Our HP Omen 45L’s 285K CPU operated 1.4GHz below its actual spec and we analyze why it performed so poorly

The Highlights

• Our HP Omen 45L came equipped with a 285K, RTX 5090, and a case with an “Omen Cryo Chamber”
• The system not only has unbelievably bad thermals for its cryo chamber for the 50 seconds it actually runs at the Intel guidance, but it also kneecaps performance after 50 seconds to make the 285K be worse than the 265K in all-core workloads
• The HP Omen 45L is the worst pre-built gaming PC we have ever benchmarked and reviewed.
• Original MSRP: Approximately $4,890

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

The HP Omen 45L is the worst pre-built PC we’ve ever reviewed.

The CPU is operating 1.4 GHz below the actual spec, which makes the $530 Intel 285K perform worse than a $260 265K, while operating somehow both below the power budget and above the thermal limit at 105 degrees Celsius in some cases. HP says that fixing the power limit to be stock for the 285K VOIDS YOUR WARRANTY, all the while its operating system is filled with spying bloatware and telemetry to harvest your data even after paying nearly $5,000 for a gaming PC with the memory preconfigured to an abysmal DDR5-4800 somehow.

Editor's note: This was originally published on September 4, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Writing

Jeremy Clayton

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets
Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

This computer is incomprehensibly bad. HP might have just dethroned Dell as the official low bar for our pre-built reviews going forward. 

But there’s more.

There’s also this video that seems to be a mix of the Bill Nye intro edit re-cut by someone on some bad acid, featuring a miniaturized woman inside the computer, some text about respecting "mother," keeping heat off of mother with thermal pads, and then a reference to motherboards.

Overview and Marketing

Today we’re reviewing the HP OMEN 45L GT22-3000t pre-built PC. As you can see, the name really rolls off the tongue. 

It’s got a top-tier price of about $4,900, an Intel Ultra 9 285K CPU, 64GB of RAM, a 2TB Gen4 SSD, and what HP says is a “dazzling” NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU. That’s good, because we hate the 5090s that aren’t bedazzled.

The marketing copy will continue until the prebuilts improve. The OMEN 45L apparently has room for the kitchen sink, as long as that kitchen sink doesn’t use a PCIe slot.

“The OMEN 45L is a one stop, can't stop, shop for DIY performance mastery. Dream, adapt, overcome.” 

First of all, that’s not what DIY means. This is literally the opposite of DIY.

The Omen 45L has a patented “OMEN CRYO CHAMBER” that isn’t cryogenic but is technically a chamber.

We’re not sure why putting a radiator in a box gets a patent, especially since there is prior art, but welcome to intellectual property of things the USPTO doesn’t understand.

The chamber should prevent any pre-warmed exhaust air from the GPU from impacting CPU cooling. It also means the only way for that GPU exhaust to leave is through the single rear fan.

The Z890 motherboard itself is a strange mix of minimal rear I/O with a CMOS reset button, heatsinks that look pretty good for cooling the 14+2+1 VRM, all in an MATX package that doesn’t take advantage of the case’s ATX size that’s supposed to fit kitchen sinks. It’s a bizarre mix.

Parts and Value

HP OMEN 45L (GT22-3000t) Pre-built | Part and Price Breakdown | GamersNexus

Here’s a table breaking down the parts and price of the OMEN 45L versus a set of DIY parts. As usual, we matched identical parts where possible, and chose the most sensible replacements for the rest.

HP’s general part selection is “fine” for a very high-end build, but we have nitpicks. The first nit is more of a... whatever the opposite of a nit is, because the 285K is god-awful and HP makes it worse. It may be Intel’s best current consumer CPU, but AMD’s 9800X3D (read our review) outperforms it in games, and gaming is definitely the target audience. The 285K is also on a dead-end platform.

Using an MATX motherboard in an ATX case is technically fine, but restricts the user from adding any other PCIe card below the GPU, and we were told there’d be kitchen sinks.

The RAM choice is sub-optimal and made far worse by the fact that XMP wasn’t on, which is just really sad at this point. 64GB is what we want at this price, but not slow DDR5-5600, although that’d still be better than the DDR5-4800 it’s running at out of the box. That’s an insane combination that even a novice DIY PC builder wouldn’t make. Intel Arrow Lake has a strong memory controller – so we’d like to see 6000 minimum, or 6400 preferred, as 6400 is officially supported. It can even be cheaper RAM.

We paid $4,730 for the OMEN 45L a few months ago, but it’s risen to $4,890 at the time of writing. Normally, the prices come down. That puts the current-day price difference between it and a DIY build at $1,100, or 29% greater than buying these parts yourself. That’s unfortunately not unusual for a pre-built of this tier, but it has to be flawless for the value to hold up at all. The OMEN 45L is the worst prebuilt we’ve tested as you’ll soon see, plus it’s just bad value.

Tear-Down

The PC’s “Cryo Chamber” is located at the top of the case. This design has been done before. It’s actually a really old school approach to radiators. What HP is trying to do is to separate the radiator from the rest of the system so that warm air is pushed off of it and doesn’t end up in the rest of the computer. The downside is that the PC doesn’t have fans in the top to help with cooling elsewhere.

At the front of the case, there are 2 buttons along both sides of the front panel, which allows users to take it off. It’s very complicated with some release mechanisms. Pulling the front cover off, however, reveals the case’s front fans and highlighted to us how the fans here have less than an inch of airflow. This design hinders performance.   

Continuing our tear-down, we removed the case’s front dust filter, which is behind a sheet of glass. This is, again, bad for airflow.  

We then proceeded with the tear-down by removing screws on the front of the case. 

We then removed the computer’s glass side panel. 

Taking a look inside the case, we noticed that the 12VHPWR cable has some hot glue on it for some reason.  

We then unscrewed the Asetek cooler off of the CPU to see if we could get an understanding of why the processor was running so hot. Removing the cooler, we were able to confirm that thermal paste was used and that there was contact. We honestly thought we might have seen a “peel-before-installation” sticker still intact given its thermal performance.

Next, we moved onto pulling out the video card, which was contained within a plastic shroud that was incredibly sturdy. There was also a screwable steel bracket, which allows HP to ship the PC with the video card pre-installed without any protective internal packing that are commonly seen in other SI builds. 

With its shroud, the GPU ends up being a 3-slot card. 

Looking at the video card out of the case, the shroud doesn’t cover most of the fins on the side, but it does cover some fins, which prevents air from escaping. 

The good news is that there is a hole in the back so air can get out again, which should actually be aided by the fact that the shroud sealed off some of the fins on the card’s side. This might explain why the GPU performed okay. 

The card is ventilated on the back and the shroud is reasonably well put together. It’s probably the best thing HP has done in the computer.

Continuing our tear-down, we started pulling cables from the motherboard and removed the PC’s wireless card.

Doing our tear-down, we noticed how small the chipset heat sink is.

The heat sink on the VRM was really nice, on the other hand. They are really tall and our unit had good thermal pad contact on the bottom. The heat pipe connecting the 2 sides is also a nice touch.

Removing the SSD, we noticed that it was very slightly bowed, but it isn’t bad and doesn’t concern us.  

Removing the back side panel, we noticed a plate that said “required for VRM cooling,” which we proceeded to take off. This exposed some thermal pads for the VRM mosfets, which is a nice touch, but it’s hard to appreciate when the CPU runs up to 105 degrees Celsius. 

Taking a closer look at the backside, there’s 2x 2.5-inch SSD slots that are not pre-wired (some companies do that). In terms of cable management, it was done to what we would call the minimum degree. Really, it’s a mess, but it’s fully covered. This is where the smaller system integrators do a better job. 

Benchmarks

CPU Frequency vs. Original CPU Review - Bar Chart

We’ll start with the incomprehensibly bad part: The 285K’s all P-core frequency is 4GHz here. The last time we saw an Intel all-core frequency of 4.0 GHz, it was in some tests on the i7-4790K from 2014. HP has managed to send this CPU back to the dark ages, before the first Great Intel Extinction event.

That 4GHz result has the CPU a staggering 1385MHz slower compared to the 285K in our review testing. Even the E-cores suffered a 729MHz loss.

This is the worst divergence from stock performance we’ve ever seen, falling embarrassingly below expectations. 

This deserves a deeper look.

CPU Frequency vs. Original CPU Review - Over Time

This is an over time plot of the same test. The 285K in our original review attempted to hold its P-cores at 5400MHz, with frequent small dips. Its E-cores stayed almost flat at 4600MHz.

In the same test, the 285K in the HP OMEN 45L tried its best to keep up initially, but then got sent back to 2014 to hang out with Devil’s Canyon at around 4GHz by the time it hit the 50 second mark. In this case, 4GHz was just a coincidence for the 285K, as clock behavior was unstable.

Blender Rendering Performance

We ran the Omen build through our standardized Blender CPU rendering benchmark to see how much performance was lost. The 285K requires 7.1 minutes to complete the render in our normal testing, with the Omen version of the 285K requiring 8.8 minutes. This is such a huge reduction in performance that HP has managed to make it worse than a 265K (read our review) despite having 4 more threads. It’s hardly better than a 14700K (read our review). This is impressively bad and means that you’re paying at least the difference of a 265K to a 285K, yet getting 265K performance.

Thermals - CPU - Over Time

Next is CPU thermals. We’re excited to see how the “CRYO” chamber holds up since CRYO means frozen.

HP’s near-literal dumpster fire of a PC caused us to alter our chart template in order to convey the sheer thermal intensity. Our charts for temperature normally stop at 100 degrees, but we had to increase the chart scale to fit HP’s impressively bad result.

Within seconds of the CPU load starting, P- & E-cores spiked over 100 degrees Celsius. Immediately after, the temperatures crash downward to the mid 50s, climb to about 70, and continue on like a diminishing wave for a few cycles. Following that, temperatures stabilize to the mid 60s.

We haven’t seen thermals like this since pre-built manufacturers were screwing up Intel’s power limits.

Plotting the CPU Package value shows just how bad it got, reaching all the way to 105C twice, staying at or above 100C for 20 seconds. The max operating temperature for the 285K is 105C, so it was not only thermal throttling, but on the verge of tripping PROCHOT and shutting down. CPU Package temperature then predictably sat above the AVG for the duration of the test.

Finally, adding CPU Package Power explains the temperature drop. It starts very low at idle, jumps to roughly 225W when the load starts (which is near normal for the 285K), then abruptly falls off a cliff to bounce around the 125W mark from then on. That’s roughly half of what it should be in a heavily parallel workload.

This makes it obvious both why temperatures stabilized and why frequency dropped – something triggered power-limiting behavior, bringing the 285K down to its default 125W “Processor Base Power.” The strange part is that board vendors don’t normally configure Arrow Lake to have an explicit window of time (Tau) to move from a higher to lower power limit. Tau still exists per Intel documentation, but typically goes unused, with PL1 equalling PL2.

HP shouldn’t be kneecapping its CPU like this. Again, this is 2014 levels of performance. 

Thermals - GPU - Over Time

The equal-but-opposite reaction to the CPU’s throttling is that the GPU doesn’t have enough work because the CPU can’t provide it, which reflects in the GPU temperature. The 5090 (read our review) briefly cools when it doesn’t have enough work to do, despite being at about 80 degrees for core initially. Temperature drops from about 80 degrees to the mid 70s near the end while GPU fan speed drops, due in part to the case fans speeding up and in part to the low load provided to the GPU by the CPU.

In many cases we’d disqualify a GPU run for being under-loaded, but it’s part of the story this time, and load at steady-state still averaged to 98%.

Memory junction temperature rises above core temperature to roughly 84C, but doesn’t reach the 95-degree-plus extremes of NVIDIA’s Founders Edition design in standalone testing. The fan speed rises to 64%, before trending downward as the case fans engage.

HP’s GPU cooler design seems like the most competent aspect of the entire build, but it’s benefitted by the CPU underprovisioning work.

Acoustics - Over Time

Now we move to acoustic testing in our hemi-anechoic chamber that we built for heavily controlled acoustic analysis in an unchanging environment, that way day-to-day noise changes in the office and outside don’t affect our results. 

The HP OMEN 45L’s default fan (and therefore noise) profile is very conservative. Idle is phenomenally quiet at about 18.2 dBA in a noise floor of 14.7. That’s functionally inaudible. It’d be a low speed air purifier or something. When the heavy CPU load hits and temperatures soar to 90C or higher, noise output only rises to 26-27 dBA, then immediately ramps down when the CPU becomes power limited.

After that, it’s a slow and steady rise to 30 dBA, followed by a slight step up, then finally another step up to settle at 34.7 dBA average. The ramps are stairstepped in a way that makes sense, if only the rest of the computer did.

Power Consumption - Full System

Finally, we have full system power consumption at the wall. Full system idle starts in the 60-70W range, jumps around between 300W and 400W, briefly flattens to 212W once the power limit kicks in, then immediately slams to 800W when the GPU load starts on the 5090.

After that, we see the same repetitive dips that we saw on the GPU thermal chart. Again, it’s not what we want to see. 

This is what the last 5090-equipped prebuilt from Maingear looked like in the same test. Much flatter, which is how it should look.

BIOS

BIOS inspection is next.

The BIOS for the OMEN 45L is version F.06, released in December 2024. The support page doesn’t show any updates between then and July 2025, but the version number jumping to F.11 makes us think that there were intermediary revisions that have since been removed.

The BIOS itself is stripped-down compared to the full feature sets we’re used to on DIY boards, but enough settings are left exposed to make important tweaks if needed. Opening the Advanced page pops two full screen notifications – one strongly advertising the OMEN Gaming Hub software, and one with a warning about overclocking.

After clicking through, we see that the memory profile is set to default, and not the one that’s literally called “HP XMP Profile.” This is bad enough since that’s a redundant initialism, but it’s made worse by not being enabled. The profile would at least bring the kit up from DDR5-4800 to DDR5-5600. 

The rest of the advanced page has toggles for LLC modes, an overclocking lock, “Extreme Mode” support, and “Resizabled Bar.” While HP gave us an extra letter ‘D,’ it’s missing a few other things: Power limits aren’t present, so you can disable cores and adjust load-line calibration, but not change PL1 and PL2. You’d have to go to the app for that so HP can harvest your data or something.

Fan control options were decent. Three pre-set automatic modes (Quiet, Normal, Turbo), and a manual mode that allows for custom curves. We have no complaints here.

As far as we could tell, there was no way to save or load BIOS profiles – just an option to reset to defaults. 

OS Setup

On to the software.

Windows 11 setup was the usual, with the added twist of trying to get us to register and give our data away to HP. Again. It’s possible to just click through these without entering anything, but the UI doesn’t make that plain – it’s a dirty trick that we’re sure works on tons of people.

Hitting the desktop brings more disappointment. Behold the bloat: myHP, “Dropbox promotion”, Adobe Apps, and whatever Otter.ai is are pinned to the start menu. The entire apps list also includes Booking.com, which isn’t even remotely related to anything, DTS Sound Unbound, 8 different HP utilities, McAfee, and OMEN Gaming Hub. There are 16 total apps beyond what normally comes with Windows. The OMEN app and a couple of the HP ones are probably useful, but the rest are just trash that HP likely gets money or benefits for including.

Device Manager showed no missing drivers, so that’s finally something good. If HP’s going to shovel bloat on us, this is the least it can do. The NVIDIA graphics driver is version 572.16 from the 50 Series launch at the end of January. Our system shipped at the beginning of April, so it’s missing two months worth of updates. Right back to the disappointment. 

Maybe we need to start using “better than HP OMEN” when back-handing out praise.

The only other noteworthy find was a file named “Output” in the C:\ drive that had “Max Total API Overhead : 0” written twice. This kind of file would normally have some kind of test results, but this seems incomplete.

HP fails at providing a clean and up-to-date Windows installation.

OMEN Gaming Hub

The OMEN Gaming Hub software was, uh, “interesting.” The intro dialog box had some cringey text, like “How about we elevate your gaming experience with badass capabilities?” and closing with “Go ahead and explore - we won’t bite.” 

The next dialog box had even more attempts to harvest data. Opting out required clicking “manage options,” then individually toggling off App Analytics, Personalized Suggestions, and Advertising. That’s on a computer that’s about $5,000, by the way.

Then we got hit with a short guided tour of in-app popups showing us what we “can do in OGH.” Coincidentally, “OGH” is also an accurate onomatopoeia for the sound we made several times while writing this review.

After finally getting the app open, we immediately realized that it’s trying to do too much. “Game Booster,” game launcher, hardware monitoring, overclocking, keybinds, “network booster,” lighting, fan control, and yet another overlay that we don’t want are all packed into this software that we imagine is maintained by a revolving door of contract devs.

Digging into the overclocking tab is disappointing – all you get are sliders for core frequency multiplier and a core voltage offset, even after clicking “show more options.”

The Performance Control tab is where HP hid the CPU power limit controls, but only by way of 3 preset modes. “Balanced” is the default, setting PL1 to 125W and PL2 to 295W. “Performance” sets PL1 to 190W, and PL2 still at 295W.

“Extreme” has to be enabled in the BIOS and gives you a warning that you will void your warranty if you use it to run the CPU at its spec. Pressing “OK” and throwing caution to the wind sets both power limits to maximum. Voiding a warranty for running the CPU how it was marketed and reviewed is certainly a choice.

The end result is that stock/balanced avoids bloatware but cuts CPU power budget in half, “Performance” uses bloatware, enables spying by HP, and still limits performance, and “Extreme” enables bloatware, spying by HP, and voids your warranty. Great.

The secret 4th option is to use Intel XTU to set whatever power limits you want.

Packaging and Accessories

HP’s packaging for the OMEN 45L was good, and one of the only clear positives.

The outer box had plastic locking plugs at the bottom. There was plenty of foam and air space between the outer and inner box, which sat in a cardboard base.

The plastic plug lock company must be doing great, because the inner box also had them. Inside was even more foam.

This might seem like overkill to some people, but we actually have an older model HP Omen system that came with the glass front panel smashed. So maybe the extent of HP’s packing is a reaction to reports of shipping damage.

The system included an AC power cable, small quick start guide, customer support slip, and a sticker above the glass panel explaining that it’s locked for shipping. It’s pretty basic, but the basics are there.

Diagnosing the Omen

We next tried to diagnose the problems.

This chart shows new testing after a repaste and remount. This is at steady state, not at peak, so that means that the non-Extreme results were running at their reduced PL1 during this steady state log.

All data is comparable except the original result, which had HP’s installation. The chart also shows configuration changes for the system. The only proper result on this chart worth considering is the Extreme configuration. It’s still not at the right frequency, but it’s a lot closer; anything else is totally unacceptable for frequency. That Extreme result actually held a 77-degree average steady state CPU temperature and not shown here, but its peak temperature was lower than the peak temperature of the other tests. And that is because its pump speed is higher by default. So they are destroying the performance of the other. 77 is actually completely reasonable if only it didn’t require voiding the warranty and manually modifying the default behavior. It’s still a little slow, and it still fails the test, but it’s not nearly as ruinous. The point is that HP’s system is capable of handling the higher power load and can even cool it, they’re just choosing not to for some reason.

They might choose not to for noise reasons -- but if that’s the case, they either need to make it a lower spec CPU and cheaper price or improve the thermal performance. 

