Corsair One Pro i180 Review: Full Power in a Tiny Tower

[Nergal]

 

At $4,999 (£4,749.99), Corsair’s top-end One Pro i180 is compact desktop opulence. It packs a 24-thread Intel Core i9-9920X and Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics into a surprisingly quiet (for the most part) aluminum tower that takes up a small amount of space on your desk--at least horizontally.


The system’s primary detractor -- apart from the high price -- is some noticeable coil whine coming from the graphics card. I’ll get into this more in the Performance section, but how annoying it is will vary by user, and where you put the system on your desk.

Specifications
 

 

Pricing and Configuration

Let’s get this out of the way up front: The $4,999 price tag of the One Pro i180 is unquestionably high. As with most pre-built systems, you could save yourself some money by building your own. But comparable parts to this system, including 32GB of RAM, a 12-Core i9-9920X CPU, a liquid-cooled 2080 Ti, and a 960GB SSD plus a 2TB hard drive for storage, will run you about $4,000 on their own. And you’d have a hard time building a system that’s both as small and as quiet from a fan noise perspective as the One Pro i180.

High-end gamers and enthusiasts who like the One’s design (and don’t need as many CPU cores) should probably look to one of the company’s lesser models, like the One i160, which sells for a more modest (though still pricey) $3,599 (£3,399.99) with a lesser Core i9-9900K CPU. The “entry” model of the One, the i140, sells for $2,999 (£2,849.99), but steps down to a non-TiRTX 2080. The One Pro i180 also has a gray aluminum case and ships with Windows 10 Pro, while the i160 and i140 models have black cases and ship with Windows 10 Home.

As far as components go, the only potential issue we see for some professional users is the 32GB of RAM that ships with this system. The mini-ITX Asrock-made X299 motherboard that Corsair uses in the i180 has laptop-style SODIMM memory slots, rather than standard desktop RAM. There are four of them, so you could potentially upgrade to 64GB of RAM on your own. At the moment, that would cost you about $350 or more for a name-brand 64GB SODIMM kit. But if you can live with 32GB for a while, the price of memory seems to be trending downward.

Design


Aside from the lighter gray color, the Corsair One Pro i180 looks identical from the outside to the black One i160 (and the original One which launched in 2017). It’s compact for a high-end PC, at 7.9 x 7 x 15 inches (200 x 176 x 380 mm), and the “bead-blasted” aluminum chassis (with a steel interior) both looks and feels great.

The light pipes that run down the front of the system default to blue out of the box. But firing up the company’s pre-installed iCue software, you can customize the color of the eight total LEDs (four in each strip), or have them change based on temperature changes or what game you’re running.

I discovered the temperature feature at one point while briefly running the system with the top off (which houses the primary fan), investigating a coil whine issue (see below). A couple minutes into a gaming benchmark, the light pipes on the right side began blinking red, which helpfully prompted me to turn the system off and re-attach the top exhaust fan. A minute or so after rebooting, and the top fan spinning a bit faster than normal, the light pipe stopped blinking its alarm at me, and returned to its calming default blue.

Ports and Upgradability

External connectivity on the One Pro i180 covers the basics. But if you crave lots of USB ports, you might be disappointed.


Up front, you get a pair of USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports, along with a headset jack and an HDMI 2.0 port for connecting a VR headset.