more conventional gaming desktops followed, the company is back with a new One, christened the i500. It’s packing a bunch of new features and the latest components, and also it has some wood on it.

While it’s still tiny, the One i500 is markedly larger than the original design, stepping up from a Mini ITX motherboard base to a Micro ATX. (Yes, micro is bigger than mini in this context, don’t look for consistency in PC part names.) Methinks the redesigned chassis is there to accommodate today’s far larger GPUs. You can still see design elements from the original shine through, with big, in-your-face vents at the top and bottom. The 21.7-liter case is 39.1 centimeters tall, 30cm deep, and 18.5cm wide (or 15.39 x 11.8 x 7.28 inches).

The front panel is now adorned with two wood accents in either dark or light options, matching gray or white side panels, respectively. In addition to the addressable color logo and two lighting strips, you get two USB 3.1 gen 1 and a 3.2 Gen 2 Type C port. The rear motherboard I/O panel features seven total USB-A ports and another Type-C, plus integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth antennas.

Inside you get the latest Intel Core i9-14900K on a customized B760 motherboard, 2TB of SSD storage (no word on which drive specifically, but with that chipset it’ll max out at gen 4), and either 32GB or 64GB of DDR5-6000 memory. An integrated liquid-cooling system is applied to both the CPU and GPU, the latter of which comes in Nvidia RTX 4080 Super or 4090 flavors. Tying it all together is a 1,000-watt power supply.

The design is as cool as ever, but I can’t help noticing that the promo video and images highlight “upgradeable memory and storage.” That tells me that all that custom cooling for the CPU and GPU are an integral part of the design of the case. While it might not be impossible to upgrade the CPU, graphics card, and motherboard, it looks like it would be a lot harder than a regular gaming PC and require some serious part selection.

Corsair

Corsair

Corsair

That custom graphics card without an air-cooled shroud is a particular sticking point — at just 300mm deep, the One i500 case can’t fit a regular RTX 4080 Super from off the shelf. So if you buy it, note that your upgrade options will be limited right out of the gate. The best you can hope for is that Corsair offers some upgraded custom parts, and that’s certainly not guaranteed.

Speaking of which, what’s the price? Predictably it’s high, even for a pre-built gaming PC. The base configuration with 32GB of RAM and an RTX 4080 Super is a whopping $3,600, with the 64GB and RTX 4090 upgrade going for $4,700. That’s double the price, at minimum, of the original One.