Their so-called “cryo chamber” is seriously hurting performance, anyway: By removing the radiator from its mummifying wrap and enclosed tomb of impedance, we reduced the temperature like-for-like by about 10 degrees Celsius. That is a huge improvement for something that’s supposed to be “Cryo.” If HP had mounted the radiator to the front of the case and put it behind a mesh panel, it’d probably split the difference here; instead, its patented gimmick is running the system hotter, which is contributing to their likely concern of noise levels if they were to run it properly. A better radiator location and chamber would reduce temperature, which would allow them to achieve the same thermals for similar noise, which would allow them to boost the CPU frequency.

The reason the PC’s chamber sucks is because of the huge amount of impeding metal surrounding the radiator. The limited area for flow immediately between the radiator and the rest of the case and potentially some problems with air struggling to get out, plus the fact that the radiator tanks themselves are wrapped in this shroud.

Profile vs. CPU Power

This chart shows the power consumption of the various profiles during the Blender workload. Here, the Extreme profile is maintaining its power budget for the duration of the test (rather than dropping precipitously after 50 seconds). This is the only one that should be considered for diagnosis, since anything else will be running so far below spec as a result of the power budget constraints that they’re meaningless for comparison. 

Frequency Diagnosis

Using HP’s various preset profiles and some of our own custom tests, we found that the CPU frequency gets closer to stock DIY expectations -- but still not quite there -- by enabling “Extreme” mode for the power budget and “Turbo” fans. That sets the higher power limit and we’ve now admitted to voiding our warranty, apparently, but that got us to 5158MHz up from the 4000MHz range. The various other tests included a 4010 MHz entry with Balanced and normal fans and a similarly poor result with Turbo fans and balanced. The result isn’t that different with the constrained power limit.

Fan/Pump Speeds

This simple fan/pump speed chart shows the speed of the pump, shown with the hyphenated line, juxtaposed with fan speed. The line colors match for the profile. The Extreme profile maintains the 2800 RPM reported pump speed for the duration of the test, which helps maintain the thermal results we just saw and the clocks closer to expectation. It still failed, but the clocks are closer.

Conclusion

We have to thank HP here because we haven't had the best products to cover over the last couple of months. And this one is also very bad, but it's so bad that it's funny and it has made our job really fun. Again, the PC is incomprehensibly bad. If you're paying $530 for a 285K and you're getting the performance of a $260 CPU, that's insane. It's also insane if you have to void your warranty to make the CPU, that is included with it, perform as it should. 

The PC also has a bunch of bloatware. We didn't bother testing the bloatware impact on performance because the CPU is so underperforming that it's not going to show up. We'd have to fix the CPU first to then test the bloatware impact. 

And all that is without mentioning that the plastic pump cap for the cooler was crooked. The cooler itself was not. So that wasn't part of the problem here, but the cap was. And that just looks bad for a $5,000 computer. Functionally though, there's no change. 

This is the most idiotically configured pre-built PC we have tested. But we’ve reviewed it and because of that, we’re going to be changing our “It’s-better-than-Dell” award to “It’s-better-than-HP.”

Maingear’s Shroud gaming PC is trying something different in the pre-built space, but they need to execute it better

The Highlights

• Our Maingear Shroud PC comes with an AMD 9800X3D CPU and RTX 5090 GPU
• The PC tries to set itself apart with liquid metal and a pre-applied overclock on the memory, the latter of which is unstable and the former of which isn't the best application
• The PC is a far better value than the Origin PC and Alienware Area-51 PCs we recently reviewed, but is still for more expensive by percent cost than other pre-built systems
• Original MSRP: $6,000

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

Today we’re reviewing a $6,000 pre-built gaming PC from Maingear. It’s cross-branded with a streamer named shroud and even includes its own unstable memory overclock, which is a feature you normally have to invest hours of your own time into giving up on, but now you can outsource the memory overclocking failures to a third-party. It also claims to have a CPU OC and claims to have liquid metal for the TIM, which is more in-line with true enthusiast building than we typically see in pre-builts. Maingear gets credit for taking more risks.

They do some things amazingly, like one of the best Windows installs we’ve seen on a prebuilt, and some things poorly. It’s ups and downs, but overall, we saw a lot that we liked.

Editor's note: This was originally published on June 30, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Writing

Jeremy Clayton

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Camera

Tim Phetdara
Tannen Williams

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

The price increase over DIY parts cost was not one of them: It’s 21-40% higher than DIY parts at retail, depending on which GPU you use in comparison. That’s significantly better than Alienware’s 50% increase, but still high. But there’s good reason it’s this high: Shroud’s name is on the case. This guy, apparently called “shroud” with a lower case S, we’re told, used to be good at CS:GO and is currently a streamer, and that means this computer costs more because it makes you good at Counter-Strike…

What’s more interesting to us is that Maingear is the first system integrator we’ve seen to use the new HAVN HS420 case (read our review), which was an excellent first showing from Maingear in our benchmarks. They also shoved a screen into the side. We found that Maingear had the cleanest operating system install that we’ve seen in recent pre-built history and they actually did some BIOS tuning, which are great positives. The choice of a 9800X3D (read our review) is also a welcomed change of pace from Intel’s weird dominance in the pre-built space, but again, it is expensive and they do need to deliver on all of those things.

Let’s get into the review.

We bought this computer for a few reasons. One of them is that it has the HAVN HS420, which is one of the first pre-builts we’ve seen with the case. That alone made it interesting because it’s really particular with how it’s configured. We’d thought it would be a good test to see if Maingear was paying attention to how it should be configured. We also bought it because it was one of their first builds with a 50-series card in it. It also happens to be cross-branded with shroud.

We can see that Maingear likes Shroud so much that it made an entire line of pre-built gaming PCs named after him. There’s the “Custom shroud Edition,” the $7,300 “shroud Signature Edition (Mk. II)” that launched more recently, and the absent middle child that we have for review today. 

This is the original shroud Signature Edition from the 5090 (read our review) launch. We’re calling it the Mk. I.

It can only be found via Archive.org’s WaybackMachine despite only being only a few months old and costing $6,000. 

The system has a 9800X3D, RTX 5090, and 48GB of custom-tuned DDR5-8000 that apparently increases your chance at hitting headshots. 

We wonder if that’s worth the chance of system crashes. 

Price Comparison vs. DIY

Maingear shroud Signature Pre-built | Part and Price Breakdown | GamersNexus

Here’s the breakdown of parts and price comparison versus DIY. The good news is that almost all of the parts are available at retail. The exception is Maingear’s self-branded 420mm so-called “Epic” liquid cooler, but we can sub-in another liquid cooler.

Overall, the parts list mostly has parts that make sense together, with the potential exception of the ASRock motherboard due to ASRock’s issues with killing some X3D CPUs. We interviewed ASRock at Computex this year, in case you want to learn more about that -- they think it’s fixed, but Reddit shows it may be ongoing.

We calculated two different DIY totals for this, since the $2,000 RTX 5090 FE is basically unobtainable. With the FE, DIY is just under $4,300. With the cheapest partner 5090 we could find at the time of writing (the ~$2,650 Gigabyte Windforce), the total comes to about $4,950.

We paid $6,000 for the system, so that puts the difference at $1,700 with the FE, which is in absolute crazy territory for the delta -- but that’s if you can get a 5090 at that price. The Gigabyte Windforce puts it at $1,050 on top of DIY parts cost – still high, but not quite as insane when viewed as a 21% increase. The Alienware Area-51 we just reviewed was at 50%, and the Origin Genesis was at 34% depending on if you compared against the original price or the later $8,400 price. 

Overview and Marketing

To try and understand why Maingear thinks it’s worth demanding that kind of price, we turned to the lifeblood of any industry: Marketing.

The Signature Edition is “co-developed” by shroud and Maingear and is pitched as the exact hardware and settings used in his main PC.

It’s got custom decals in various places around the HAVN HS 420 VGPU case and a riveted badge that’s “Inspired by shroud’s personal pinball machine collection.” 

Weirdly, Maingear neglects to mention HAVN anywhere on the page, listing the case as “MAINGEAR shroud Signature Edition.” That’s unfortunate for HAVN, especially seeing as its HS420 really deserves the recognition.

The system is advertised as overclocked right out of the box, both on the 9800X3D CPU and the aforementioned headshot-boosting DDR5-8000 RAM.

Factory OC is rare for a pre-built and essentially unheard of on RAM, so we’ll validate those claims later. It’s a cool idea. Maingear directly advertises reliability and the OC in the same sentence, which is bold, and also incorrect. 

Also interesting is the claimed use of liquid metal TIM on the CPU. 

That’s interesting, and we’ll take a look at that, but using liquid metal on a lidded CPU has significantly less impact than using it with a delidded CPU, where it would really excel. It also introduces risk if not done carefully by Maingear.

There’s a 1920x720 display inside, covering the drive bay area in the HS 420. It’s connected to the 9800X3D’s integrated graphics via a USB-C cable that routes out to the rear I/O. 

Maingear suggests that it’s perfect for chat, but the curve in the glass sits directly between the screen and the user in the normal desk position. 

That’s fine though, everyone knows these screens are actually for waifus.

As part of the “MAINGEAR Difference,” it boasts “100% Zero Bloatware. It’s a confusing concept grammatically, but easy to check in practice. We value a clean OS, so having 100% of zero would be an ideal percent share of zero bloatware to have.

Tear-Down

Let’s get into the tear-down.

One of the reasons why we like the HAVN HS 420 case is how the panel mechanically slots in.

Pulling the backside off reveals the cable management. The PC uses cable extensions, which introduces another point of failure. The 12VHPWR cable is actually a replacement one, which was smart of Maingear. This means it goes from the GPU to the power supply and doesn’t use an extension like the 24-pin. This is good.   

The PC uses a vertical GPU mount. The glass pane acts kind of like a flow guide. The idea is that it shoots the air from the bottom up towards the glass and back at the GPU, but in our testing, it hindered performance, though not in a big way. Actually laying the 3 bottom fans down flat performed better. This means the PC uses a sub-optimal configuration, though it’s still okay. The system’s bigger problem is that they aren’t utilizing the fans speeds the way they should be. 

The gap between the GPU and the glass plate should be much closer. The closer the GPU is to the top edge of the glass, the better it will perform. Otherwise, it introduces some potential recirculation issues.  

For the case, HAVN recommends using the lower back fan as intake and the upper back fan as exhaust. Unfortunately, Maingear set up both fans as intake. This means the system integrator isn’t following the case manufacturer’s recommendation. When we tested the case, HAVN’s recommended way did work better. 

Continuing with the tear-down, we unplugged the power cable from the video card. We noticed that Maingear used a GPU bracket that looked 3D printed. To remove the GPU, we had to unscrew its vertical kit off and unscrew the GPU from its bracket. We unscrewed the radiator at the top to give us better access to remove the vertical kit. The shroud’s glass made it difficult to press down on the video card’s locking clip with our hand, so we used a screwdriver. 

With the GPU removed, we can move forward with the rest of the disassembly. We tugged on all of the cables and saw that they were all secure and properly connected, which is good. Cable management was also tidy with good attention to detail, which is what you want to see from a pre-built. 

Removing the pump for the liquid cooler exposes the extremely lackluster liquid metal application on top of the CPU, which is really disappointing. It wasn’t applied all around the IHS. We also saw a droplet of liquid metal off of the IHS. We noticed that the pads on the CPU were covered, which protects the components. The reason they should do this is because liquid metal is conductive, and might cause a short otherwise. Maingear’s liquid metal application was not the best and we think if they're going to do it, they should do it right.  

Looking at the underside of the cooler’s copper coldplate, it’s not clear if Maingear applied liquid metal here, which it’s supposed to do. Regardless, there’s not enough liquid metal here. Liquid metal needs to contact liquid metal from both sides to properly mate, otherwise there’s potential for gaps, and poor performance as a result. 

The problem with trying to clean up liquid metal is that it tends to get everywhere. And we had to wipe down parts of our system after we took off the cooler to get rid of traces of it in the case. If you don’t do this, it can potentially cause a short. 

Next, we checked to see if all of the screws in the motherboard were properly screwed in. We discovered that one of them was torqued too tight and basically bound a screw to its standoff. We had to use the help of pliers to unscrew it.

With that removed, we were able to pull the ASRock motherboard out of the case. 

We then took the NVME SSD out of the motherboard and saw that Maingear had removed the tape off the thermal pad, which we’ve seen Starforge fail at in the past and unlike Alienware’s Area-51 PC we recently reviewed, the drive wasn’t bent either. 

With the tear-down done, let’s get into the rest of the system.

Thermals

Thermals - Steady-State

We’ll start with thermal benchmarks. A full system load at steady state has the GPU at 80 degrees Celsius and GPU memory at 96.5 degrees Celsius, which we think is unacceptably high for the memory. The core is OK here. Despite NVIDIA’s FE design being so good overall, its memory can sometimes run too hot in some configurations. This is one of them. As this system ages, the pads age, and dust enters the system, we worry about the memory temperature long-term. The CPU temperature was 84 degrees Celsius with a 420mm liquid cooler, with the chipset at 74 at the hottest as a result of getting dumped on by the GPU. We’ll need to look at noise levels and the power consumption from the overclock to better understand if these numbers make sense.

Other assorted temperatures were fine.

Thermals - CPU Over Time

Now we’ll briefly plot CPU and chipset temperatures against the fan speeds to see how Maingear’s custom fan curve plays out.

CPU temperature rapidly rises at the start of the test and eventually hits the 80s. The AIO pump stays constant for RPM, while the main CPU fans stairstep before settling in just under 1,600 RPM. Overall, this kind of curve mostly makes sense. The biggest downside is that the chassis fans aren’t doing much at under 700 RPM, rendering them to basically be RGB ornaments and limit their usefulness for something like GPU memory thermals.

Adding the “Chipset 2” sensor to the chart again illustrates the general heat dump from the GPU with the flow-through design.

Thermals - GPU Over Time

Moving on to GPU thermals over time shows an interesting start as core and memory temperatures steadily increase during the initial idle period of the test, then a steep decline as the fans kick on. After that, they climb to unacceptably hot on the memory and about 80C for the GPU temperature. 80 is fine for the GPU core.

The same goes for the fans – the initial rise to 30% and subsequent quick ramp to 50% are expected.

CPU Frequency

This is a bar chart comparing the average all-core frequency performance for the 9800X3D at steady-state in a separate all-core Blender workload. Maingear’s overclocking claims fall short as the pre-built configuration ran at 5157MHz average, 68MHz slower than in our original review of the CPU when it was tested stock and out-of-the-box without any overclocking. Maingear’s overclock is not actually overclocking the CPU. It’s actually performing lower than the expectation.

Maingear’s website states: “Amplified by liquid metal TIM and AMD 3D V-cache technology, the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D utilizes 104MB of on chip memory to deliver massive gaming performance boosts to the overclocked 8-core processor, maximizing frame rate output on the most popular and demanding games.” So for all that liquid metal, 420mm liquid cooler, and use of aggressive PBO settings, Maingear falls short of actually delivering its promise. Part of this is because of how Maingear used PBO without fine-tuning, but the marketing sets clear expectations. They need to have good acoustics to be worth this trade-off.

Acoustics - dBA Over Time

Acoustic testing is performed in our hemi-anechoic chamber, which we built a couple years ago for around $250,000 and have used regularly since then. The chamber has allowed us new insights into cases and coolers in reviews and also gets a lot of use for prebuilt reviews. 

For noise over time, the system started out at a very low 16.9dBA during the idle period, before rising to roughly 25-26dBA during the first few minutes of load when measured at 1 meter, then running at roughly 27.1dBA at steady-state.

We have no complaints about the noise in the shroud Signature Edition – Meangear did well here, but the trade-off is clear in our earlier thermal results. Maingear has some room acoustically to get a little more aggressive on noise to combat these thermal concerns with the VRAM, particularly in some of the under-utilized chassis fans.

Total System Power Consumption

Full system power consumption during the full-torture load started out at an average of 153W when idle. That’s higher than the Origin Genesis’ roughly 125W idle, and that had a full-size water cooling pump. This is due to the internal screen taking power in addition to all the LEDs.

After the load was established, the system shot up to about 840W and stayed there, very slowly rising to 860W at steady-state.

BIOS

We need to understand what Maingear did for this overclock.

Jumping into the BIOS for the first time was extremely laggy and slow, and maddeningly, not all of the inputs went through. A reboot fixed it at least.

We checked out the ASRock X870E Nova WiFi’s BIOS version 3.17 that came on the system. This revision isn’t available publicly at the time of writing, but research pointed to it being launched in January 2025. The PC was built near the very end of February, meaning that version 3.20 (released 2/24) should have been installed. The possible exception is if Maingear has an actual thorough process to make sure the OC settings work on newer BIOS versions, potentially requiring validation. Version 3.25 did not exist yet so that’s fine that it’s not on here.

It came with two profiles already saved. The default profile (named “MG SHROUD OC”) sets AMD’s PBO to its most aggressive settings and has numerous tweaks to the system memory that indicate a genuinely custom OC, which is pretty cool. Voltages, miscellaneous settings like “DDR5 Nitro Mode,” and even tightened timings of 34-48-48-86 with a 1T command rate show manual tuning.

The extreme memory profile for this kit uses primary timings of 38-48-48-84, so Maingear did actually manually modify the settings, which is pretty cool.

We can respect that and credit to them for being more like actual enthusiasts.

But also like actual enthusiasts, this isn’t fully stable. And yes, we did just roast the entire audience, kind of like how the VRAM roasts on the FE GPU.

We didn’t experience any crashes during our earlier thermal testing, but workloads are highly varied and don’t always trigger problems. Explicitly testing the memory revealed instability and caused a crash when we set it to run over a weekend. We also saw multiple errors within minutes under MemTest64, and a full system crash within hours of launching OCCT’s RAM test.

So at best, this OC might be called “game stable” by people who want to cope, but it’s not actually stable, and that means it’s only a matter of time before you run into some kind of game where it is also not stable. You also wouldn’t want to do any meaningful, actual work on a system with unstable memory because it could result in a loss of data. This is a huge fumble that indicates Maingear’s testing isn’t rigorous enough.

The other profile, “MG STOCK OC,” switches the CPU to auto PBO instead of the more aggressive settings on the shroud profile. It also drops some of the memory related voltages and loosens the RAM timings back to the XMP numbers. This is not the default profile, though.

The BIOS showed other signs of care, like the auto driver installer being disabled, which we really appreciate, and custom fan curves all around. SIs normally leave fans set to the motherboard defaults, so this is cool to see. Maingear is doing cool stuff in BIOS, but they need to perform more exhaustive stability testing.

Software and OS Setup

Windows is next.

Maingear wins points for setting up the Windows 11 installer to automatically include the “I don’t have internet” button on the first go. Maingear must have customized the install to allow this, and that’s great because it’s the only way to make a local account, and Microsoft keeps taking steps to make the workaround more difficult. There were no additional agreements or data harvesting attempts tacked on at the end, either. This is one of the best things Maingear did for the system.

The desktop itself was clean, with no bloatware on the desktop or in the start menu, or tray. We guess this really is what “100% zero” looks like: Scientists have said humans can’t conceptualize nothingness for centuries, and yet here we are, seeing it on the Windows desktop. And that’s a good thing. There were no missing drivers and the NVIDIA driver version was 572.60, which was released February 27th, so that’s as up to date as it could be when it was built.

Overall, we’d put Maingear’s OS setup into the “great” category.

