Corsair Vengeance i5100 review: falls short of its potential

The overall vibe of the i5100 is excellent. It looks clean and classy, with a slightly stocky shape that helps it stand out — as if the plethora of RGB lighting doesn’t do that enough already. It’s a showcase PC. It grabs the eye and turns heads. It’s the kind of thing your less-techy relatives will comment on as looking like a spaceship.

Corsair takes the cooling of this PC seriously, and it should, because with an RTX 4090 and a 14900KF, there’s the potential for hundreds and hundreds of watts of heat to be dumped into that expansive case when they’re being pushed hard. To that end, Corsair has the CPU fitted with an H150i 360mm AIO cooler, and the graphics card is the Asus TUF edition using its oversized, triple-fan cooling design. There are also six more 120mm system fans: three intakes on the bottom, two intakes on the right-hand panel, and one exhaust at the rear.

That gives this system a 5:4 ratio of intakes to exhausts, keeping the system at positive pressure and ensuring that any gaps in the chassis will push air and dust out, rather than pulling it in. All intakes are fitted with robust and easy-to-remove and clean dust filters, and all fans are managed by Corsair’s iCUE system, which provides in-depth temperature and fan speed monitoring and a mix of automated and manual controls.

All good in theory.

However, in practice, the implementation feels heavy-handed and lacking in subtlety. Where you would expect such a combination of cooling systems to be nuanced in its approach, the reality is far more blunt, and far more obvious.

At even the slightest hint of load on the 14900KF, the fans spin up dramatically and noisily. This might be for just a few seconds if the system is idling, but throw on a benchmark or a game, and the fan noise is consistent and very audible. You wouldn’t necessarily hear it in headphones, but you might and it’s louder than I personally like my gaming PCs — especially an expensive one.

Corsair does install a handful of its own applications like iCUE for managing cooling and RGB lighting and some diagnostics software to help if you run into trouble. That’s about it, though, leaving the system feeling clean and unburdened by unnecessary apps and services. What is there can be readily uninstalled, but it doesn’t feel too egregious or in-your-face.

I would have liked to see a few more basic applications pre-installed in such a high-end gaming system, though. Just for easier setup. Steam, Chrome, Discord perhaps. Not something you can’t do yourself easily, but if you’re going to spend the time installing apps you think people might need, you might as well install the ones you know they will.

As much as Intel might not have made waves in 2024 with its big CPU launch, let’s not pretend that its top chips aren’t seriously powerful and more than capable of giving AMD’s best a run for their money. Even as maligned as the 14900K was at launch, it’s still one of the most powerful processors ever made, and paired with a 4090, there should be nothing it can’t handle.

And indeed, that configuration in this Corsair i5100 is supremely powerful, but perhaps not quite as powerful as it should be.

In Cinebench 24, while the 14900KF does well, its scores were about 10% lower than I expected, with a boost clock that never broke 5.7GHz in the single-threaded test, or 4.9GHz in the multi-threaded test. I dug into the why on this one for a while, and discovered some power limit throttling and current/EDP limit throttling warnings in Intel XTU. Corsair suggested we update the BIOS to the latest version, which I promptly did, but it made little difference.

Fortunately, Geekbench didn’t seem to show the same problems, and the Handbrake transcoding was impressively quick, so this may have been a Cinebench quirk with this system. I still don’t like seeing any throttling on a PC this expensive, and my bet is on the B760 motherboard not having the beans this CPU needs to really stretch its legs, but if it doesn’t pan out in the real world, how much does that really matter?

One plus, though, is that I never saw any thermal throttling. Whether in gaming, or synthetic performance testing, this notoriously hot and heavy chip never broke 83 degrees C. Fan noise was seriously noticeable, though and something I would likely play with extensively to bring it down if this was my daily driver gaming PC.

Suffice to say, weird throttling behaviors or not, this PC is incredibly powerful and can play just about anything well — though as per usual, Cyberpunk with everything maxed out still gives it some trouble. DLSS 3 to the rescue.

Probably not — at least not in this configuration I tested. It is powerful, and it looks great. There’s potential there for a quiet system once you’ve tweaked and adjusted the cooling and the fan curves. But at that price? It’s hard to justify compared to the competition.

The 14900KF might be faster than the newer 285K, but it’s not as consistent as I’d like to see on this comparatively-pedestrian-feeling B760M motherboard. The fact that this PC doesn’t support overclocking for such an expensive build feels like a misstep and one that I’d be miffed about if I had put down over $4,000 on it. Especially not when Corsair also offers a comparably priced version of this same system with Ryzen X3D CPUs. For gaming, they’re just way better, and way cooler than this aging monster.

If you do buy the i5100, I’d suggest opting for the RTX 4080 Super version. It has less storage and memory, but 2TB and 32GB are still plenty, and you shave around $1,500 off the price for maybe 20% performance drop in real-world gaming. That still gives you a stupendously fast system in a big and airy case with some great aesthetics, and you can always upgrade it later if you find it lacking in the long term.