NZXT Player: One

Built with the care of a boutique PC builder, NZXT's Player: One ($1,049) is a premium version of an entry-level gaming desktop. Crafted largely of the California company's own components, this mid-tower gives you much more of a prestige aftermarket feel than a big-box mainstream model. We like nearly everything about it, from its expert assembly to its fluid 1080p gaming performance, and it's even available in two colors. It's priced slightly above its mainstream rivals, but NZXT gives you the security of a two-year warranty. The Player: One easily earns not only a recommendation but our Editors' Choice award among budget gaming towers.

The Design: A Slice of the Aftermarket, Please

The Player: One is the entry-level model in NZXT's prebuilt gaming desktop line, with Player: Two and Player: Three models upward in the stack in price and features. The $1,049 base configuration we were sent for review combines an Intel Core i5-12400F processor (six Performance cores, 12 threads, 65 watts base power), an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card, 16GB of RAM, a 500GB solid-state drive, and Windows 11 Home.

Outside, the NZXT H5 Flow case has a minimalist yet edgy look, with squared edges and tall rubber feet supporting the setup. Our unit is black, but the Player: One can also be had in white. The case measures 18.3 by 8.9 by 17.6 inches (HWD).

Airflow clearly isn't a problem with this case, with primary intake through a perforated front panel and a bottom intake fan angled at about 30 degrees to point at the graphics card. No front intake fans are installed—this relatively low-powered setup simply doesn't need any—but you could easily add them later. Likewise, our unit's 65-watt Core i5 CPU is fine with air cooling, but a sealed liquid cooler with 240mm radiator could be added later. (In fact, NZXT's step-up Player: One Prime model features such a cooler.)

Maintenance is made easy by washable dust filters behind the front panel and under the openings for the bottom fan and power supply intake.

This case's selection of front-mounted ports is stingy; you'll find just one USB-A port, one USB-C port, and a headset jack on top of the case. The USB ports are version 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps) connectors.

NZXT's house-brand Intel Z690-based ATX motherboard provides a generous selection of rear ports including one 10Gbps USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port; seven USB Type-A ports (one version 3.2 Gen 2, four 3.2 Gen 1, and two legacy 2.0); three audio jacks (microphone, line-in, and line-out); and 2.5Gbps Ethernet. The antenna jacks are for the built-in Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 wireless. The HDMI port is disabled since the Core i5-12400F lacks integrated graphics.

For video outputs, the GeForce RTX 3050 card offers the expected single HDMI and three DisplayPorts.

The NZXT's tempered glass side panel is secured by a rather stubborn thumbscrew. I like that the panel has little plastic rivets that press into the case and secure it, so it's not held solely by the thumbscrew. The same is true for the other side panel.

The spacious interior looks a little empty without front or top fans, but gives you plenty of working space. The DeepCool CPU air cooler is the only source of lighting, with its white-only 120mm fan. That leaves the case on the dark side, especially since the side panel is tinted. The CPU fan made more noise than I expected, but the Player: One's overall noise level is low and easy to ignore in a family-room environment.

The NZXT website doesn't seem to specify the exact motherboard that's included, but our unit had NZXT's N5 Z690 ATX board. It has four DDR4 memory slots (notably, not DDR5), two holding 8GB DIMMs of TeamGroup-brand RAM, and four M.2 slots for SSD storage. The included drive is covered by a heatsink, as it should be.

Beyond the M.2 slots, storage expansion is limited to one 3.5-inch and two 2.5-inch bays behind the right-side panel. Our unit's 650-watt NZXT modular power supply is also accessible from there.

The GeForce RTX 3050 is a small graphics card by modern standards. It has a two-slot, two-fan cooler to leave room for access to the motherboard's other expansion slots, which include another PCI Express x16, two PCI Express x4, and two PCI Express x1. The topmost x16 slot holding the graphics card supports the latest PCI Express 5.0 protocol.

Overall, the Player: One is well-made and conveniently upgradable. NZXT uses decent-quality components and has reasonably neat cable management. I also like that NZXT covers the entire tower with a two-year warranty, double what you'd normally see on an entry-level machine.

Benchmark Testing: Ready to Ace 1080p Gaming—and That's It

As mentioned, we're testing NZXT's Player: One in its least expensive $1,049 configuration, which includes an Intel Core i5-12400F processor, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 500GB SSD.

The Player: One can seem pricey for what's inside, especially since it has just 500GB of storage. I found an Acer Nitro 50 gaming desktop on sale for $789 with a 1TB hard drive. Likewise, I saw MSI's Infinite ZS 5TH-402US tower listed at $899. Meanwhile, HP's Omen 25L tower was a tick more than the NZXT at $1,073. As noted, the Player: One's two-year warranty narrows the value gap.

If you can splurge to the tune of $1,299, NZXT offers a step-up Player: One Prime model that gets you a considerably faster Intel Core i5-12600K with liquid cooling, a GeForce RTX 3060 card, and twice the storage (1TB). Overall, though, I'd like to see NZXT including Intel's 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" processors in the Player: One line for even better performance.

Let's get onto the performance testing. The other players (so to speak) facing the NZXT gaming rig include the Dell XPS Desktop (8950) and the higher-end MSI Aegis RS, the only two gaming-oriented towers of the group. I also included the prosumer Asus ProArt Station PD5, being one of the only other non-high-end towers we’ve tested as of late, and the Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast Kit mini-PC. This is a varied bunch, to be sure, and the NZXT will face an uphill battle since it has arguably the weakest processor and graphics card in the group.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

We begin with UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. The Player: One scored far above the 4,000 points we look for from mainstream PCs in the main test and held its own in the storage test.

Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Finally, we run workstation vendor Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Player: One trailed all but the Asus and its older Core i7 CPU in these tests, as its six-core Core i5-12400F was no match for the higher-core-count chips in the others. The Dell desktop showed the strength of the Core i5-12600K available in the Player: One Prime. Clearly, you're not getting a productivity powerhouse with the Player: One, but stay tuned for the gaming tests where you'll see this desktop's true strength.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

For Windows PCs, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming tests. The former includes two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Also looped into that group is the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL performance.

Our real-world gaming testing relies on the in-game benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, representing simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games respectively. We run Valhalla and Siege each twice (the first at 1080p with Ultra quality, the second at 4K resolution and Ultra quality), while F1 2021 is run at 1080p/Ultra quality settings with and without Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing turned on.

The Player: One's GeForce RTX 3050 is a known quantity, producing numbers that leave no room for complaint at 1080p resolution, though asking it for more than that with today's titles will be a stretch. Its main strength as a value graphics card is its 8GB of display memory, which should let you use high-quality texture settings in most games at 1080p.

Verdict: NZXT Delivers a Budget Gaming MVP

The NZXT Player: One ticks the boxes we look for in an entry-level gaming desktop. Skillfully built by experts, its aftermarket style is a nod to the company's topnotch components and cases. The base configuration we tested delivers more-than-satisfactory 1080p gaming performance, especially for esports, and though its SSD is on the small side, upgrading after the fact is easily accomplished. The Player: One may look a little pricey next to budget mainstream towers, but NZXT adds value to its upscale appeal by doubling the usual warranty. With little to let it down, NZXT's Player: One is our latest Editors' Choice prizewinner among budget gaming desktops.