Unfortunately, the internal screen gave us trouble. It didn’t even detect on the first boot, which is a big problem and it was a toss-up if it would come on with subsequent boots. Unplugging and re-connecting the rear USB-C cable gets it going again, but even then we had to manually change the screen orientation in Windows. This is annoying and disappointing for a main feature. The upside is that there’s no custom software. The downside is that relying on Windows to guess the right setup isn’t going to work. We think the issues stem, at least partly, from using the IGP.

Packaging and Accessories

Packaging was simple, with soft foam inside to protect the PC. Ours came with a hole in the box, but there wasn’t any damage to the system. We would have liked to see more protection for a $6,000 computer. It doesn’t need to be an Origin wooden crate, but sturdier cardboard boxes would be good for safety.

Aside from the PC, there was a QA checklist, some stickers, and the standard case, motherboard, and PSU extras. We like when the companies include the component accessories that they wouldn’t otherwise have a use for.

The quick start guide was a mixed bag. On one hand, it had good basics like a warning to remove any foam inside the build (though there wasn’t any in our case), and instructions to make sure the PSU was switched on.

On the other hand, it says “connect secondary monitor to USB-C here,” referring to the motherboard I/O. This is a very strange instruction. We’re pretty sure it means the internal screen, but it’s not immediately clear based on the vague language. 

It’s not until we went to the link on the QR code that it became clear. Maingear should update this section of the guide.

Trade-In Program

Finally, Maingear has a trade-in program specifically for this PC. The company says that when it upgrades a component in shroud’s personal PC, it’ll notify all Signature Edition customers via an email that details the upgrade and its alleged performance boost.

Cynically, we think the point of this is to use FOMO marketing on parasocial whales. There’s only a 14-day decision window, so clearly time pressure is part of the plan. We haven’t received an offer like this as far as we can tell, unless it went to spam or something (which is possible with a promo email), but the currently advertised signature Edition has a higher-end CPU versus our original model. We feel like that should have qualified as an upgrade opportunity, although it doesn’t seem worth taking.

CPU, motherboard, and PSU upgrades require sending the PC to Maingear, while RAM and storage will be handled by mail. Labor is free for the shroud-specific upgrades, but customers have to buy shipping labels and parts from Maingear. They want you to keep the original box and foam to ship in, too. Maingear does not provide shipping boxes.

Conclusion

The Maingear shroud Signature Edition pre-built PC is an interesting mix of highs and lows. From a value standpoint, the $1,000-$1,700 markup over DIY is hard to swallow, but is far from the worst we’ve seen for this caliber of build. Again, Alienware and Origin set the bar at awful levels for that.

There are some serious negatives to this system, but also serious positives. We haven’t run into a prebuilt like this in a while:

The operating system setup is excellent, with extra steps taken to enable local accounts without the users needing to know how to modify the OOBE parameters is nice because most users won’t know that. 

Tuning in BIOS is well appreciated, but the stability issues are problematic and unacceptable. Thermals are mostly OK, with the exception of the FE’s VRAM temperature. This could be partially combatted by Maingear with better configuration of the case and fan speeds, as we showed in our HS420 review, and with better utilization of the chassis fans that basically serve as decorations at their current speeds.

From an aesthetic standpoint, we also think the customizations to the HAVN HS 420 are overall fine if you’re a fan of shroud without going overboard.

On the bad side, the prominently-featured internal screen has to be babied into working consistently.

Worse is the unstable RAM OC. It’s a unique selling point, so we’d like to see the company nail this next time. Price is also pretty high, but less offensively than Alienware’s.

We review Alienware’s 2025 Area-51 and test its thermal performance, noise levels, power consumption, and more

The Highlights

• Our Alienware Area-51 PC was outfitted with an RTX 5080 and an Intel 285K CPU
• The system is a poor value and came with a bent SSD
• Despite its flaws, the company’s 2025 Area-51 PC represents a huge improvement for the company
• Original MSRP: $4,650

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

Alienware got tired of us finding all the flaws in its Aurora line of desktop pre-builts, so it brought back the big guns: The Area-51. That’s a name we haven’t heard in a long time. Well, except for that one incident we had in Nevada…but we’ve been told not to talk about that.

As for Alienware’s Area 51, we bought one for independent review.

Speaking purely about the PC itself, this is the most significant positive effort we’ve seen from Alienware to date – including an overhaul to thermals and a new focus on industry standard parts.

Editor's note: This was originally published on June 18, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Writing

Jeremy Clayton

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Camera

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

They have QR codes everywhere to detail how users can service parts, which has been our number one Alienware complaint for about a decade now. They’ve switched to using fewer proprietary components, meaning more user serviceability. That’s a huge improvement.

But Alienware still had negatives, like the inability to manually control the fans. The biggest negative is the price: We paid $4,650 for this, which at the time of purchase, was $1,500 more expensive than DIY at the time we put the pricing table together. And that’s with “$400 off” the “estimated value,” a number that Alienware claims is based on competitive data but is clearly, instead, based on something we call, uh, “bullsh*t.”

The good news is that, somehow, this is still more price competitive than Origin’s high-end pre-built PCs. Under normal circumstances, on value alone, we’d say this prebuilt is eliminated from consideration; however, Origin puts Alienware into a new perspective where, somehow, even a $1,500 higher price than DIY parts looks doable.

The thermals and construction are the most interesting for this one. Let’s get into it.

Alienware Area-51 Price Comparison vs. DIY

Alienware Area-51 AAT2250 Pre-built | Part and Price Breakdown | GamersNexus

We’ll start with a price comparison. Prices for DIY parts were taken at the end of May and were as close a match as we could find to Alienware’s selection. We did not try to fine-tune.

The new Area-51 comes in 13 different configurations, up from just 3 when we ordered, all with Intel Core Ultra CPUs and NVIDIA RTX 50 Series GPUs. 

Our configuration has a 285K, an RTX 5080 (read our review), 64GB of DDR5-6400, and a 4TB SSD.

Along with that is a 360mm liquid cooler and a 1500W 80 Plus Platinum rated ATX12VO PSU.

Value discussion is a total non-starter. The DIY total comes to $3,091 at the time of writing, making it $1,559 less expensive than the Alienware’s ridiculous $4,650 price tag. Expressed another way, the Area-51 is 50% more expensive than DIY parts cost; there are cheaper pre-builts out there. If you’re opposed to DIY (and we don’t have a problem with people buying pre-builts). We think the Area-51’s case is probably more expensive to produce than the manufacturing cost of our Lian Li Lancool 216 RGB substitution, but that’s obviously not enough to really sway the math. It’s also not relevant to an end user.

Overview and Marketing

The biggest updates to the Area-51 are the construction, thermal solutions, and part choices. Alienware actually had emailed us to ask if we wanted to look at one, as the company felt confident in its changes. We rejected the offer and bought one independently, as always for pre-built reviews, as we wanted the full customer experience.

Alienware went with a traditionally laid out large tower case with far more ventilation than its past designs. As a reminder of how bad it’s been before, we made an entire video “fixing” the dumpster fire known as the Alienware R13.

On the new system, the top, front, and most of the bottom are all air intake areas, leaving the meshed-out rear as a totally passive exhaust. Particularly interesting are the two 180mm fans in the front panel, reminiscent of the Fractal Torrent. There’s roughly 35mm of clearance in the front cutout, which should be sufficient to avoid too much restriction despite looking covered. It helps that the hub loses the most access to air, and yet is the only part of a fan that air can’t go through. The dust filter inside the panel is magnetically retained for easier cleaning as well, which is a nice feature.

The CPU is cooled by a 360mm liquid cooler with access to fresh air through the top, with a dust filter that slides out to the rear, retained by a screw. The bottom has one as well.

Alienware Area-51 Tear-Down

The last couple of Alienware systems we’ve tested have been really difficult to take apart. This one is easier to work with. 

To get inside, you remove a screw, turn the lock knob, then press these spring-loaded buttons to release the side panels. Fortunately, they rest in a partially opened position without falling – then you just lift up. Access inside is pretty good, and the cable management is overall good.

The next biggest thing following after thermals is the Area-51’s shift to standard ATX parts – well, mostly. The motherboard is a custom Alienware model with standard ATX mounting points, but it’s actually ATX12VO electrically. That also means that the 1500W PSU is ATX12VO to match. You can see how instead of a 24-pin connector, the board has a 10-pin and a supplemental 6-pin along the right edge.

If you don’t know what ATX12VO is, we have a video from a couple years ago that covers it, so go check that out after this.

Cable management is really well done. This is an area where pre-builts tend to do really well.  

Looking at the other side and inside the system, the video card is relatively large but there’s plenty of room to upgrade.

The bottom of the system has a really huge power supply shroud, which has fans inside them.

The top of the case has a bar that covers the side of the radiator, which has been in past Alienware systems.  

We generally like how the heat sink for the VRM are finned. 

The system uses a fan header cage that creates a make-shift 12-pin connector. 

The PC doesn’t use any proprietary connectors and all the connections into the motherboard were secure.

The RTX 5080 inside is held in place by the most substantial GPU bracket we’ve ever seen. It’s a chunk of solid metal attached to both the end of the GPU and the internal wall of the case and it slides into place. It’s pretty nice, but totally unnecessary and adds to the expense. It does somewhat make sense in a pre-built to prevent breaking during shipping, however. 

Looking at the video card, it uses a very large flow-through area, which is excellent. The last time we tested Dell’s video card, which was a 4090, the company’s design did surprisingly well for what it was.  

Inside the PC, we noticed a fully custom USB 3.0 connector, which goes into the motherboard at a 90-degree angle. 

Their HD-audio connector also has an extra protrusion on it to latch it in. 

We like how Alienware labeled almost every single cable.

Removing the pump block, we can see a thermal pad was applied underneath. The paste pattern is a bit lacking in spots. 

On the CPU side, we noticed a slight gap in coverage on one of the corners, but that’s an okay spot. Overall, it looks good. 

We also like how water block’s cables were kept short and run straight into the board, which is an advantage that Dell has.  

Removing the screws from the motherboard, we discovered one that wasn’t all the way in. 

Lifitng the motherboard out of the case, we noticed that it was sticky on the back, which indicates that it wasn’t thoroughly cleaned. It shouldn’t hurt anything, but it’s kind of ugly.  

Removing the heat sink off of the SSD and taking a look at its thermal pad looked good as there was no tape on it.

Taking a look at the SSD itself, that didn’t look great as it was bent. Alienware is lucky it didn’t snap the SSD. This is disappointing because the company was doing relatively well up until this point. Taking the drive out, it maintains its very slight arc as a result. 

Taking another look at some of the components, there was a lot of factory dust inside the system. 

Opening up the PSU shroud enclosure, and removing the back-most fan, we can see it doing functionally nothing as it’s right up against the power supply. The case’s 2 grills also add impedance as well. Looking at the bottom of the system, there isn’t a lot of room for air to come up through. 

We also noticed a lot more factory dust. 

We took the top radiator fans out and measured them at 38mm, which are pretty thick.  

Alienware Area-51 Upgradeability

Back to the rest of the review:

Alienware intends for this generation of Area-51 to be expandable and upgradable into the future. That’s apparent in immediate ways like the empty drive trays under the right side panel with pre-routed cables, which is something we like. 

Unfortunately, rumors point to LGA1851 being a dead-end platform. If that’s true, there won’t be any CPU upgrades.

The GPU would be as easy to swap as in any normal PC, and space is plentiful. Alienware also claims up to a 420mm radiator can fit in the top of the case.

It gets weird when considering a motherboard swap. Since this is an ATX12VO system, that means it would either need to be another ATX12VO motherboard or you’d have to also swap the PSU, which would be a shame. This is a chicken or the egg problem. There aren’t many ATX12VO motherboards in the DIY market, but Alienware also isn’t using something proprietary. It is a real standard. It’s just not one that’s heavily adopted by DIY motherboards. 

The really weird thing is the so-called “AlienFX board” behind the right side panel. It’s a combo platter of fan and light control, along with providing front panel connectivity. However, it doesn’t actually have any fans connected to it – they’re all directly connected to the motherboard as normal. Alienware’s idea here, we think, is that if you ever do swap the motherboard, you can buy a conversion kit. That kit hooks the AlienFX board to the new motherboard, and would then provide both light and fan control via the Alienware software.

Frankly it seems back-asswards to how we’d think this would go. It would make more sense to us if the stock configuration had all the fans connected to the AlienFX board, then a future motherboard swap would just use the regular headers.

So overall, the Area-51 is technically upgradeable, it’s just in a niche tech-tree with a dubious future.

The case is also covered in at least 7 QR codes that link to various sections of the manual. It’s detailed, including this cool exploded diagram of the system and a dedicated screw list. Alienware is actually making progress here. Using ATX12VO and LGA1851 is a limiter, but the parts are standard, and that’s a big improvement over the proprietary crap they’ve used in the past.

Intro to Charts

Let’s get into the benchmarks.

CPU Thermals - Steady State - Alienware Control

We’re starting with CPU thermals at steady state. The Performance fan preset resulted in a huge temperature reduction versus the other options of 7.3 degrees Celsius on the P-cores versus the stock Balanced preset at 74.5C. The Quiet preset didn’t change much and was roughly 1 degree warmer than Balanced.

E-cores average and follow the same pattern.

GPU Thermals - Steady State - Alienware Control

GPU thermals under automatic fan control are pretty much a wash and illustrate NVIDIA’s maintenance of a target temperature from VBIOS.

GPU Thermals vs. Fan Speed - Over Time - Alienware Control

Here’s a quick look at GPU temperature and its fan speed over time. The results are unremarkable except as a model for what this should look like. GPU temperature quickly climbed to the high 60s and the fans locked in at 50% after a few minutes. That’s definitely a lot better than what we saw with Origin, where it took 8 minutes for the fans to do anything. 

I/O Thermals - Steady State - Alienware Control

Other temperatures were mostly unremarkable, with the exception of the PCH temperature getting significantly more cooling with Performance mode. Any of these results are acceptable for the chipset temperature, though, so this mostly tells us where the air goes.

Intro to Manual Fan Control Thermals

Next, we’re manually controlling the fan speeds to do some A/B testing to evaluate Alienware’s design choices. We connected all the fans to a Corsair fan controller preloaded with PWM values that roughly correspond to the values at steady-state under Alienware’s control. The GPU fans were fixed at 50%.

We did testing stock, with the front panel removed, and with the top fans flipped to exhaust.

Steady State - Manual Control

Broadly speaking: Removing the front panel had no meaningful impact on results and was within error. Top exhaust significantly improved drive temperature, GPU memory temperature, and GPU temperature for the core, with reductions of about 3 degrees in each. The GPU temperature in particular improves because of the better ability to utilize flow-through cooling, evicting warmed air out the top of the case in a straight path for the GPU. This naturally heats up the CPU radiator more, which means CPU temperature slightly increases. The CPU can take it though, and the GPU will actually boost slightly higher as a result of this. Likewise, the CPU temperature increase is less than the GPU temperature decrease.

Frequency - CPU

CPU frequency has frequently been a key area of failure for several of the pre-builts that we’ve reviewed – usually due to poor thermals or power management.

To Alienware’s credit, that’s not the case here. The Intel 285K with the 360mm liquid cooler and the fans at the Performance preset only loses an average of 29MHz across the P-cores versus our original review of the 285K. The stock Balanced preset gives up 115MHz on average, and Quiet falls behind by 145MHz versus stock. A 145MHz loss is large across all cores averaged and would be noticeable where performance is time-based, but because it’s an optional fan preset, we’re OK with it as long as users know about it. It’s trading clocks for lower noise.

Acoustics - dBA Over Time

Next up is testing in our hemi-anechoic chamber, which we’ll use to evaluate noise levels of the different preset fan profiles (now that we know the trade-off for performance and thermals).

The stock Balanced profile idles around 21-22dBA before spiking in response to the initial CPU load. There’s a faint extended stair-step pattern throughout the test duration before settling in at 29.7dBA average at steady-state.

The Quiet profile follows much the same pattern – actually measuring slightly louder than Balanced during parts of the test. This reflects the extremely similar thermal behavior we saw between Balanced and Quiet.

Performance idle was around 24-25dBA, ramping beyond 30dBA quickly, then settling in at 35.9dBA at steady-state. It’s not objectively that loud, but is by comparison to the reserved nature of the default curve. 

Power at the Wall

Measuring power at the wall during the full system torture load shows only marginal differences between the three profiles, all sitting around 650W average at load. The most significant difference is elevated power consumption at idle when using the Performance profile. This is due to the raised fan and pump speeds.

Setup and Software

Software and setup is next.

The Windows installation process was modified to include a registration form and agreements to Alienware’s terms. We can never just get a clean Windows install from Dell. The good news is that you don’t have to fill them out or agree to them, you can just press next. The bad news is that it doesn’t tell you that’s even an option.

After hitting the desktop, we saw that all drivers were present, but the NVIDIA driver version was 572.16 from the 50 series launch on January 30th, despite newer versions being available at the time of build. Also, one of the Intel drivers was even older, dating back to October 2024, even though much newer versions are available.

Bloatware includes the Alienware Command Center (which is actually needed for fan and light control), Alienware Digital Delivery, Dolby Access, Killer Intelligence Center networking, Microsoft Office, including “Outlook (new),” and SupportAssist.

This is a lot of crap for a clean install. It’s not the worst we’ve seen: There weren’t any anti-virus solutions installed from McAfee or Norton, which is a major positive, but it’s still a little bit bloated.

Upon opening the Alienware Command Center, you get hit with text reading “Welcome, Gamer!” The main page shows a few basic metrics like CPU, GPU, and RAM utilization, and also basic thermals. From here you can choose performance profiles, which control the fan curves.

Weirdly, the performance page claims that Performance mode does this: “GPU power consumption is increased above the rated power levels. Your system’s graphics performance may be amplified while consuming more energy.”

That makes Performance sound aggressive, like it’s overclocked or something, and implies pushing beyond normal limits, which is just a lie. It runs at the rated power levels, not above them, unless Alienware means above its own rated power levels rather than NVIDIA’s, in which case that’s misleading. The app claims it controls overclocking settings, but the Custom profile gives neither clock nor power control.

One huge miss here is the inability to set truly custom fan curves. All you can do is add a positive percentage offset to the existing base fan curve. It technically works, but it’s awkward and deprives the user of granular control.

Detailed temperature readouts are split into 8 “zones.” It would have been interesting if these were thermocouples actually placed around the system, but they’re not. CPU, Front, and Top are the CPU temperature, and Bottom is the GPU temperature.

Packaging and Accessories

The Area-51 came in a huge and heavy box. The outer box pulls off after popping the retaining plugs, revealing the foam-encased PC. There’s even a chunk of foam shoved into the front panel opening, which is welcomed attention to detail to prevent front panel damage.

The case itself was absolutely mummified in a ridiculous amount of plastic – every panel, edge, and piece of trim was covered. This is annoying to remove and also creates unnecessary waste.

Inside the case was a block of foam for additional GPU support. This is great and allows Alienware to ship with the GPU installed, rather than requiring user installation.

The only included accessories are a basic keyboard and mouse, like the kind you’d get with any Dell system off the shelf.

BIOS

The BIOS is Dell standard with simple sections and a straightforward layout. Mildly interesting is the dust filter maintenance reminder setting, but it’s Disabled by default. This could be pretty cool if utilized properly.

Thankfully, XMP and resizable BAR were turned on, so a few points for that.

Otherwise, there were no oddities in the BIOS settings.

Alienware Area-51 Conclusion

Alienware’s Area-51 is massively improved over Alienware’s predecessor systems. The build quality is better. The company also moved over to standardized components. 

