We’re big fans of Corsair’s One gaming PCs, thanks to their innovative case designs, water-cooled components, and incredibly compact footprints, but they’re usually prohibitively expensive. That’s why we’re delighted to see this Corsair One i500 mini gaming PC deal on Best Buy right now, which enables you to save a massive $400 on the usual price of this gorgeous, wooden-fronted compact mini gaming rig.
This Corsair system is quite simply the best mini gaming PC you can buy right now in terms of design, thanks to its use of full-size PC gaming components, despite its compact dimensions. Not only is there a water-cooled 24-core Intel Core i9 14900K stashed inside this little gaming rig, but you even get a choice of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super or RTX 4090 GPU, with both specs options currently discounted at Best Buy.
We gave this machine a solid score of 8/10 in our Corsair One i500 review, praising its superb build quality, compact dimensions, and excellent frame rates in games when we tested the RTX 4080 Super version. However we did criticize its expensive price, even considering the components on offer, so it’s great to see this water-cooled wooden wonder coming down in price.
One of the main benefits of this machine is its modest 187 x 300mm footprint, which means it doesn’t take up too much room on your desk, with Corsair building upwards to squeeze in all the components and cooling gear. Amazingly, both the CPU and GPU are water-cooled in the One i500, thanks to a pair of Corsair AIO coolers.
Our only criticism here is that the cooler attached to the Core i9 14900K only has a 120mm radiator, which means its fan has to spin up to high speeds to keep the CPU in check at high loads. This can make the Corsair One i500 quite noisy in games, so it’s best to drown this out by wearing a headset. The noise is fine in day-to-day use when the components aren’t running at full pelt, though.
This machine is seriously fast too. Running at 2,560 x 1,440, the RTX 4080 Super version averaged 106fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at the Ultra ray tracing preset, thanks to some help from the frame generation tech in Nvidia DLSS 3. It also averaged 111fps in F1 2023 at Ultra High settings without DLSS, and an amazing 151fps in Total War: Warhammer 3.
To top it all off, this machine even looks great, with a choice of light and dark wooden panels to match your workspace, and a subtle glow of RGB lighting emanating from the strips down the sides of the wooden panels and the Corsair logo in the middle. Best of all, of course, you can now save $400 on this machine, bringing it from $3,599.99 to $3,199.99, if you click on the links above, or this link here.
That’s still a large pile of money, of course, but it’s justified for the specs and build quality on offer here. The Corsair One i500 is deservedly listed as the top compact choice on our guide to the best gaming PC, where you can also find plenty of other options if this mini gaming rig isn’t quite right for your needs.
