Meet the latest iteration of the entire desktop ecosystem, the Corsair A100.
This machine is powered by Ryzen 9 and GeForce RTX, giving some unbelievable power in just a 12L water-cooled enclosure.
So, first up, let’s look at how this latest iteration stacks up in terms of cooling, noise, and performance in all types of scenarios.
BTW, it’s powerful. It’s small, and it’s expensive and one of the best-prebuilt systems ever built.
Design
The design is the same as it was in the past couple of years.
We have some thick aluminum triangular side ventilation going on ad some cooling fans on both the top and bottom and some glowing beautiful RGB strips in the front of the chassis.
It can also be bought in three different configurations with the Ryzen 9 processor inside with the prince ranging from $2999 all the away up to $3999.
And this time, they are using an Asus motherboard inside the X570i with some excellent IO and Wifi 6 while utilizing the PCIe Gen 4 for insanely fast storage speeds with the included MP600 NVMe SSD.
The power supply is a 600 watt Gold SF600, a fully modular unit from Corsair itself. The RAM is a dual DIMM 32 GB Corsair Vengeance Kit with 3200 MHz from Corsair itself, and aside from the GPU and the motherboard and the Seagate HDD, everything inside is by Corsair itself, which is a pretty cool match on the highest end unit of the Corsair A100.
So, there’s one fan on the top exhausting all the heat generated from the internals, while the CPU and GPU have there owned coolers with slim radiators, and it’s awe-inspiring what the system can achieve while working on load.
Accessing the internals is also easy, and it does not void your warranty while it is incredible, so that you can upgrade components or clean the internals when needed.
And one thing to note is that you can only control the top fan RPM inside the iCue as the CPU Pumps and GPU fans are automatic.
Also, the machine exhibits some coil whine, which is audible when the fans are not spinning, but when some airflow is going on the inside, it’s pretty subtle, and most of the time, it cannot be heard.
Performance
Gaming performance on this desktop is fantastic and should run all of the AAA title games pretty fine. The CPU and GPU temperatures are also cooler unless you fully boost them in the MSI Afterburner, but you can still expect some fair amount of heat.
And if you are using some CPU intensive programs, this beast flexes its muscles in any CPU intensive tasks so, if you are a heavy resource user, this beast got all the power you need at this price point.
So, should you buy the Corsair A100?
Well, what we have here is a Ryzen 3950x stacked inside in an extremely compact 12L enclosure with some pretty adequate cooling.
It is not a mega powerhouse but will pretty much behave as you would expect for a desktop PC at this price point.
So, it’s clear that Corsair has prioritized on the form factor, noise profile, and giving you as much power density as possible without redesigning the entire system back, which has saved you a lot of money which could potentially be better spent on keeping them for some new upgrades or peripherals without wasting them on another desktop PC at the same price point which gives you the same performance as the Corsair A100 does and this is a better bang for your valuable bucks.
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