The biggest mark against the system that takes it down from an overall positive review to one with more criticisms is really that SSD. If we saw that much of a bend on an SSD, we would personally opt to replace it, even if it was working at that moment, to avoid any potential data loss. 

The dust and the dirt were also pretty gross throughout the system and it’s an issue we’ve seen in past Alienware systems. The company has not improved here. What we found is that as you use the PC, the dust loosens up and gets into the system itself. There’s no reason this system should be this dirty out of the box. We don’t normally see that from other vendors. 

Those are 2 marks against the system despite being overall positive on it otherwise. The price is also 50% over DIY price. As a reference, the Thermaltake View series system that we previously reviewed was roughly 7% over DIY part costs. We’ve looked at some other systems in the past, like some of Maingear’s stuff, which charge around 30% over DIY parts. So the 50% is really high and that kind of kills it on value alone for us despite all of the other improvements. 

In a market where it’s a roll of the dice whether competition is even competent, some amount of people will pay extra just to know that it works. The build quality is good and the bloatware is not that bad. 

Alienware clearly took some of the criticisms about the former Aurora desktops seriously. The case is heavy and somewhat elaborate, but it’s actually kind of thoughtful in some places. The part selection is niche and may not have a clear upgrade path, but it’s not proprietary, so that puts fault on Intel more than Alienware this time, though we’d like to see something like a 9800X3D (read our review) option. ATX12VO is rare, but it’s an actual standard that has efficiency improvements over regular ATX12V. If Alienware sticks with this but lands on a more upgradeable platform in the future, they may have the basis of a good formula.

The price is the worst part. We were able to find some alternative pre-builts with similar components for about a $700 - $900 increase over DIY cost, which would make those cheaper, but we’re working to get those in to make sure they’re any good. 

Anyways, it’s actually a good computer, and unironically, Alienware can get the “It’s-better-than-Dell” award. It is technically a Dell, but now we just need to see if Dell can improve its actual Dell name product lineup for gaming. We may change the name of the award to “It’s-better-than-Origin.”

We take a look at ID-Cooling’s new air and liquid coolers, which aim to balance quality and value with their designs

The Highlights

• ID-Cooling’s A720 AD and A720 TD represent the company’s attempt to fix its acoustic problems while being affordable
• ID Cooling has a range of liquid coolers from low-end to high-end starting around $80 to $100 for 360mm coolers
• The company’s SL360 V2 Plus cooler interestingly uses a larger radiator than it does fans

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

We visited ID-Cooling’s booth at Computex 2025 and the company showed off scented paste…and a bunch of coolers.

Looking at the company’s product at the trade show, we found ID-Cooling’s products to be more expensive than Thermalright's, but they’re cheaper than others in the market. This places them somewhere in the middle but the company is trying to keep quality levels in focus for some of their designs.

Editor's note: This was originally published on May 24, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Host

Steve Burke

Camera, Video Editing

Mike Gaglione
Vitalii Makhnovets

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

A720 AD 

ID-Cooling has updated its A720. It’s calling it the A720 AD and it’s targeting the higher-end market but still trying to be affordable at around $70. It represents a serious overhaul from the A720 that we’ve tested before, which was one of the top performers for its price. It was competitive with Noctua and was cheaper. The updated A720 now has pogo pins to deliver power to the fan. This means the fan doesn’t have a cable. 

ID-Cooling has also soldered the finstack to the heatpipes. This is something a couple companies are doing now. Some of them claim that this offers no performance improvement whereas others do claim a performance uplift. ID-Cooling says that, in a like-for-like scenario comparing the old A720 with the new one, the company is seeing about a 2 degree improvement at 280 watts. 

The A720 AD uses PBT fans. The most expensive fans typically use LCP, which uses a liquid crystal material in the middle for the blades. Sometimes they’ll do LCP for the inner and the outer part of the fan. This is what Noctua has done for its super expensive fans where the company is trying to get the tip-to-frame clearance as small as possible, hitting clearance numbers like .6mm or .8mm. This low of a clearance requires LCP or metal. ID-Cooling is using PBT, which helps with the price. The company tells us it’s supposed to be 30% fiberglass reinforced, which helps maintain the rigidity as the fan blades stretch towards the inner walls of the frame over time. 

620 AD

We tested ID-Cooling’s 620 in the past as well. It competed pretty closely with ID-Cooling’s older AK620, but the company showed off its new 620 AD. Like the A720 AD, the company is soldering the fin stack to the heatpipes so there’s some improvement from that and it also moves to a newer fan design. 

We asked ID-Cooling what is the biggest thing it’s trying to change with its revised coolers, and the company told us acoustics is the number 1 complaint it got. So the company has reshaped its blades to feature a more gradual curve to mitigate this issue. ID-Cooling has also changed the blade angle at the hub. We aim to test all of this as soon as it becomes available. It will be $55 and the company hasn’t announced a release date yet. We imagine it might come out around Q4. 

The 620AD offers 3 different levels for the RAM clearance on the front, which can be adjusted and clipped in. 

The outside fan is 28mm and the inside fan is 30mm. This allows the cooler to maintain a higher static pressure through the fin stack, especially with the dual-tower fin stacks. 

410 TD 

ID-Cooling already has its 410 series of coolers, but the company showed off its 410 TD at Computex. The TD stands for temperature display. This does increase the price a little and will supposedly make the 410 TD a $35 cooler.  It has a temperature digital display that shows the CPU temp. The finstack thickness has also changed with the TD model moving to 50mm. The heatpipes are all using a composite powder and groove style. 

It’s also made changes to the cold plate where ID-Cooling is trying to push the 4 heatpipes as close together as possible. It’s not as impressive as we saw at Scythe’s Computex booth, where Scythe basically conjoined them all into one direct touch pad, but they’re getting closer.  

ID-Cooling Liquid Coolers

ID-Cooling showed off a bunch of liquid coolers at Computex 2025, though not as much as at Thermalright’s booth.

SL 360 V2+

One of the liquid coolers, the SL 360 V2+,  immediately jumped out at us because its fans are a different width than the radiator. That’s abnormal. The fans are 120mm but the radiator measures 140mm wide and it was done to incorporate LED lights on the sides of the fans. 

To compensate for the smaller fans, ID-Cooling has added 2 water channels. ID-Cooling also added more liquid. Between the tank and the extra channels, it ends up with 36g more liquid. The propylene glycol percentage is around 15%. The reason that’s important is that the more distilled water there is in the loops, the better the cooling performance is. Propylene glycol helps with things like cold storage, transit, freight, and cold temperatures, but going too high with that compromises performance. 15% is a little on the lower end, which is a good thing for performance. The fans are AP120s and are 28mm thick. ID-Cooling tells us the cooler will have a 6-year warranty and that the surface area has been increased by about 15% compared to traditional 360 setups due to the size change. The cooler is supposed to be $190 when it comes out. 

Unfortunately, the cooler doesn’t come with an offset bracket, and we’ve requested that ID-Cooling include one. 

ID-Cooling informed us that there’s a .5mm gap between the bottom of the microfins and the bottom of the cold plate. Lian Li is experimenting with .3. The downside to that, or  something smaller, is there could be more flex/more weakness. The upside is the performance will be better because you’re getting the liquid and the microfins closer to the heat source, which is the CPU IHS.  

FX 360 TD Black  

At $80, the FX 360 TD Black is the cheapest liquid cooler ID-Cooling showed off. It offers a 360mm cooling setup that’s 27mm thick, which is standard. 

With an LCD screen, it’s $90. And it’s a 240x240 screen. 

DX 360

The company’s DX 360 liquid cooler offers a thicker 38mm radiator. It’s supposed to be $120 with its 2.8-inch LCD screen. Launch is TBD. 

DX 360 GDL 

We saw a prototype of the DX 360 GDL at the show. The key thing about this liquid cooler is that it has very short 100mm-length tubes. They go out from the block and go right into the radiator. The downside to this design is that it forces you to put your radiator at the top, which can be problematic in a super-tall case. The benefit to this design is that it looks clean.

ID-Cooling has also added 82 grams of additional liquid by changing the radiator size, which is 130mm wide and has 120mm fans that are 27mm thick. 

Its cap is also magnetic and pulls right off, which exposes the top of the tubes and the rest of the cooler’s block.

We take a look at Corsair’s upcoming i600 pre-built PC, Air 5400 case, Frame 4000D prototype, and more

The Highlights

• Corsair’s i600 pre-built PC is a new revision on the company’s i500 and overhauls its GPU cooler and CPU radiator
• The Corsair Air 5400 is an airflow-targeted case that has air ducts on the top and bottom of its chassis
• Corsair has partnered with Singularity to develop the Frame 4000D prototype, which has an interesting power board that handles cable management

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

We visited Corsair’s suite at Computex 2025 and liked some of the stuff the company had to show. 

Editor's note: This was originally published on May 21, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Host

Steve Burke

Camera, Video Editing

Mike Gaglione
Vitalii Makhnovets

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

Corsair Air 5400

Corsair will release its Air 5400, which is an airflow-targeted case. On the back side of the case is a giant hole, which couples with a front-mounted radiator that will allow the case to shove air straight out of it. This design allows it to focus air flow for the GPU entirely from its own set of fans at the bottom of the case. 

This is probably the most interesting case from Corsair we saw at Computex this year. It should be around $220, though that’s dependent on the everchanging tariff situation. 

Internally, the Air 5400 has a duct at the bottom where the case has 3x120mm fans (the entire case is actually set up to support all 120mm fans, which simplifies things). The duct is there to guide air into the GPU. Corsair claims that the case is getting about a 1-2 degree improvement with the duct in a like-for-like test. 

If you do end up with a front radiator, then a potential area that gets abandoned in terms of airflow might be around the VRM area and some of the board components like system memory.  

There are mounts for fans up on top of the case along with an additional duct. 

Looking at the back of the case, there are 2 holes on the back, which is surprising for a 120mm fan. The spacing doesn’t look like it would fit a 120mm fan, but Corsair’s plan is to include a bracket that would adapt a 120mm fan here and would actually cut out into the glass area on the back, which would make you lose about 40% of the fan. This should help but raises some questions about whether it may cause acoustic issues when you partially blast air into a glass wall. 

Speaking of glass, the Air 5400’s glass is laminated. A couple companies are doing this now. Corsair says this helps the glass stay more put together to prevent shattering. 

Looking at the back side panel, there’s a big acrylic sheet coupled with an area where air can escape. 

Opening up the back panel, there’s a huge amount of cable-management depth. You can also see that the motherboard tray is punctured all of the way through. This causes concerns around structural rigidity, but Corsair is using a .8mm thick steel, which helps a little bit here. The company has also strengthened the case’s top panel compared to Corsair’s 4000D case, which received negative feedback in that area. 

The Air 5400 is set to be priced at $220 with 3x120mm fans included. 

i600

Corsair is updating its i500 pre-built PC, which we hated, with its upcoming i600, and the company has improved it a lot. 

The i500’s GPU cooling solution had basically no contact with any of the power components. The i600, on the other hand, has massive overhauls here. The case itself has only slightly changed, but the changes made accommodate larger radiators. The block for the video card, including the power components, is totally different in a way that looks promising. 

The stuff that jumped out to us right away about the i600 is the fin stacks for the VRM, which is connected to a shared copper nickel-plated base plate for the GPU and memory. Everything is connected to the same base plate, which is connected to the liquid cooler. This means all of the heat gets dumped into the liquid cooler. There’s pros and cons to this design. The pro is that all of the other components get cooled better. The downside is that the GPU itself is sharing the heat dissipation capacity with all of the other components in the cooler. This means you typically see some increase in the GPU temperature as a result. There’s ups and downs to this approach. It doesn’t necessarily mean one solution is better than the other as long as it’s all cooled. 

The i600 has copper bars, which contact the MOSFETs. Otherwise, it’s very similar to the i500. 

Corsair has also modified its CPU cooler radiator, where the company has moved its tanks off to the side. The tubes are also running in a different direction. Corsair is also moving to 25mm thick fans, where previously they had the slimmer 15mm fans. That extra 10mm will help with pressure and performance a lot. 

We plan on doing a review of the PC as soon as we buy one.

Corsair Frame 4000D

We saw a prototype of Corsair’s Frame 4000D, where the company changed a few things. Corsair partnered with Singularity for its powerboard. It’s somewhat similar to Elmore’s BENCHLAB, with the exception of it not logging power. With the case, you basically run all of the power cables into the power board and then route them to their final locations. We count 10 fan headers here along with a bunch of RGB headers. There’s a lot of possibilities with this. Currently, it’s mostly being used as a cable-management tool, but you could, in theory, expand this to include more switches, like fan-control switches. We would really like to see current monitoring. It would make it more expensive but that could be a potentially useful direction to go in where you could monitor on the 12VHPWR, for instance, which would become a great marketing point for Corsair and would be very useful for end users. 

The front panel is also different as it has a die-cut edge now.  

The power supply setup is also different here with Corsair doing an acrylic wall for the PSU instead of steel. The challenge here is that plastic is an incredibly good insulator. This could raise some ESD (electrostatic discharge) concerns and may cause the PSU to lose some of the shielding that steel provides.
As a part of this design, Corsair has customized the caps and PCBs so that they get nice color matching. It looks pretty nice. 

3D Printing

Corsair was telling us how for its upcoming 4000D and its Frame series cases, it was getting into 3D printable panels and pieces. 

They showed us how one Corsair employee 3D printed a shroud-like duct, which takes air in through the bottom and shoves it up into where the pump and reservoir are in the image above. These 3D print files are available on Corsair’s account on Printables.  

Corsair 5000D

We didn’t care too much about it but Corsair also showed off its new 5000D that has a screen on it, which is a thing companies are doing now. 

They also had a 5000D case without the screen, which is a larger variant of the Frame 4000D case. Corsair says that it should be priced around $180, but that’s in flux with the tariffs situation.  

Corsair Open Concept

Corsair’s open concept at Computex is using some of the same Frame components, where the company is trying to make the Frame series modular and represents an open frame. 

There’s also an option for fan mounts as well. The company showed a gigantic radiator tower at the show, which is pretty cool to see.

We test Origin's expensive PC’s thermals, acoustics, power, frequency, and perform a tear-down

The Highlights

• Our Origin Genesis PC comes with an RTX 5090, 9800X3D, and 32GB of system memory
• Due to poor system thermals, the memory on the GPU fails our testing
• The fans in the system don’t ramp up until the liquid-cooled CPU gets warm, which means the air-cooled GPU temperature suffers
• Original MSRP: $6,050+
• Release Date: January 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

We paid $6,050 for Origin PC’s 5090-powered Genesis when it launched, or $6,500 after taxes. Today, a similar build has a list price of $8,396. Markup is $1,700 to $2,500 over DIY. This computer costs as much as an RTX Pro 6000, or a used car, or a brand new Kia Rio with a lifetime warranty in 2008 with passenger doors that fall off…

The point is, this is expensive, and it also sucks.

Editor's note: This was originally published on May 16, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Video Editing, Camera

Mike Gaglione

Testing, Writing

Jeremy Clayton

Camera

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

The RTX 5090 is the most valuable thing in this for its 32GB of VRAM, and to show you how much they care about the only reason you’d buy this prebuilt, Origin incinerates the memory at 100 degrees Celsius by choosing to not spin the fans for 8 minutes while under load. 

The so-called “premium” water cooling includes tubes made out of discolored McDonald’s toy plastic that was left in the sun too long, making it look old, degraded, and dirty.

But there are some upsides for this expensive computer. For example, it’s quiet, to its credit, mostly because the fans don’t spin…for 8 minutes.

Overview

Originally, this Origin Genesis pre-built cost $6,488 – and that’s after taxes and a $672 discount off the initial sticker price of $6,722. We ordered it immediately after the RTX 5090 launch, which turned out to be one of the only reliable ways to actually get a 5090 with supply as bad as it was (and continues to be). It took a while to come in, but it did arrive in the usual Origin crate.

We reviewed one of these a couple years ago that was a total disaster of a combo. 

The system had a severely underclocked CPU, ridiculously aggressive fan behavior (which is the opposite of the system we’re reviewing today), chipped paint, and a nearly unserviceable hardline custom liquid cooling loop. Hopefully this one has improved. And hopefully isn’t 1GHz below spec.

Parts and Price

Origin PC RTX 5090 + 9800X3D "Genesis" Part Prices | GamersNexus

We’ll price it out based on the original, pre-tariff $6,050 build before taxes and with a 10% off promo. Keep in mind that the new price is $7,500 to $8,400, depending on when you buy.

The good news is that nothing is proprietary – all of its parts are standard. The bad news is that this means we can directly compare it to retail parts which, at the time we wrote this piece, would cost $4,493, making for a $1,557 markup compared to the pre-tax subtotal. That’s a huge amount to pay for someone to screw the parts together. 

Given the price of the system, the MSI PRO B650-P WIFI motherboard and 1TB SSD are stingy and the 7000D Airflow case is old at this point. The parts don’t match the price.

Just two months after we ordered and around when it finally arrived, Origin now offers a totally different case and board with the Gigabyte X870E Aorus Elite. The base SSD is still just 1TB though – only good enough for roughly two or three full Call of Duty installs. 

The detailed packing sheet lists 22 various water cooling fittings, but, curiously, the build itself only has 15, plus one more in the accessory kit, making it 16 by our count. We don’t know how Origin got 22 here, but it isn’t 22. Hopefully we weren’t charged for 22. 

Oh, and it apparently comes with “1 Integrated High-Definition.” Good. That’s good. We wouldn’t want 0 integrated high definitions.

Similar to last time, you also get “The ORIGIN Difference: Unrivaled Quality & Performance” as a line item. Putting intangible, unachievable promises on the literal receipt is the Origin way: Origin’s quality is certainly rivaled.

Against DIY, pricing is extreme and insane as an absolute dollar amount when the other SIs are around $500-$800 markup at the high end. In order for this system to be “worth” $1,500 more than DIY, it would need to be immaculate and it’s not. The only real value the PC offers is the 5090. Finding a 5090 Founders Edition now for $2,000 is an increasingly unlikely scenario. Lately, price increases with scarcity and tariffs have resulted in 5090s closer to $2,800 or more, so the markup with that instead would be $777 if we assume a 5090 costs $2,800. That’s still a big markup, and the motherboard is still disappointing, the tubes are still discolored, the SSD is too small, and it still has problems with the fans not properly spinning, but it’s less insane.

Build Quality

Getting into the parts choices:

This new Genesis has a loop that’s technically set up better than the last one, but it only cools the CPU. That means we have a $6,500 computer with water cooling, but only on the coolest of the two silicon parts -- the one that pulls under 150W. That leaves the 575W RTX 5090 FE to fend for itself, and that doesn’t always go well.

Originally, Origin didn’t have the option to water cool the 5090. It’s just a shame that Origin isn’t owned by a gigantic PC hardware company that manufactures its own water cooling components and even has its own factories and is publicly traded and transacts billions of dollars a year to the point that it might have had enough access to make a block... 

A damn shame. Maybe we’ll buy from a bigger company next time.

At least now, with the new sticker price of $8,400, you can spend another $200 and add a water block to the GPU. Problem solved -- turns out, we just needed to spend even more money. 

Here’s a closer look at Origin’s “premium” cooling solution, complete with saggy routing that looks deflated and discolored tubing that has that well-hydrated catheter tube coloring to it.

