PC_Advisor_Issue_264_July_2017

Reviews
with a Maxwell-era GeForce Titan
X. Mind you, we had issues with the
Chronos, which ran rather loud.
Tomb Raider
Moving on to an actual game, we
ran the older, but still fun, Tomb
Raider on the Ultimate setting at
2560x1600 resolution. Again, the
One places in front thanks mostly
to its higher-clocked seventhgeneration
Kaby Lake CPU and
its Pascal GeForce card.
3DMark FireStrike Extreme gives
the edge to the Corsair One
The hardware inside the Corsair One schools
older as well as cheaper components
of parts. Many vendors sell barebones
systems with everything but
the operating system, because the
minute they install the OS, they’re
on the hook for all hardwareand
software-related issues.
Got malware? Problem with the
internet? Clouds outside not moving
fast enough? Call the PC maker.
So while you might not see it as
a big deal that a PC comes complete
with OS, know that it’s a big deal
for a company that got its start
making just one PC component.
Most of the One’s parts are
top-notch, but if we were to nitpick,
our first target would be the SSD,
a Corsair Force in old-fashioned
2.5in SATA flavour. Sure, it’s plenty
fast, but with M.2 PCIe NVMe
drives offering three to even four
times the performance, it’s hard
to settle for SATA. Note, however,
there’s room for two 2.5in drives
and an M.2 drive inside the One.
A 400W PSU seems a bit small
and potentially limiting for future
upgrades, but to be fair, you can’t
really drop a ton of hardware into
the One’s frame.
Performance
None of these details matter if
the One can’t keep up with similar
desktops, so we put it through our
standard system tests. The results
were quite good for a machine so
small and quiet.
3DMark
First up is Futuremark’s 3DMark
FireStrike Extreme test. It’s a
synthetic test (meaning it’s not an
actual production game engine),
but it’s still useful for measuring
a PC’s 3D gaming capability. It’s
also generally considered to be
neutral ground, free from vendor
politics. The overall score reflects
the performance of both the CPU
and the GPU, but is more weighted
toward the latter. You can see the
One comes in slightly faster than the
8-core Origin PC Chronos equipped
CineBench R15
Moving on to pure CPU performance,
we use Maxon’s CineBench R15 to
measure a system’s ability to render
a 3D scene. This particular test
loves multicore CPUs, and systems
with more cores generally win.
Although no slouch by any
means, the One gets left behind
by the eight-core Core i7-5960X
in the Chronos. It’s worth noting,
however, that the eight-core chip in
the Chronos cost a cool thousand
pounds in its day, almost three
times the cost of an Intel quad-core
chip. Still, the upshot from this
test is that if you need a machine
for heavy-duty 3D-rendering
work, consider an octo-core.
The good news? Maybe one day
we’ll see a Ryzen-based One, too.
Handbrake encoding
Rendering 3D frames isn’t
something the typical
person does, but for a
broader look at CPU
performance, here’s how
the One would handle
a more common video
encode. Up against the
Core i7-6700K chips in
the Gigabyte PC and
the Cerise, the One is
fastest, but not enough
to matter to most users.
Sadly, that’s the world
of incremental upgrades
we live in today with
Intel’s quad-core CPUs.
Corsair uses dongles
to route the GPU’s
outputs to the back
of the system
July 2017 www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews 41