The newly released Corsair ONE ELITE is an engineering marvel. It packs some ridiculously high-end hardware into a pre-assembled PC with a surprisingly small footprint. It will make your wallet $3000 lighter, though.
When Corsair released the Bulldog, their first “barebones” PC, it just made sense. Corsair has an impressive presence in the PC component space with power supplies, memory, cases, fans, keyboards and mice, SSDs, even their own graphics card if you count the team-up between Corsair, MSI and Nvidia on the Hydro GFX 1080 Ti. So why not bundle them together?
After that the company effectively became a system builder when the Corsair ONE was introduced last year. It represented Corsair’s first ready-to-game, fully assembled PC crammed into a chassis that’s only 12L in volume. (For reference, a squirrel is 4L. That’s an actual comparison the company makes, and it’s effective!) The brand new Corsair ONE ELITE builds on the original with a couple key upgrades, but it also taunts its target demographic of enthusiast PC gamers with one regrettable inclusion.
Here’s a damn good marketing video that gives us a closer look inside:
Let’s take a look at the core specs across all the SKUs:
There are some variations to check out in the lineup but the $2999 model is loaded. Both the Intel 6-core i7-8700K and Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti are treated to liquid cooling, and there’s a roomy 480GB M.2 NVMe SSD which will boast blazing fast read/write speeds. 16GB of DDR4 memory is plenty, but I’m a little disappointed in the choice of speed which tops out at 2666 MHz.
I’m more disappointed in the deep storage option. While the primary drive is awesome, a 480GB M.2 SSD will swell up quickly with Windows 10 and a handful of 4K-optimized (read: very large) games. Then you’ll have to fall back on a 2TB 5400RPM drive, which makes me cringe. A beautiful high-end system like this shouldn’t make compromises with its secondary storage option.
What thrills me about this system though is how compact and quiet it is. Scouring some reviews of the original system revealed that it’s only 20dB when idling, and under load it’s not distracting due to the pitch of the fans. Corsair’s fans, of course.
$2999 is a significant amount of coin but considering the cost of RAM and top tier graphics cards, along with the engineering effort and custom liquid cooling solution, it’s a fair price. We’ve seen how cost-prohibitive it is to build your own systems right now. My only concern is user-upgradability, something that Linus Tech Tips had reservations about when the Corsair ONE originally launched.
And yes, the Corsair ONE ELITE remains devoid of RGBs. I count this as a tasteful decision coming from the company who RGBs all the things!