The fluid is clean and the contents of the block are fine, but the tubing is the problem. In fact, the included drain tube is the correct coloring, making it even more obvious how discolored the loop is.

Corsair says its XT Softline tubing is “UV-resistant tubing made to withstand the test of time without any discoloration or deforming.”

So clearly something is wrong. Or not “clearly,” actually, seeing as it’s not clear. The tubing looks gross. It shouldn’t look gross. The spare piece in the accessory kit doesn’t look gross. The coolant is even Corsair’s own XL8 clear fluid, making it even more inexcusable.

We’re not the only ones to have this problem, though – we found several posts online with the same issue and very little in the way of an official response from Corsair or Origin. We only saw one reply asking the user to contact support.

Even without the discoloration, it comes off as looking amateurish from the way it just hangs around the inside of the case. There’s not a lot you can do about long runs of flexible tubing, unless maybe you’re the one building it and have complete control of everything in the pipeline... 

There is one thing we can compliment about the loop: Origin actually added a ball valve at the bottom underneath the pump for draining and maintenance, which is something that we directly complained about on the previous Origin pre-built. We’re glad to see that get addressed.

The fans in the build are part of Corsair’s relatively new LINK family, so they’re all daisy chained together with a single USB-C-esque cable and controlled together in tandem by two of Corsair’s hubs. It’s an interesting (if expensive) system that extends to include the pump and CPU block – both of which have liquid temperature sensors.

Tear-down

We’re starting the tear-down by looking at the cable management side. 

Opening up the swinging side panel, we noticed masking tape on the dust filter, which we’re actually okay with as it’s to keep it in place during shipping and is removable.  

Internally, they’ve included all of the unused PSU cables in the system’s accessories box, which we’ll talk more about down below. 

The cable routing makes sense and is generally well managed. While they tied the cables together, not all of the ties were tied down to the chassis. The system uses the cable management channel for the 24-pin connector. Overall, it’s clean and they’ve done well here. 

Looking at the other side of the system, we can see that the power cable leading into the 5090 is mostly seated, and isn’t a concern to us. 

Removing the water block’s cable, it had a little piece of plastic which acted as a pull tab. That’s actually kind of nice.

Removing the screws on the water block reveal that they are captive, which is nice. Looking at the pattern, we can see that they used pre-applied paste via a silk screen. That allowed contact for all 8 legs of the IHS, which looked good with overall even pressure. The block application was also good. 

Looking at how well all of the cables were seated, everything was fine from the CPU fan header down to the front panel connectors. 

Removing the heat sync off the NVMe SSD, we didn’t see any plastic on the thermal pad, which is good. 

Look at the 16GB DDR 6000 RAM modules, they are in the correct slots and Origin outfitted them with Corsair 36-44-44-96 sticks, which are not the greatest timings. 

Examining the tightness of all the screws on the motherboard, we didn’t encounter any loose screws. 

Removing the motherboard from the case, everything looked fine. 

Looking at the motherboard out of the case, it’s a lower-end board than we’d like to see out of a premium system. 

Looking at the fans, they are immaculately installed, which is partially due to how they’re connected together. This results in a very clean setup.  

The back side of the PC has a massive radiator. And overall, the system has very clean cable management and the assembly was mostly good. This relegates the system’s biggest issues being the value and its water-cooling setup. We didn’t drain the loop so we’re going to keep running it and see what it looks like down the road. 

Thermal Benchmarks

System Thermals at Steady State

Getting into the benchmarking, we’ll start with thermals.

Right away, the 96-degree result on the memory junction is a problem -- especially because this is an average, which means we have spikes periodically to 100 degrees. The technical rating on this memory is 105 degrees for maximum safety spec. This is getting way too close and is hotter than what we saw in our 5090 FE review. This is also when all of the thermal pads are brand new. 

The Origin pre-built uses a large case with 12 fans, so it should be impossible for the GPU to be this hot. 

The Ryzen 9800X3D hit 87C at steady-state – which is also not great for how much cooling is in this box. All of the various motherboard and general system temperature sensors fell well within acceptable ranges.

Finally, the watercooling parts provide a couple of liquid temperatures. The pump is on the “cool” side of the loop and read 36.7C at steady state, while the coolant in the block on the “hot” side of the loop got up to 41.3C. You typically want liquid temperature to stay under 55C (at the most) to not violate spec on the pump and tubing, so this is fine.

We need to plot these over time to uncover some very strange behavior.

CPU Temperature vs. Fan Speeds Over Time

CPU temperature during the test starts out on a slow ramp upwards during the idle period. When the CPU load first starts, we see an immediate jump to about 72C, a brief drop, then a long and steady rise from roughly 250 seconds to 750 seconds into the test where it levels off at the 87C mark. The VRM temperature follows the same general curve, but takes longer to reach steady-state. Adding the liquid temperatures to the chart shows the same breakpoints.

Finally, adding pump and fan speeds gives us the big reveal for why the curves look like this. The pump stair steps up in speed while the temperatures rise, but the fans don’t even turn on for over 8 minutes into the load’s runtime. Once they’re actually running, they average out to just 530RPM, which is so slow that they might as well be off.

This is an awful configuration. Response to liquid temperature isn’t new, but this is done without any thought whatsoever. If you tie all fans to liquid temperature, and if you have parts not cooled by liquid like VRAM on the video card, then you’re going to have a bad time. And that’s the next chart. But before that one, this is an overcorrection from how Origin handled the last custom loop PC we reviewed from the company, which immediately ramped the fans up high as it could as soon as the CPU started doing anything. Maybe now they can find a middle ground since we’ve found the two extremes of thoughtless cooling.

GPU Temperature vs. Fan Speeds Over Time

This chart shows GPU temperatures versus GPU fan speed.

The GPU temperature under load rises to around 83C before coming back down when the case fans finally kick on. As a reminder, 83-84 degrees is when NVIDIA starts hard throttling the clocks more than just from GPU Boost, so they’re dropping clocks as a result of this configuration.

The 5090’s VRAM already runs hot on an open bench – 89 to 90 degrees Celsius – and that gets pushed up to peak at 100C in the Origin pre-built. This is unacceptable. Adding the GPU fan speed to the chart shows us how the Founders Edition cooler attempts to compensate by temporarily boosting fan speed to 56% during this time, which also means that Origin isn’t even benefiting as much from the noise levels as it should from the slower fans. Balancing them better would benefit noise more.

As neat of a party trick as it is to have the case fans stay off unless they’re needed in the loop, Origin should have kept at least one or two running at all times, like rear exhaust, to give the GPU some help. Besides, letting the hot air linger could potentially encourage local hot spots to form on subcomponents that aren’t directly monitored, which can lead to problems.

Power At The Wall

Now we’ll look at full system load power consumption by logging it at the wall – so everything, even efficiency losses from the PSU, is taken into account.

Idle, it pulled a relatively high 125W. At the 180 second mark, the CPU load kicks in. There’s a jump at 235 seconds when the GPU load kicks in.

We see a slight ramp upwards in power consumption after that, which tracks with increasing leakage as the parts heat up, before settling in at an average of 884W at steady state. 

Acoustics

Next we’ll cover dBA over time as measured in our hemi-anechoic chamber.

At idle, the fans are off, which makes for a functionally silent system at the noise floor. The first fans to come on in the system are on the GPU, bringing noise levels up to a still-quiet range of 25-28dBA at 1 meter. The loudest point is 30.5 dBA when the GPU fans briefly ramp and before system fans kick in. 

CPU Frequency vs. Original Review

For CPU frequency, fortunately for Origin, it didn’t randomly throttle it by 1GHz this time. The 9800X3D managed to stay at 5225MHz during the CPU-only load portion of torture test – the same frequency that we recorded in our original review for the CPU so that’ good. At steady state with the GPU dumping over 500W of heat into the case, the average core frequency dropped by 50MHz. If Origin made better use of its dozen or so fans, it should hold onto more of that frequency. 

BIOS Configuration

BIOS for the Origin pre-built is set up sensibly, at least. The build date is January 23, which was the latest available in the time between when we ordered the system at the 50 series launch and when the system was actually assembled.

Scrutinizing the chosen settings revealed nothing out of line. The DDR5-6000 memory profile was enabled and the rest of the core settings were properly set to Auto. This was all fine.

Setup and Software

The Windows install was normal with no bloatware. That’s also good.

The desktop had a few things on it. A “Link Windows 10 Key to Microsoft Account” PDF is helpful for people who don’t know what to do if their system shows the Activate Windows watermark. Confusingly, it hasn’t been updated to say “11” instead of “10.” It also shepherds the user towards using a Microsoft account. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but we don’t like how it makes it seem necessary because it’s not and you shouldn’t. 

There’s also an “Origin PC ReadMe” PDF that doesn’t offer much except coverage for Origin’s ass with disclaimers and points of contact for support. One useful thing is that it points the user to “C:\\ORIGIN PC” to find “important items.”

That folder has Origin branded gifs, logos, and wallpapers, as well as CPU-Z, Teamviewer, and a Results folder. Teamviewer is almost certainly for Origin’s support teams to be able to remotely inspect the PC during support calls. It makes sense to have that stuff on there. 

The results folder contains an OCCT test report that shows a total of 1 hour and 52 minutes of testing. A CPU test for 12 minutes, CPU + RAM, memory, and 3D adaptive tests for 30 minutes each, then finishing with 10 minutes of OCCT’s “power” test, which is a combined full system load. It’s great that Origin actually does testing and provides this log as a baseline for future issues, and just for base expectations. This is good and gives you something to work from. Not having OCCT pre-installed to actually run again for comparison is a support oversight. It’s free for personal use at least, so the user could go download it easily.

There weren’t any missing drivers in Device Manager and NVIDIA’s 572.47 driver from February 20 was the latest at the time of the build – both good things. 

There wasn’t any bundled bloatware installed, so points to Origin for that.

iCUE itself isn’t as bad as it used to be, but it’s still clunky, like the preloaded fan profiles not showing their set points. 

Packaging

On to packaging.

The Origin Genesis pre-built came in a massive wooden crate that was big enough for two people to move around. Considering this PC was $6,500 after taxes (at the time), we’re definitely OK with the wooden crate and its QR code opening instructions.

Origin uses foam, a fabric cover, a cardboard box within a crate, and the crate for the PC. The case had two packs of expanding foam inside it, allowing the GPU to arrive undamaged and installed. The sticker on the side panel also had clear instructions. These are good things. 

Unfortunately, there’s a small chip in the paint on top of the case, but not as bad as the last Origin paint issues we had and we think it’s unrelated to the packaging itself.

Accessories

The accessory kit is basic, and came inside of a box with the overused cringey adage “EAT SLEEP GAME REPEAT” printed on it. Inside are the spare PSU cables (that we’re happy to see included), an AC power cable, stock 5090 FE power adapter, standard motherboard and case accessories, a G1/4 plug tool and extra plugs, and a piece of soft tubing with a fitting on one end that can be used to help drain the cooling loop. All of this is good.

Conclusion

During this review process, the price went even higher. You already shouldn’t buy this, but just to drive it home:

Now, for the same configuration, the Genesis now costs $7,557 after the discount, off the new sticker price of $8,396. That’s an increase of over $1,000, making the premium over current DIY pricing roughly $1,700-$2,500.

Now, there are good reasons for the price to go up. Tariffs have a real impact on pricing and we’re going to see it everywhere, and tariffs are also outside of Corsair’s control. We don’t fault them for that. But that doesn’t change the fact that the cost over DIY is so insanely elevated. Even Corsair’s own competitors offer better value than this, like Maingear.

At $8,400 sticker price, you’d have to be drunk on whatever is discoloring Origin’s loop to buy it. Nobody should buy this, especially not for gaming. If you’re doing productivity or creative work that would seriously benefit from the 5090’s 32GB of VRAM, then look elsewhere for a better deal. This costs nearly as much as an RTX Pro 6000, which has 96GB of VRAM and is better.

It would actually be cheaper to get scalped for a 5090 on Ebay and then buy the whole rest of the computer than to buy this Origin system. That’s how crazy this is.

The upcharge, even assuming a 5090 price of $2,800, is just way too high versus other system integrators. Seriously, Alienware is cheaper at this point – by thousands of dollars. Alienware.

We can’t recommend this PC. Ignoring the price, the memory on the video card is hitting 100 degrees C in workloads when the fans aren’t turning on because the fans are set to turn on based on the liquid temperature and the liquid doesn’t touch the GPU. For that reason alone, it gets a failing grade. For our thermal testing, pre-builts have to pass the torture test. If they don’t, they instantly fail. That’s how it always works for our pre-built reviews. This system has, unfortunately, instantly failed.

We evaluate the build’s thermals, build quality, CPU frequency, acoustics, setup, packaging, and more

The Highlights

• Cyberpower's build is equipped with a 9800X3D, 4070 Super, 32GB of DDR5-6000 RAM, and a 1,000-watt PSU
• The system has a horrible cooling solution that throttles the CPU by 200 MHz all-core
• Aside from the poor thermals, this pre-built PC is excellent
• Original MSRP: $1,865

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

We really need Cyberpower to stop screwing up its thermal configuration. It’s been doing this for 10 years of GN buying and reviewing its PCs, and it’s disappointing because this pre-built is overall excellent. Its only failing is in the thermal configuration. Everything else was done with great attention to detail.
AMD still gets shafted by big OEMs and system integrators for its CPUs, which is why this system excited us. We’re reviewing a Cyberpower 9800X3D pre-built gaming PC that we bought undercover. It’s the first pre-built with a 9800X3D we’re reviewing, although Thermaltake’s Vista 470M did really well in our review and used a 7800X3D (watch our review).

Editor's note: This was originally published on February 6, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Writing

Jeremy Clayton

Camera

Vitalii Makhnovets

Video Editing

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

We bought this before the RTX 50 GPUs were announced, so especially considering that, the price was actually excellent at the time we bought it. Back then, it was about a $200 markup on the DIY cost. That’s one of the most competitive prices we’ve seen. So, some of the components are well-chosen, the price is competitive, and now it’s up to Cyberpower to build it properly.

Overview

Lately we’ve been looking for some actually good pre-built PCs and we’ve had mixed success. The Thermaltake Vista 470M was really good for a pre-built, but the small form factor ASUS G22CH-DH978 was actually the worst we’ve reviewed so far.

We jumped on this system from CyberpowerPC as a “Daily Deal” because it had a Ryzen 9800X3D with a good configuration on paper at what looked like a reasonable price at $1,865. Again, that’s before the 50-series was announced. It was also a rotating daily deal, which phased in and out.

Cyberpower’s MO is a little less about cringe marketing and more about absolutely flooding you with overwhelming configuration options while shopping. Just look at the insanity in the images above. Not even counting the multiple base SKUs and rotating options like this “Daily Deal,” once you get into customization, it’s completely overwhelming. Everything is “just $20 more” or “just another $10,” taking the car model of adding every small piece of trim and ending up paying 30% more at the end.

We really hope the web developers at Cyberpower get paid per radio button. The product page was so long that Firefox literally refused to screenshot the whole thing. Some of this is good – we like options – but this is the Cyberpower way.

In fact, Cyberpower’s upsell tactics here are so well-known that we know people outside the industry who refer to add-on flooding as “getting Cyberpowered.”

It’s not like it’s a bad practice, it’s just their business model. We didn’t add anything to our system as we think many people will just buy it as the company presented it.

There are a lot of good things about the PC on the surface: the on-paper part choice made sense, cable management is excellent, and general value is pretty damn good for a pre-built. But there’s at least one massive negative, and it’s the CPU thermals. We’ll come back to that below.

Pricing

CyberPowerPC 9800X3D Pre-built | Part and Price Breakdown | GamersNexus

This table has the parts. Remember that we’re looking at this data from back when we bought it, not today, because we want to judge it against the time of purchase. That was around the last week of November. Pricing for the Cyberpower system is good to average, with a $200 premium over DIY for exact parts at the time. The wildly popular 9800X3D is still going in and out of stock, making it frequently above MSRP due to third-party opportunism. We’re showing it as $480 for the sake of this chart since it restocks frequently and can be bought for MSRP with patience and we don’t think you should pay a scalped price for it.

The Bitspower 240mm cooler and white-labeled Cyberpower case can’t be purchased retail from anywhere we saw, so we subbed those out with reasonable alternatives for DIY comparison.

32GB of DDR5-6000 is the right choice for this AM5 Ryzen gaming system, so that’s good to see. RAM is a common area that pre-builts screw-up since they underspec the speed, but this is good. The 2TB capacity on the SSD is also good. The ASUS Prime B650 motherboard is thankfully an off-the-shelf model with public drivers and BIOS, which means you can maintain it yourself.

The 1,000W PSU is overkill for this 9800X3D and 4070 Super (read our review) configuration, but at the very least keeps the door wide open for a future GPU upgrade to anything currently available – even to a used 4090 (watch our review) some time in the future.

Overall, the paper listing of the specs looks like reasonably chosen parts. There isn’t any proprietary BS in this list, which is great to see.

Tear-Down

Time to get into the tear down.

The case has a dust filter on the top of the exhaust. It’s not necessary and can impede airflow a little. We noticed the dust filter had a quality-control issue with it splitting apart at one end.

We also noticed a screw at the back of the case being screwed in at an angle.

There are things we like and don’t like regarding the case. We like how the front door has an indentation that allows you to easily push out the glass side panel, which we found to be a nice, simple mechanical feature.  

The front of the case is perforated, but the porosity is low. It’s definitely a lot better than what Cyberpower used to do, which was to use a glass wall. The LED bar, however, completely blocks airflow. As a matter of fact, there is a fan behind it, which does close to nothing as a result.  

The bottom of the case technically has holes, but there’s not much room for it to breathe between the dust filter and the case’s short feet. This probably chokes the intake of the power supply. On the positive side, the filter pulls out from the front, which prevents owners from having to move it from the wall to pull it from the back. 

The back fan is also an area with room for improvement as the case blocks off roughly 20% of the fan here. The design could have used more perforation to allow more breathability. 

Opening up the case, the cable management looks pretty good. The zip ties are also cut to look a little cleaner. We did notice a random twist tie that was on there, which wasn’t doing anything. That’s minor and we won’t take off any points for that. 

The PC also uses a cheap PCB for all of its RGB cables.

Internally, the RAM sticks are in the correct slots, which is good. The cables are fully seated. We can see that Cyberpower uses a Bitspower 240mm liquid cooler, which has been re-badged to feature a Cyberpower logo.  

Next, we wanted to remove the cooler to see what was causing the build’s thermal issues. Taking it off, we can confirm that everything was fully seated and that there were no loose screws. We did, however, notice a cable coiled around one of the screws, which may have caused some unlevelness.  

Examining the cooler’s coldplate, we noticed there wasn’t good contact between the cooler and the CPU via the paste pattern. It was uneven. It may have potentially been caused by the aforementioned cable wrapped around one of the cooler’s screws. Looking down at the CPU itself, the paste was not spread well, which may have caused poor performance. The cooler itself may be bad as we haven’t tested it standalone. A 240mm cooler should be enough here if it’s not trash, so it’s disappointing to see bad thermal performance here.   

Testing

CPU Thermals vs. Fan Speed - Full Torture

Time to get into testing:

CPU cooling is the largest problem this system has, so we’ll start the charts with CPU thermals vs. fan speeds over time during our full system torture load.

Tdie jumps over 90C as soon as the test starts, then dips as the CPU fans ramp to try to keep it under control and as the GPU load prepares to run. The fan ramp comes with an acoustic cost. We can see that the AIO pump and front panel fan speeds don’t change at all, even as the CPU hits 95 degrees Celsius. The pump is fine since it’s maxed out, but the relatively low 1,200RPM on CPU_OPT isn’t ideal. It may be due to the specific fan choice topping out at that RPM, or due to some inherent behavior of the CPU_OPT header which isn’t directly controllable in BIOS. Either way, what’s clear is that this temperature is totally unacceptable. It’s unfortunate, as a lot of other aspects of the machine were good. This has been our historic experience with Cyberpower, though: The company just really seems to struggle with thermals.

As a reminder, the 9800X3D is not like the 7950X (watch our review) or early AM5 silicon. The CPU doesn’t boost to 95C. It just runs up against its power limit. The chip is remarkably easy to cool when considering its performance, and yet somehow, Cyberpower has failed to do that. We’ll talk more about what caused that failure in the conclusion.

CPU Frequency

CPU frequency is next. This shows the performance impact of running against the 9800X3D’s temperature limit like this.

The Cyberpower system’s CPU cores averaged out to 5,023MHz during the CPU-only portion of our test – that’s 200MHz lower than in our original review of the 9800X3D. This is a gigantic drop when considering it’s applied across all cores. This indicates that the CPU’s not able to consume enough power to keep clocks high due to the thermal constraints. It’s throttling. This is a huge disappointment for an otherwise promising system. A drop of 200MHz is massive when looking at an all-core load.

System Thermals - Full Torture

We next manually set the fans to 100% in BIOS, but even this wasn’t able to keep the CPU under 95C, partly because the fans were eventually ramping to 100% anyway. It may help boost slightly higher initially, but doesn’t resolve the throttling.

The rest of the system’s thermals also remained within variance between the two configurations. GPU, chipset, SPD hub (which is RAM), and drive temperatures were within expected ranges. The 67 degree GPU temperature is good.

Acoustics - Full Torture

Next up is testing in our hemi-anechoic chamber.

Acoustic testing in our hemi-anechoic chamber underscores the immediate fan ramp, as it instantly jumped from the idle average of 31.6dBA to 37.9dBA average under load. That’s louder than we’d like to hear at both ends of the spectrum, but is also a huge and instantaneous change and that’s the part that really matters here. There’s no gradual ramp. It just instantly dumps an extra 6 decibels of noise as soon as there’s a load, which is something an end user would notice. 

Subjective analysis of the noise profile doesn’t turn up any harsh tones, just the typical sound of loud fans. Here’s a sample.

Power - Full Torture

Power testing is next. It’s tested at the wall. This is mostly to determine if Cyberpower chose a large enough PSU.

Logging power at the wall shows a very flat steady-state with an average of 500W during our torture load of Blender on the CPU and 3DMark Port Royal on the GPU. This level of load is uncommon in gaming scenarios, as it heavily loads both core components at once. This puts the 1000W PSU at 50% capacity, leaving plenty of headroom and keeping the PSU in a good spot on its efficiency curve.

BIOS, OS Setup, and Software

Time to get into BIOS, operating system setup, and software or bloatware presence.

Booting into the BIOS showed version 3042 from October 22, 2024 – one version out of date when we purchased it at the very end of November. We look for the most up-to-date version at time of purchase, but within a month is overall good.

The EXPO memory profile was enabled, ASUS’ performance enhancement was disabled, and almost everything else was set to auto. Cyberpower has a clean BIOS setup that we agree with overall. The only change we’d like to see is disabling the Armory Crate bloatware installer, which is unfortunately a default setting. But EXPO and disabling ASUS’ enhancements are both correct.

Windows setup itself was normal and not appended with any third-party software agreements.

The desktop was clean and without bloatware – the only extra software at all was ASUS AURA RGB software, which technically adds functionality. The new NVIDIA App was preinstalled with driver version 566.36, which is actually from December 5. That’s awesome to see as it was the latest version before the PC shipped out the door. There were no missing drivers in Device Manager either. There also weren’t any stray files left behind. Having a driver from right when we purchased is awesome, so good job to Cyberpower.

Again, the software side of setup is solid for this system. This entire aspect of pre-builts has so many potential pitfalls that getting it all right like this deserves commendation.

Packaging

Packaging was fine, though the box showed typical shipping wear we see when not double-boxed, which is preferred. Cyberpower didn’t do that. The interior of the PC had a large pack of expanding foam protecting the GPU from impact. This is what we’d want to see, so another area where Cyberpower excelled.

Accessories

Accessories included with the CyberpowerPC system were better than average. The RGB keyboard (featuring volume roller) isn’t particularly good, but easily clears most of the garbage-tier peripherals we’re used to seeing with pre-builts.

The bag inside held a game pass promo card, quick start guide, USB stick card, and invoice as well as the usual motherboard pack-ins. The mouse, surprisingly, even has thumb buttons -- that alone gets the “It’s Better Than Dell” award.

The quick start guide is good. Step 1 guides the user to remove internal packing foam and to inspect for loose cables. Step 2 instructs the user to use the display connectors on the GPU instead of the motherboard, which is the most common mistake, and Step 4 takes care of the second-most common by showing turning the power switch as “on” at the PSU.

The strangest thing included is a USB drive embedded into a fold-out card. At first we thought this might be the usual thing and contain drivers and maybe a manual, but instead, it acted like malware. Plugging the USB drive into the system triggers a script that rapidly opens Run and types https://www.cyberpowerpc.com/share, launching the default browser to that address, and looking incredibly suspicious in the process. 

The page it takes you to isn’t even useful – it’s just a landing page to push you to write a review of the system in exchange for two $10 gift cards two to four weeks after approval. So, great... Even worse, the USB device doesn’t show up as an actual drive in Windows or Device Manager, rendering it an utter waste of resources. It wasn’t malware, but it sure acted like it.

Conclusion

We would have liked to recommend this CyberpowerPC 9800X3D system, but we can't because of the way it was set up, but it’s close. This system is metaphorically one step short of greatness. It reminds us of another Cyberpower pre-built we reviewed, where we concluded it was good, but should have its cooler replaced. This means that the PC represents an odd mixture of someone who wants to buy an enthusiast pre-built PC but is still okay with manually making changes to the build.

It does a lot correctly, but critically fails to offer sufficient CPU cooling, causing the fans to ramp constantly and loudly. This also hinders performance during the heavy CPU load scenarios by dropping 200MHz below what it should run at.

As for the rest: The part configuration is good on paper, with the possible exception of over-speccing the PSU, but at least that doesn’t hurt the system. And remember, this predates this 5070 announcement. The 9800X3D is obviously a phenomenal CPU for gaming and the 4070 Super is strong enough to play games at 1080p at high refresh rate and most games at 1440p, possibly needing to lower settings in graphics-heavy titles.

The OS, driver, and software setup are all solid, with up to date drivers and an unbloated Windows experience. Cyberpower’s attention to detail on the GPU driver really impressed us, as they must have installed that right before it went out the door. The included keyboard and mouse are actually OK, as was the quick start guide for novices. The automatically-executing script on the USB drive is not only suspicious, but also just a disappointing waste.

Cyberpower did most of this well. It’s unfortunate that we’ve been through this with Cyberpower a few times over about a decade of buying their pre-builts now, because they often nail a lot of it -- and they’re especially competitive on price -- but screw it up on the thermals. We don’t know what it is that’s so hard for them in the thermal configuration process, but if Cyberpower can figure that out and permanently rectify it, we really wouldn’t have much to complain about. They’d probably get our recommendations regularly.

We examine the ASUS G22CH-DH978’s setup, pricing, build quality, performance, thermals, acoustics, and more

The Highlights

• The ASUS G22CH-DH978 pre-built is a compact sandwich-style PC with a 14900KF, RTX 4070, and 32GB of RAM
• The PC’s 14900KF was downclocked over 1.3 GHz with no option to change it
• The ASUS ROG G22CH is the worst version of a pre-built that we've ever reviewed
• Original MSRP: $2,500

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

ASUS in its infinite wisdom has made a $2,500 pre-built computer, which absolutely guts the multi-thread performance of the Intel i9-14900KF inside with over 1.3 GIGAHERTZ of frequency drop. They have downclocked it back to the 9th Generation, and it’s objectively the worst delta away from what the CPU should be running at that we’ve ever seen in a pre-built PC. This is the worst version of a pre-built that we've ever reviewed.

And what this tiny ROG pre-built lacks in performance, competent component selection, thermals, and value, it makes up for with its excellent name: This is the ASUS G22CH-DH978.

Editor's note: This was originally published on December 28, 2024 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Video Editing, Camera

Mike Gaglione

Testing, Writing

Jeremy Clayton

Camera

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

The computer is from ASUS’ self-branded R-REPUBLIC, O-OF, G-GAMERS and spends all of its overhead on the largest don’t-eat-batteries warning we’ve ever seen. This appears to have been made by the R-REPUBLIC O-OF L-LAWYERS. 

ASUS gets its own computer’s dimensions wrong, the retail page calls the side panel “tempered glass” despite it being plastic, and it says the design doesn’t use screws, but it does, and the system is a clown car of component choices with its DDR5-4800 RAM, and it’’s limited power budget for Intel.

It’s got a custom-sized closed-loop liquid cooler in the top under a quick release panel. 

We picked it up at Micro Center for $2,500 – so it’s not cheap – and we ran it through our intense thermal and acoustic benchmarks to see how it stacks up. It does not stack up. It’s... bad.

Overview

Here’s what ASUS’ marketing says about this computer:

“Condensed size. Concentrated Power,” “Compact with an impact,” and “Do more with less.” 

We assume ASUS means less CPU performance, which is accurate.

Despite this focus, ASUS' dimensions for the PC are flat-out lies -- and that’s the easiest thing to get right since it’s literally just measuring the computer.

It claims the G22CH measures at 323x115x287mm and 10L in volume. First of all, that’s 10.6L, not 10L, and 10.6 doesn’t round to 10; secondly, it’s also wrong because the PC actually measures at 324x123x292mm and a volume of 11.6L, which is way different from 10.0. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter because you shouldn’t buy it anyways.

Moving past that, cooling for the CPU is handled by a custom dual 92mm liquid cooler in the top, underneath a quick-release panel. There’s also an air-cooled version, but that’s not what we’re covering today because this computer already doesn’t need any help incinerating its CPU and we certainly don’t want to do that with air.

The ASUS pre-built also comes with an alternative plexiglass panel for the right side to replace the pre-installed metal mesh over the motherboard. The ASUS marketing material on Micro Center’s page explicitly calls it “tempered glass,” which it is not. It's plastic.

Despite being easy to see through the bulls***, it’s hard to see through the panel due to the dark tint. It also has a strange section of text that is literally just the definition of the “Cyberpunk” genre:

“Cyberpunk is a sub-genre of science fiction that features advanced science and technology in an urban future. CYBER represents the extreme technology of ROG while PUNK represents a culture with attitude and a distinct style. ROG aims to bring our users to the new future by building our brand around CYBERPUNK.”

Nothing says PUNK more than a multi-billion dollar corporation trying to use the technicals of a dictionary to define culture.

One last thing to mention here is that ASUS mentions the PC being a “tool-free” design, saying “you’re able to get into the internals quickly without turning a single screw.” 

There is, however, a single screw that the user does, in fact, have to turn and remove in order to take the top off for the first time.

Good. That’s great... ASUS has really gotten better this year. Just make anything up.

Let’s get to something that ASUS is actually a master of: Pricing.

Pricing

ASUS G22CH-DH978 Part and Price Breakdown | GamersNexus

This is the part and price breakdown of the G22CH-DH978 variant we bought. We used identical parts where possible when building a DIY list, but the ASUS system has a lot of proprietary bulls****, so we picked the closest stuff that made sense for price and kept the general spirit of the build.

ASUS ends up with a premium of around $850-$875 over DIY, depending on day to day price fluctuations. That’s not as bad as the Corsair i500 (watch our review), but is still way beyond what’s reasonable, and is insulting considering the shortcomings of functionally turning the 14900K (read our review) into a lower-spec part.

We always disagree with the use of proprietary or non-standard parts when industry standard parts would work just fine. In this case, ASUS not using a mini-ITX or microATX motherboard kills future upgradability of the PC. Flex ATX PSUs are also available for this form factor – they’re just rare in DIY – ASUS could source one relatively easily at its size.

We take less issue with the custom-sized cooler since it’s matched to the case, but if/when it eventually dies, it will essentially be impossible to replace.

The worst part of the raw spec sheet is the DDR5-4800, which is abysmally slow and will hamper overall performance. You’re paying over $800 for the privilege of bottom-tier launch-spec DDR5 from 2021. The price difference is negligible for a 32GB kit: 4800 starts around $70, 5600 starts at $75, and 6000 can be bought for $80.

And none of that is even the bad part. The largest objective issue (aside from price) is in CPU performance. 

Benchmarks

CPU Frequency

Here’s a frequency chart comparing the 14900KF in the ASUS computer to frequency data for the 14900K gathered in our original review.

Average P-core frequency is 855 MHz BELOW spec at PL2, and a staggering, actually unbelievable 1,330 MHz down at PL1. This actually reduces a 14900K to under 4 GHz, which is crazy. The Intel 2700K boosted to 3.9GHz – (the same speed) 13 years ago in 2011. Now, architecturally, these are pretty different -- so we can look to the 14900K’s familial heritage in the $70 i3-12100F (watch our review), which boosts to 4.3 GHz.

E-cores don’t fare much better, also falling behind by over 1 GHz relative to stock. This is insane and is the worst setup we’ve ever seen.

Frequency Over Time

This chart shows that the system is clearly set up for the CPU to actually apply Tau (the PL2 duration limit). It exhibits different frequency behavior over time, dropping off a small cliff just after the 80 second mark. The P-core average falls below the stock E-core average frequency. It’s actually disastrously bad.

It’s all a direct result of ASUS slashing the power budget of the 14900KF to about 125W, or half of what it should be.

CPU Performance in Blender

This has a huge negative impact on multi-thread performance. The chart above shows the completion time of our standard Blender rendering benchmark.

The properly configured 14900K completed the task in 8.5 minutes, while ASUS’ configuration of the same CPU required 10.9 minutes. The stock result reduces the time requirement to complete the render by 22%. ASUS set this up so poorly that it made the 14900K perform the same as a 13700K in real-world rendering performance. The 13700K (watch our review) can occasionally be found for $295 and is performing equivalently to the $484 14900K that ASUS sells you.

Tear-Down

ASUS claims that the PC doesn’t require any tools, but you’ll need a Phillips screwdriver to remove a screw on the back.

Doing so allows you to pop off the top and sides of the case.

The side panels have a lot of steel and are pretty heavy.

Removing the other side panel reveals the proprietary motherboard along with SO-DIMM RAM coupled with a socketable CPU. We can also see small heat sinks on the NVMe drive, VRM, and chipset. 

The PC also has a daughter board that offers a PCIe slot for the video card.

The PC has a radiator up at the top, which is a unique shape. Its width measures approximately 95 mm, which is atypical, though its approximate 27 mm thickness is pretty standard. 

With its design, ASUS completely obstructs the front panel and its floor offers little in the way of airflow, despite having a small intake fan near the bottom front of the build. 

The power supply, which is on the back and bottom of the PC, has a small exhaust fan, but doesn’t get much air to pull from.  

The strange cable pictured above is for the front IO, which has another daughter board that provides more USB ports and audio headers.

One bright side to the build is that ASUS at least peeled the tape off the NVMe heatsink. 

We also saw random silver sharpie bits on every screw in the system. Fortunately, we didn’t find any loose screws in the case.

Remove the cooler, the torque was good on the screws. The application of the thermal paste also looked good. 

Packaging

Despite being purchased in-store at Micro Center and therefore not requiring sturdy packaging, it probably could have been shipped as-is without issues. The outer box contains the accessories and four foam corners that suspend an inner box with a handle, which levers open and raises up like a pedestal. There’s a cardboard and foam sled that holds the PC itself inside a fabric bag.

This is maybe one of the few things where ASUS was able to hit a bar of being acceptable.

Accessories

Moving to accessories: The accessory bundle has a super basic mouse and keyboard that aren’t good, wireless antennae, AC power cord, and the extra NOT-tempered-glass “plexiglass” panel. There’s also a box of paperwork with an installation guide, a very large don’t-eat-battery sticker, and panel replacement instructions. 

In what is one of the most basic mistakes, the install guide shows connecting the monitor to the motherboard HDMI port and doesn’t even have a GPU installed in the drawing. This is bad and misleading to a novice user. It’s especially weird since even the worst pre-builts we’ve ever reviewed get this step right since incorrect display header usage leads to high support volume.

Replacing the side panel is annoying. First, you remove the “tool-free” top panel without a single screw…by using a tool to remove the single screw under a rubber cover before sliding the side panel up. Then, you use two tools to remove 14 screws (of 3 different varieties with both PH1 and PH0 heads) from the side panel insert. Installation is the reverse, leaving the PC with a plain-looking and very dark tinted side panel without ventilation.

BIOS

If you didn’t have enough reasons to not buy this computer, we’ll move to BIOS.

On first boot, the G22CH restarted twice, so 3 attempts total just to turn it on. This isn’t entirely unheard of but is strange for a system that runs JEDEC spec memory and was behaving as if it had never been powered on after install. 

BIOS version 404 indicates that important Intel microcode updates are not found, since the build date of November 2023 long predates them. You’d be at risk of Intel’s instability problems. We purchased the pre-built PC in August, so based on ASUS' support page, version 408 of the BIOS had been available for around two months. 

The rest of the BIOS is mundane and lacks any overclocking, power limit, or even memory speed controls. B760 is supposed to have XMP capability, so that’s inexcusable. These restrictions further reinforce the power-hungry 14900KF as a nonsense choice and relegates the board to e-waste. It at least technically works for now, so it’s got that going for it.

One of the only nice things about the BIOS is that the fan headers are labeled well and are fully controllable.

Software and OS Setup

The OS setup also had problems. There’s an ASUS registration prompt at the end of the Windows 11 Out of Box Experience and user information will be shared with McAfee by default unless you uncheck a box, presumably so they can figure out how to make their software even worse.

Upon finally hitting the desktop, we were greeted with a suitably cool/edgy neon R-REPUBLIC O-OF G-GAMERS wallpaper. There weren’t any popups, but the start menu had the full complement of ASUS bloat: MyASUS, Armoury Crate, Aura Creator, and McAfee, which was the only one actively running in the tray and also the worst of these.

Overall, it’s basically set up just like a laptop that sucks – it just happens to be a desktop that sucks.

The pre-installed NVIDIA GPU driver was from June 2023 – 14 months out of date at the time of purchase. That’s absurdly old and lacks over a year of various feature updates, game compatibility fixes, and optimizations. This would lead to problems for the user if they didn’t get a forced update or didn’t know to do one themselves.

System Thermals - Full Torture

With the amateur-hour software setup out of the way, back to the charts: This chart has thermal results for both the stock mesh side panel and the solid plexiglass.

Generally speaking, the system managed to keep itself cool because it is underclocking itself into oblivion, and by that, we mean into frequencies that were common when The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion launched. 

Given that restriction, CPU P-core average temperature peaked at 68-69 degrees Celsius with the solid side panel installed. Sticking with the stock mesh panel gave roughly 1 degree lower temps across both the CPU and SSD. ASUS could have safely allowed a moderately higher power limit given the 20 or so degrees of headroom. It’s possible that the motherboard VRM is also a limiting factor.

Interestingly, the solid side panel gave a very slight – but insignificant – advantage to GPU thermals. It’s likely that increasing the resistance to airflow on the CPU side of the case forced more air to be drawn from the GPU chamber, therefore removing hot GPU exhaust faster.

Memory SPD hub temperatures show the same favor, which is something we’ve seen before in ITX case reviews when the airflow path is such that air is forced to flow directly over the RAM.

Acoustics

We also brought the system into our hemi-anechoic chamber for acoustic analysis. We built this chamber last year with help from all of you in the audience who’ve supported us via Patreon and the GN Store and have gotten heavy use of it since its construction. Thanks for your support.

The system operated in somewhat of a stairstep pattern for its fan control: You can see these relatively quick changes at roughly 375 and 700 seconds into the test. Noise levels settled in around 31.9dBA at steady-state thermals.

We aren’t able to see how the fans would behave under an actual heavy load because of the aforementioned CPU power limit.

Even though these noise levels aren’t bad purely by the dBA number, the quality of the noise is bad. Our noise sample exhibits an annoying low hum at idle that reminds us of a mini fridge. Take a listen here.

ASUS ROG G22CH Conclusion

The ASUS G22CH-DH978 isn’t remotely worth buying. The $850+ price premium over DIY essentially overrides any hopes the system had right off the bat. The custom SFF arrangement is not special enough to warrant the cost based on “cool factor” alone. It would need to both not suck, and have truly custom water cooling to even approach sensibility.

ASUS shouldn’t offer this flagship CPU choice if it’s just going to cut the thing off at the knees like this. Gaming-only scenarios wouldn’t show the hit as severely, but it’s still wasteful and passes expense on to the customer for no benefit.

ASUS added insult to injury by horribly crippling the performance of the 14900KF through a 125W power limit that isn’t even changeable in BIOS. It’s another scenario like with the Corsair i500 where the SI should have either built a system capable of running a power-hungry flagship CPU, or just not offered it to begin with. The performance in Blender showed it literally tied with the cheaper and older 13700K.

The proprietary parts are another big mark against it, especially the motherboard, which should have just been standardized to ITX or mATX.

Ignoring everything else, we don’t hate the basic idea – it’s very compact and sandwich layouts with liquid cooling are a proven successful archetype as evidenced by cases like the Era 2 and A4-H2O. The custom-sized liquid cooler is capable of dissipating at least 125W with about 20C of headroom without getting loud, so it could probably handle a 13600K (watch our review). An AMD X3D CPU would have been the obvious best choice for a gaming-focused SFF pre-built, given the generally massive advantage in efficiency they bring.

All that said, the price is just too high. Sometimes you have to pay a little more for less in the small form factor market, but this is beyond saving.

We examine Thermaltake’s Vista 470M’s build quality, value, software, power, thermals, acoustics, and more

The Highlights

• Our build came with an 7800X3D, 4070 Super, and Thermaltake View 380 case
• Out unit had 2 loose RGB headers and a slightly bent pin
• The Thermaltake Vista 470M is a surprisingly good pre-built PC
• Original MSRP: $1,700 (approximately)
• Release Date: October 2024

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

Between rental PCs, pre-built disasters, and just bad value, we’ve had a hard time finding good pre-builts over the last few years. We specifically went hunting to actively try and find one of the better mainstream options on the market. 
We bought the Thermaltake Vista 470M for around $1,700 and, surprisingly, it’s actually pretty good. This system has an AMD 7800X3D, which is already a huge improvement on most SIs still offering primarily Intel from some prehistoric marketing collaborations. It’s also priced reasonably.

Editor's note: This was originally published on December 19, 2024 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Video Editing

Mike Gaglione

Testing, Writing

Jeremy Clayton

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

We’ve never looked at a Thermaltake pre-built before, but they’ve been building them for a few years now. This one just launched at the start of October. It’s the Vista 470M, from the LCGS (Liquid Cooled Gaming System) brand of custom and pre-built PCs.

It’s got reasonable pricing and mostly good build quality. That “mostly” is because despite overall great cable management, Thermaltake managed to seriously bend one of the RGB connections to the motherboard – that’s one way to keep the terrible lock-lacking 4-pin from going anywhere, unintentional as this is. The system is also running relatively slow RAM, but sadly, in the prebuilt world, these types of complaints are relatively minor.

But in spite of this, we actually kind of like this system. That’s probably the highest praise we’ve given a prebuilt other than the Starforge systems we’ve looked at. Maybe that should be our new award category: The highly sought-after “We Actually Kind of Like It” award.

Thermaltake Vista 470M Overview

Marketing is normally loaded with memes, so we’ll start there:

“Embrace the exhilarating promise of domination,” Thermaltake says in surprisingly tame marketing cringe, and that’s about it. The rest of the language is pretty normal: Talk of completing a battle station, edge-to-edge glass, the usual MDF-fueled NVIDIA and AMD branding, and talk of the components. Shockingly, the only thing on this page that was worth making fun of was the exhilarating promise of domination. Once again, for a pre-built, this is already one of the more professional listings.

In the past, we’ve seen Corsair’s no-fewer-than 6 assorted “uncompromised” claims on a PC that embodied the very definition of compromise, so this is good from Thermaltake.

As we write this, Thermaltake is only offering its 470M in the Matcha Green colorway of the dual-chamber View 380 case. There aren't any other options if you don’t like it, but at the very least, it’s a unique color.

Thermaltake Vista 470M Pricing

Pricing for the 470M is pretty good, especially compared to some of the more expensive prebuilts we’ve looked at recently. Here’s the breakdown. We put together a pricing table for the components at the time we bought the system. This doesn’t reflect the newest prices in December, but is from when we actually purchased it.

Thermaltake Vista 470M Part and Price Breakdown | GamersNexus

There’s only about $100 of upcharge over DIY part cost, with the usual fluctuations of the DIY market. We think that’s completely reasonable, especially if you value saving time and don’t care as much about assembling it yourself. At the depths of sales, you might find about $200 to $250, but even that is a good price: Starforge was typically around $400 to $650 cost over DIY, with iBUYPOWER and CyberPower typically about $100 to $400, depending on model. 

As always, you could find greater savings by totally swapping some of the components in this list, but we try to compare exact part-for-part in these pricing tables.

It’s not perfect though. The launch of the higher-performing 9800X3D (read our review) at the same price as what the 7800X3D has been available for recently casts somewhat of a shadow on the overall value, but the 7800X3D (watch our review) is still a strong 2nd place in almost all of our gaming tests. Part of the pricing may be explained by Thermaltake getting the remains of the 7800X3D that has become suddenly less desirable.

The DDR5-5600 RAM is also, unfortunately, a terrible choice, given that the “sweet spot” for AM5 is at 6000MT/s and it’s essentially universally compatible across all of the current CPUs. 

It doesn’t even really cost more at this point to get better RAM -- the pricing is similar.

Thermaltake accidentally benefits from the higher cache on the X3D CPU helping to brute force and make up for some of that weaker RAM choice.

The motherboard and power supply are on the lower end, but don’t cross over into truly cheap territory. Also, since it’s 850W, the possibility of a future GPU upgrade is there. 

And because you own the system, unlike NZXT’s envisioned nightmarish dystopian hellscape that is its rental program, you could upgrade it with whatever you wanted.

The ASRock B650M-C is a commercial variant of a consumer board, but thankfully has a publicly accessible support page with BIOS and drivers. This is a huge improvement over what we’ve seen in the past, including Corsair using commercial variant boards without any public BIOS maintenance.

Overall, the parts choice and pricing are better than a lot of the pre-builts we’ve looked at.

Let’s get into the tear-down next.

Thermaltake Vista 470M Tear-Down

Removing a single screw on top of the case allows you to remove the case's side panel.

The backside cabling of the 470M is incredibly clean and reveals a non-modular PSU, which goes to show Thermaltake’s high quality cable management. 

The company hid cables at the bottom of the case behind a cover, which makes sense.

The main interior of the build has a clean assembly, though we did notice 2 loose RGB headers with one of them having a bent pin. It still worked, but that isn’t great.

Thankfully, we didn’t notice any loose screws, which is pretty rare to see.

Our 470M used a lower quality 450-watt 12VHPWR cable for its GPU. Fortunately the GPU in our system, a 4070 Super (read our review), won’t pull something higher like 600 watts, but this will prevent GPU upgrade options, like the 4090 (watch our review). So that’s not great and we would have preferred a 600-watt solution.

With the CPU cooler removed, the paste on the processor looks okay. There was one corner which could have used a little more thermal paste. We can also see there was a lot of force applied to it. Thermally, it was fine in our testing. 

Back to the system review. All of this testing was completed prior to the tear-down.

BIOS, OS Setup, and Software

The BIOS didn’t have any negative surprises, and was set to stock values outside of EXPO being turned on, which is good. This should be the norm, but because companies fail at enabling EXPO and XMP so frequently, it actually becomes the mark of a prodigal system integrator. That’s a sad statement, but experience has unfortunately set low expectations. The only strange thing was the date being set to January 31, 2024, which was easily fixed. The CMOS battery did not seem to be faulty. It just looked to be misconfigured. 

There was nothing else to mention in BIOS, which is good.

Windows setup was normal, thankfully devoid of any third-party software agreements deceptively tacked on at the end. Booting into Windows was clean, without any pop-up app assault. The desktop had a screenshot of a Superposition benchmark result, indicating the system was probably tested prior to packaging. Having a result stored locally for the customer is excellent, as it offers a means to calibrate against the expectation and gives customer support a way to help direct the consumer to a performance gauge.

The only additional software on the system was the ASRock RGB utility, which provides some functionality. There was no bloatware otherwise: No Norton or McAfee, no BS gaming services, and just a clean OS.

The pre-installed NVIDIA graphics driver was version 565.90 from October 1, less than a week prior to our original order date and only three days before the 470M even went on sale. This is awesome to see: Thermaltake might be better about getting the latest version into its builds than some other SIs we’ve looked at – it’s hard to definitively say with only a single data point, but other systems we’ve reviewed have sometimes had very outdated drivers, upwards of 3 or 4 months out of date, which isn’t good.

As a downside: There was a missing driver in Device Manager. Research showed it’s AMD’s 3D V-cache driver. It should be installed but disabled with the 7800X3D. We would like to see it installed, but Thermaltake lucked into the fact that this is a single CCD CPU, so this wasn’t disastrous. It absolutely shouldn’t be missing, but Thermaltake would only truly suffer for it if this were a dual-CCD solution with 3D cache.

Altogether, Thermaltake did a great job with providing a clean BIOS and OS setup with up-to-date drivers. We really didn’t have a lot of complaints here.

We’ll get into benchmarks now.

Thermaltake Vista 470M Benchmarks

Power - Full Torture

Full system power measured at the wall is up first in our charts. This is captured while the system is running a full CPU plus GPU load with Blender and Port Royal on loop. System power consumption idles at around 60-70W and then climbs to roughly 150W during the brief CPU-only load portion, then jumps over 360W when the GPU joins in. It’s stable overall, and during our steady-state period, results in a 370W average. With an 850W PSU, Thermaltake has gone slightly overkill on the power supply, but not in a bad way. Most power supplies are at peak efficiency somewhere in the 40% to 60% range of utilization for capacity, although it depends on the power supply. 850W gives just enough headroom for an upgrade without increasing cost unnecessarily while also staying within a reasonable efficiency range.

Thermals - Full Torture

Next is a simple bar chart of all thermals at steady-state in the same workload. The GPU has plenty of access to fresh air, keeping itself to 68 degrees Celsius on the core, 75 degrees on the memory, and 80 degrees hotspot. This is all completely fine.

The CPU at steady state is 77 degrees, which is within the expected range for the 7800X3D with a competent 240mm liquid cooler. RAM SPD Hub and SSD temperatures were fine, showing a slight delta between the two RAM sticks. That’s normal.

Thermals are relatively hard to screw-up in this case since it’s so heavily perforated and includes 3 side intake fans, a 240 liquid cooler, and a rear exhaust fan. Thermaltake did not screw them up, so that’s also a good sign. Overall, the cooling configuration is good and performs well for what it is. We don’t have any problems with the CPU or GPU temperatures here.

CPU Thermals vs. Fan Speed - Full Torture

The chart above shows CPU temperature over time and plotted against fan speed. There’s an initial spike in temperature around the 200-second mark, which causes the liquid cooler’s pump (recorded as CPU1) and fan speeds to spike to control it. Outside of that initial burst, the rest of the curve is gradual, without any sudden ramps. This is all good as it should help avoid noticeable, annoying, and sudden changes in noise. Fan hysteresis seems good here.

The cooler fans topped out at 1908 RPM AVG, but the chassis fans only reached 429 RPM AVG. This is so low that we doubt they're contributing much at all to the overall cooling. The system doesn’t really need them to be going faster, but this points to them being improperly configured.

We think it’d be better to boost these speeds at least a couple hundred RPM to make some use of the fans, as currently, they are borderline ornamental at those speeds. It would actually result in a quieter system if Thermaltake slightly dropped the speed of the higher RPM fans and slightly increased the speed of the side fans, as they’d get rid of some of the higher frequencies in the noise spectrum by reducing the higher RPM fans. This would yield a better overall balance for the system than setting a few fans high and the rest so low that they do nearly nothing.

Acoustics - Full Torture

We’ll wrap up the charts with acoustic testing. 

This is done in our hemi-anechoic chamber that we built last year. We’ve been getting a ton of use out of this chamber for testing. The reason we built the chamber is to ensure a consistent test environment day-to-day. You’d be shocked how much daily external noise changes as picked up on decibel meters, and without good controls, we wouldn’t be able to fairly test and evaluate systems against each other from day to day as the conditions would be constantly changing. Our chamber allows us to eliminate external noises that aren’t from the computer, so if there’s a truck outside or some high-pitched wind whistling or something like that, we eliminate all of it with the chamber. That means we are correctly attributing system noise to the system itself, not to our own environmental factors that aren’t present in your situation.

The image above is a plot of dBA over time during the same full system load. The average noise level during idle was 18 dBA. Noise levels during steady-state reached 31.1 dBA. What we’re really looking at here is the ramp: Thermaltake’s system ramped to full noise level over a period of about 10 minutes, which is great. That means Thermaltake isn’t unnecessarily rapidly ramping and de-ramping the fans (other than that initial spike) and is utilizing time to slowly increase the speeds. This would help control noise levels during spikier workloads.

Frequency Spectrum

Here’s a quick frequency spectrum plot with data collected in our acoustic chamber.

The Thermaltake 470M under steady state full load had its largest spikes at the 223 and 380 Hz frequencies, followed by a dip, then another small spike at 500 Hz. Overall, this noise profile is fine. There is a slight spike at 1600-1700 Hz which could be flattened a bit by lowering the pump speed and CPU cooler fan speed slightly, but overall, there’s not a lot to complain about with it.

Packaging

Thermaltake’s packaging was generally pretty good, utilizing the tried and true box-in-a-box method, but with the oddity of using GPU box foam inserts as packing material (and from a different GPU than the one in our system, no less). We have no way to know if this is routine practice or if the warehouse just ran out of the usual stuff – at least it’s recycling. The PC itself was packed inside the case box as usual.

The glass side panel was screwed in for transit, which was good, and was taped to the front glass panel, which was annoying. But at least for the positives, making use of the glass security screw is the correct move and we’re happy to see it get its proper use. 

There was a QR code linking to instructions on how to remove the side panel. This is a bit strange since it’s a lot of extra steps to get to the answer: It technically works, but a simple instructional pictograph would be a lot better since they’re printing and applying a sticker anyway, so applying a sticker with a QR code to basically a single step is a roundabout way of conveying a message in the same space as the code itself.

The inside of the case was well-packed with a mixture of both closed-cell and expanding foams. Thermaltake did an adequate job of protecting the system during shipping. Ours did not sustain any shipping damage. We were overall happy with how this was packaged. 

Accessories

Now for the accessories: The included quick start guide provides an actually helpful primer for setup, especially for novices. Step 1 clearly instructs the user to plug the monitor into the GPU and not the motherboard, which should help prevent the number one easy mistake, and it also notes to flip the PSU switch to on, which should prevent the second most common easy mistake. 

The bag of accessories inside the case has the case manual, SATA cables, WiFi antennae, extra screws, and, curiously, two 12VHPWR adapters. One of them is the official NVIDIA adapter that probably came with the 4070 Super and the other is a mismatched-white that just looks bad. Nothing in the build is white themed, so we assume this was an accidental inclusion. Including the native NVIDIA adapter is good though, as there are a lot of reasons a user may want it in the future. Keeping the card’s accessories with the card is the right move and we’re happy to see it. Some SIs just toss the extras, which could minimally pose issues for second-hand resale when done with the system.

We’re not sure if this is better or worse than the used Sharpie PRO we got from NZXT. We didn’t end up mentioning that in the NZXT video because it didn’t matter compared to the utter trainwreck that Flex is, but we actually got sent a used Sharpie in the accessory box. Maybe it’s a trap so they can charge us for the entire cost of the system if we don’t include the Sharpie upon return.

Anyway, at least in reference to this, Thermaltake is looking good. We were overall satisfied with the accessories included.

Thermaltake Vista 470M Conclusion

The quick version of the conclusion is this: The Thermaltake Vista 470M pre-built is one of the best we’ve looked at recently, alongside the Starforge Lowkey. It’s also the best value for money we’ve seen since probably the Maingear Vybe in 2022 (watch our review). The upcharge over DIY is only about $100, which is pretty much as good as it gets outside of major SI clearance sales. And even with the more recent sales since we bought the system, it might be at most $200 to $250 upcharge. 

Part selection makes sense outside of the slow DDR5-5600 – matching a still-excellent and efficient last-gen X3D CPU with the upper-midrange 4070 Super. It ends up being a good build. Thermaltake also doesn’t back the user into any corners with something like a proprietary motherboard that won’t get regular BIOS updates, which is good. The 850W PSU leaves overhead for a GPU upgrade down the road.

Now that the 9800X3D is out for effectively the same price, we’d like to see Thermaltake update the SKU with the new CPU and keep MSRP the same.

Build quality is overall good: Cable management was well-done, with the only major negative of the assembly being a bent RGB header.

The system’s setup was also a major positive for Thermaltake. The BIOS was sensibly configured and the Windows 11 install was clean, with impressively fresh GPU drivers. The only oddity there was a missing X3D driver that’s only necessary to the dual CCD parts, which the 7800X3D isn’t. As general best practice, we still like to see all drivers installed and no yellow bangs (!) in the device manager.

Thermals across the whole build are well managed, with CPU and GPU temperatures within expected ranges. Fan curves and acoustics are also good, with the one exception being the chassis fans never ramping up. 

Thermaltake could improve upon its fan configuration by reducing the CPU speeds in the curve and increasing the case panel speeds, which would slightly lower noise and create a more desirable acoustic profile, but with the same thermal results.

We’re overall impressed with this system. After how many bad prebuilts we’ve looked at recently, we specifically went hunting for good ones and bought several. Of those, one was bad -- and that’s coming up soon -- and another coming up looks promising. This one went well. This is our first Thermaltake prebuilt we’ve bought. We’d feel comfortable recommending this one. It’s a big plus to see AMD in use where it makes sense too, as a lot of the system integrators and OEMs are still embedded with Intel.

Well done to Thermaltake. We’ll probably give this system to someone we know since we expect it won’t come back with any problems.

From thermals to design, we explain how terrible Corsair’s ONE i500 pre-built PC is

The Highlights

• Corsair’s ONE i500 is a pre-built PC equipped with a custom case and a 14900K
• The PC has major thermal issues in regards to both CPU and video card performance
• Despite advertising “uncompromised” performance, the Corsair ONE i500 is full of compromises
• Original MSRP: $4,200 - $4,700
• Release Date: May 6, 2024

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

The Corsair ONE i500 is terrible. 

Corsair’s product page calls the i500’s performance “uncompromised” no fewer than 6 times. Except we’d say that running 600MHz slower than stock on the CPU because it’s intentionally power limited is literally the definition of compromise.

In fact, there is no more literal definition of the word. In our view, Corsair is just straight-up lying by calling this uncompromised when referring to thermals and size, because it is actively compromising.

Editor's note: This was originally published on September 29, 2024 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Writing

Jeremy Clayton

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

3D Animation

Andrew Coleman

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

Also, in Corsair’s world, “advanced”, “top-tier” cooling means GPU VRAM at 94 degrees Celsius and a 120mm radiator desperately trying (but failing) to cool the 14900K from hitting 100 degrees Celsius.

We spent over $4,700 on the Corsair ONE i500 pre-built gaming PC because it’s spammed everywhere across the internet a few months ago. We’ve seen nonstop ads for it on social media, videos with influencers and showcases, and it’s... bad.

There are a few positives, like the OS setup. But that’s not really enough.

Corsair ONE i500 Overview

The i500 is available in just two configurations, both using the Intel i9-14900K with the same motherboard, cooling, PSU, and custom case. The ONE we have has an RTX 4090 and 64GB of DDR5-6000 for $4700 (or $4200 on sale at the time of writing).

Corsair ONE i500 Part and Price Breakdown

We did some price analysis using identical DIY parts where possible or replacements where not. We’re not trying to outmatch Corsair -- we want a fair fight, so we stuck as close to the spec as we could.

The i500 ends up with a premium of $1,625 over DIY, or $1,225 if counting the current sale – which, in either of those two situations, is absolutely, completely insane. For reference, some of the Maingear and Starforge PCs we’ve looked at over the last two years have been on the “higher” side of “build fee” and markup, both at around $400-$550 on top of builds that cost around $1,500 to $2,000. 

At this price, we’re disappointed with several of the part choices, including the B760 chipset motherboard (more on that later), the inadequate 120mm CPU liquid cooler, and the capacity of the SSD. 4TB M.2 options start around $220, including Corsair’s own MP600 CORE XT 4TB for $260. Yet, our $4,700 build only provides us 2TB. 

It doesn’t come with any peripherals either, but Corsair’s happy to link its $280 K100 AIR wireless keyboard prominently on the product page.

The case itself is custom and exclusive to the i500. 

It has a solid front, which comes in the dark wood version we have, sourced from walnut, light wood sourced from maple, or black metal.

The top and bottom of the case have really bulky aluminum fins. The top gets warm during operation, but the metal isn’t leveraged for cooling in the way it should be. This was a missed opportunity in such a customized build as this is.

The bottom has holes to theoretically let the PSU get access to air, but it’s so blocked off that there’s only a few millimeters of space for it to breathe so the vents are functionally useless or very close to it. This is bad, and the case should absolutely not be placed on carpet.

All the fans in the i500 are Corsair AF120 SLIMs that top out at 2,000 RPM and are all stacked-up right against the side. It’s a unique ensemble. Slim fans typically struggle in high resistance applications, like on radiators. The left side fans are entirely intake, but the right side has none and has no real opportunity for airflow.

The i500’s main cooling is handled by two independent closed-loop liquid coolers: 120mm on the CPU as left side intake and a 240mm radiator on the GPU as top exhaust. 

The CPU cooler is laughable for the notoriously power hungry 14900K (read our review). 

As for the GPU cooler, it should be able to handle its job given no major screw ups. Unfortunately for Corsair, there are major screw ups. 

Corsair ONE i500 Thermals

Corsair ONE i500 Thermals - GPU Comparison

Here’s the chart of GPU thermals for the Corsair ONE at steady state under various loads.

GPU thermals are abysmal. The water-cooled Corsair 4090 has GPU VRAM hitting 94 degrees Celsius in a 21C ambient, which is completely unacceptable even if it were air-cooled. TjMax for VRAM, depending on special exclusions and exceptions, is typically 95C or 105C. It depends on the specific memory. In either scenario, the 94C result is deeply concerning and embarrassing for Corsair to even ship out the door with water attached to the block that shares a cold plate with the memory.

We added the ASUS Strix 4090 here just for a high-end air cooler reference and used its stock fan curve. Testing is on an open bench -- it’s not a perfectly controlled comparison, and it’s not supposed to be. The point is a reference.

The i500’s 4090 is warmer across the board, even with liquid cooling. GPU core is also way higher on the i500’s 4090, at 70 versus 63.7 degrees Celsius. Back when we reviewed the Colorful Neptune 4090, its core temperature was about 52C in the same test – albeit with an entirely different liquid cooler. Corsair’s 4090 thermals are disastrous.

Thermal interface material, including pads, will age. Dust accumulates. Liquid permeates tubes. With time, this 94C will easily breach 100C with a little bit of time in the mix or a higher local ambient temperature. 

All Thermals

Liquid temperature inside the GPU loop hit 65C for the i500. For reference, some CLC manufacturers, including Asetek, cite 60-65C as being the maximum safe liquid temperature for the plastics internal to the pump before they start breaking down.

All Thermals - Equilibrium Chart

This chart shows all system thermals at steady state.

We already talked about GPU thermals being not only uncompetitive, but embarrassingly bad and potentially damaging to long-term survivability of some of its components.  

The CPU is next: During a Cinebench workload at steady-state, the P-cores averaged 89 degrees Celsius. The hottest single cores were hitting 100C, only stopping there because they were thermal throttling and hitting TjMax. This is literally compromise, again, despite what we believe is Corsair’s false advertising.

With Blender, which is a completely realistic all-core workload, we still monitored 81-degree results on P-cores and 92 for the hottest single core. VR VCC also measured hot, way up at 85C. The MOSFET measurement from the motherboard was 79 degrees, which is warm, but survivable depending on capacitor temperature (which we didn’t check, since our conclusion is already that you shouldn’t buy this). 

The PCH was fine, SPD Hub on RAM was fine, and the drive was also fine.

These issues point to something being fundamentally wrong with the i500’s GPU cooling setup. And its CPU cooling setup. And just the computer in general -- but we’ll focus on the GPU since the VRAM is so bad.

A large portion of the issue is that the rear fan on the GPU radiator, of which there are two, is actually controlled by the CPU cooler liquid temperature, and it barely sped up during the GPU-only load, like gaming at 4K. 

You also can’t change this fan behavior. If that sounds stupid, it’s because it is.

This alone doesn’t explain the 94C VRAM, so we’ll look for a root cause in the tear-down. Let’s jump over to that now.

Corsair ONE i500 Tear-Down & Disassembly

Starting the tear-down, we remove the case’s two floppy panels before unscrewing the 2 large metal side panels underneath.

Removing one of the panels unveils a swinging door, which, as a mechanism, is nice. It houses 2 fans and the CPU cooler’s 120mm radiator, which is too small to effectively cool the PC’s 14900K. We can also see that it has short cooling tubes connected to it in order to reduce clutter, but at the cost of reduced usefulness in future systems. 

Inside the case, we can see multiple clips that manage one of the fan cables. It’s a nice touch, but they are held down by adhesive, which come off easily as a result of the extreme heat build-up within the system. Corsair fully customized this case specifically for this purpose, so choosing not to build metal cable tie points into the case is not only bizarre, but a waste of an opportunity. The point of going fully custom is to not need to resort to glue. 

Next, we unscrewed the swinging door to get better access to the motherboard and to pull the cooler out.

Removing the water cooler, we noticed that there were some loose screws on the mounting bracket. The cooler ended up using a pre-applied thermal paste via silk screen application, which is fine and keeps things consistent.  

Examining the graphics card, we can see that the VRM is completely exposed, forcing it to rely exclusively on air cooling. This approach is a major shortcoming of the design and shows either a lack of care or a lack of understanding of how hot VRMs get.

The GPU uses a 3-slot bracket, which ends up being a wasted benefit since the card simply isn’t heavy enough to rely on it. For heavy air-cooled video cards, 3-slot brackets are a great way to help reduce GPU sag; here, however, the 3-slot bracket provides no value to the rigidity of basically just a blank PCB with a CLC strapped to the top.

Taking the card out of the case, we noticed that its PCB has 2x 8-pin blank spots, which suggests Corsair reused this PCB from another design. 

We looked at the space between the PCB and the copper cold plate to check for thermal pads and saw that a corner of the memory module had zero contact to a thermal pad. We also saw poor contact around the edges of other memory modules. This helps explain some of the poor performance we saw in our thermal results.

The card’s GPU and memory share the same copper cold plate. The downside to this approach is that the GPU appears to run a little bit warmer as a result. The upside is that the memory can access better cooling because of this design, but unfortunately with Corsair’s execution, it didn’t work based on our testing. We also noticed that the thermal pads are on the thicker side, which hurts performance. They also felt completely dry. We’re not convinced the thermal conductivity of these pads is any good.

The top of the case uses a 240mm radiator, which isn’t sufficient to deal with all of the heat the PC puts out. Going back to the GPU, its solution is very disappointing and we were baffled by how barebones and cheap it is.  

On the bright side, all of the computer’s cables were fully seated, though we did notice 4 pretty loose screws on the motherboard with one of them being completely loose. 

Removing the motherboard from the case exposes some built-in cable ties that help manage the cables on the back. This is a nice touch as they flatten the cables out, though they are inaccessible without removing the motherboard. 

Removing the PSU, we can see some odd, massive screwed-in steel plates that hold the cables in place. Corsair is investing effort into the wrong areas to manage its cables.

Finally, during the teardown, we noticed that the case had a strange metal box which clamped the front IO cables together. Corsair used glue and tape here to hold things down, which made it feel like a hack job. We also were uncertain of its purpose. It is neither a heatsink nor an EMI shield.

Overall, the case was frustrating to work in. We understand it’s not meant to be taken apart but some level of serviceability is nice and Corsair doesn’t really hit those marks here.

Corsair ONE i500 Benchmarks

Back to the charts.

Corsair ONE i500 GPU Frequency

For GPU clock, the RTX 4090 in the Corsair ONE i500 initially boosts up to 2655MHz before falling to an average of 2620MHz. It frequently drops into the 2580MHz range. Our air-cooled 4090s typically stay relatively flat and higher than this.

Corsair ONE i500 CPU Power Throttling

Looking now at CPU power behavior, CPU package power shows the CPU hitting the 240W PL2 limit during the passes until Tau expires and drops power to the lower 200W PL1 that Corsair set. There’s still a momentary higher peak at the beginning of every pass, which lines up with the thermals. Normally for the 14900K under Intel Performance or Extreme profiles, there’s no time limit on PL2, and PL1 would equal PL2, rendering Tau meaningless anyway. Here, they’re forced to use it because the cooler is woefully insufficient.

CPU Frequency

To look at CPU frequency, we’re comparing our original 14900K review data for an all-core 3D rendering workload in Blender against the Corsair build. 

The original review data had an average frequency of 5321MHz P-core and over 4600MHz all-core. The Corsair ONE was already 300MHz below this, at 5031MHz, and is already compromising. The problem is that even this only persists for a minute or two, at which point it falls to the 4689MHz entry that we’re seeing. That’s a massive 632MHz across all P-cores to a combination of compromises and poor design. 632MHz against every P-core will have a multiplying effect where the performance loss cascades.

Corsair ONE i500 Airflow Animation

Before moving to BIOS, we’ll look at the airflow situation. We made a custom 3D animation to help visualize the airflow patterns we observed during testing.

First, the side panels themselves already present a lot of challenges for the fans. The plastic and metal supports block a lot of the intake area, meaning those areas for the fans will be dead, as in, they won’t be able to do anything.

3 fans are revealed from removing the left panel. Some of these are on a hinging mechanism that we actually liked, if not for all the other problems. It’s a good way to get side intake without the panel itself being tethered to a cable. Opening the hinged door reveals the top exhaust fans mounted to the GPU radiator, with one fan attached to CPU liquid temperature.

Closing the doors again, here’s how the air is flowing: This case will mostly behave in a positive pressure way. The bottom fan blows air in unobstructed. The fan directly above it pulls only past the panel and pushes basically straight into the right-most GPU radiator fan. The fan to its left pushes air in, through a radiator, and then will mostly get pulled up and out. 

Opening the bottom fan hinge, this air will mostly hit the exposed GPU components. Because the upper half of the chassis is sectioned-off by the card and because there’s a solid steel plate next to it, most of the air finds its way out through the rear PCIe slot covers. There’s a ton of heat in this area from the PCB and GPU and no active way to get rid of it, plus the card is dividing the case, so a lot of the heat will get trapped and pool around the video card. We think this contributes to a lot of the problems.

As for the upper half: The biggest challenge is for the CPU radiator. The right-most fan will push more air straight into the chassis than the radiator fan next to it, which will struggle with resistance and pressure. The right-most fan is mostly going to feed the GPU exhaust, while the left fan will push warmed CPU air straight into the VRM, then out the GPU radiator. The rear port is empty, but ventilated, and depending on the speed of the various fans, can function either as a passive intake when the system is exhausting more than it’s bringing in, or as exhaust when it is pushing more air in through the side fans.

To support more of these educational animations, visit store.gamersnexus.net. 

Corsair ONE i500 BIOS

Corsair’s motherboard is the MSI MAG B760M MORTAR WIFI, but with a proprietary BIOS that turns it into the “MORTAR WIFI CORSAIR.” We occasionally see this from the larger SIs, and we always consider it a bad thing as it forces reliance on the SI for updates rather than the motherboard manufacturer.

The board’s BIOS has a build date of 2/2/24, and there weren’t any updated versions on Corsair’s download page until September 9th. That means Corsair didn’t take any action to support its customers with new microcode revisions in the face of Intel’s CPU stability and degradation issues until after MSI itself did. In other words, if Corsair had just used an off-the-shelf board, customers could get normal updates sooner.

Some BIOS settings are good: MSI’s software download tool is disabled and XMP is applied. Almost all CPU values were default except power limits. 

PL1 was set to 200W, PL2 at 240W, and ICCMAX CPU current at 350A. Both power limits are lower than Intel’s notorious June recommendations for the 14900K under the Performance and Extreme profiles.

All these values in the BIOS are also totally locked and unable to be changed by the user. This is both an admission of the subpar cooling capabilities, and a hindrance in any scenario where the user might want something else. 

BIOS also lacks any way to control the fans. Only CPU1 is shown, but this is actually one of the CLC pumps. None of the 5 actual fans are attached to the motherboard itself, and therefore can’t be controlled here.

Corsair ONE i500 Packaging and Accessories

The i500’s packaging was good, with dual layer boxes and thick, tofu-like foam that probably has the word “eco” in its name somewhere. Large, clear unpacking instructions are immediately on top after opening the outer box. We liked how well it was secured at least.

The only accessories included were the wireless antenna. That’s it – no peripherals, no headphone hanger (which was shown in many of the product photos and which influencer videos talked about), and no or extra PSU cables. This is a big negative, especially since the SF1000L PSU inside is a standard part and should remain operational well beyond the useful life of the system as a whole.

There also weren’t any manuals, nor was there a sticker covering the motherboard’s display connectors to help guide novice users in the right direction. And those are the users who will need it because they’re the only people who would buy this. There’s just the most basic setup instructions on the unpacking card and a link to Corsair’s online quick start guide. 

We were surprised by the inclusion of genuinely useful instructions for hardware upgrades: RAM, M.2 and 2.5” SSDs, and an extra PCIe card all get detailed. 

OS Setup and Software

Another positive area for the i500 is in OS setup and software. The Windows 11 out of box experience went as expected and we had zero popups on first boot.

The only actively running non-Windows software was the Corsair One Dashboard. It’s a barebones utility for changing the case lighting and monitoring liquid temperatures and fans speeds; however, it can’t change the fan speeds. It doesn’t even remember your RGB settings all the time. We think it’s strange Corsair didn’t go with the more mature iCUE software here.

The only other bloatware on the system is the Corsair Diagnostics software, a suite of tools from Ultra-X for reading system stats and a variety of stress tests.

As another positive, there weren’t any missing drivers in Device Manager, but the NVIDIA Game Ready Driver was 3 months out of date by the time we bought the system. Some version lag is OK. 3 months is too much.

Acoustics Over Time

The final test is noise testing over time in our hemi-anechoic chamber.

Since we can’t directly control or log the fan RPM on the i500, we have to rely on noise data gathered over time during a full system torture test.

The system is very quiet at idle and during initial periods of load, hovering around 17dBA before briefly rising to about 18dBA at our noise floor of around 14. Then the noise rapidly ramps up during a period of about 100 seconds, reaching about 33dBA, then steadily increasing to settle in at an average of 37.7dBA.

This behavior is due to the fan speeds being set to react to liquid temperature inside the CLCs rather than actual component load or heat. That can work, but the downside to that here is the fan curve is steep, and boils down to basically two modes of operation – slow with hot thermals and relatively quiet or fast and noisy (but still hot).

Here are a few noise samples.

The 2000RPM fans keep this from sounding crazy, but the approach is devoid of nuance, any skill, and lacks a competent configuration. It seems kind of like the “auto” approach to cooling for something that otherwise was supposed to be custom, which is bizarre. Corsair wanted the i500 to be perceived as silent under load, but it’s only quiet as long as the load is sporadic, with heat spikes being absorbed by the liquid. Anything that’s sustained for more than a minute or two will start to get loud. 

Corsair ONE i500 Conclusion

The conclusion here is pretty straightforward: Don’t buy the Corsair One i500. Its price is steep and its value is bad.

If we ignore all of its problems, which are bad across its thermals to its acoustics, it still represents a markup of $1,625 or, if on sale, a markup of $1,225 over DIY.

While we don’t think everyone should build a PC and that there are many valid reasons to buy a pre-built, that’s still too much because you can go to other SIs and get a similar form factor system for less of a ripoff. To top it off, the Corsair One i500 isn’t even designed well. 

Moving on to specifics, the B760 board at this price point is an absolute joke, the SSD should be larger, and the GPU VRAM hitting 94 degrees C is literally insane. The solution they’ve built for the graphics card is woefully inept. It is either the biggest cost-cutting solution in the greediest way possible or it’s incompetent as there’s nothing on the VRM components, which results in thermal issues in this case.    

The Corsair ONE i500 also had limited CPU cooling for the 14900K, which is a terrible CPU choice for the build. A 240mm CLC could have easily fit if Corsair made its custom case a few millimeters larger. Alternatively, Corsair could have simply used a lower tier CPU like it’s done in the past as the company had to downclock the 14900K to perform like a lower tier CPU anyway. The user can’t even change the fan settings at all without rewiring the fans to run straight into the motherboard.

Other complaints include the power supply barely having access to air. It’s also bare on accessories and doesn’t include any extra cables. 

On the bright side, the online documentation is good and the Windows setup was mostly clean. But when you’re paying 5 grand for a computer, if it’s going to be marked up as much as the Corsair One i500 is, it needs to at least perform at expected levels.

Corsair heavily marketed the ONE i500 as offering uncompromised performance, which we view as false advertising in this case.