The Corsair One a200 is one of our favorite powerful yet compact gaming desktops, but it'll cost you—$3,799 as tested. Though similar in size, the NZXT H1 Mini Plus is much more affordable: For $1,799 in our test configuration, this obelisk-like micro-tower delivers excellent 1080p and 1440p gaming performance thanks to an Intel Core i7 K-series processor and a 12GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card. It's impeccably well built with NZXT's own top-notch components; whisper-quiet even during gaming; and easier to open and service than MSI's flashier MEG Trident X. It's an Editors' Choice award pick among gaming mini-PCs if ever we saw one.
A Mini Skyscraper
The H1 Mini Plus is only a fraction as large as a mid-tower at 15.3 by 7.4 by 7.4 inches (HWD). I'm testing the matte white version, but NZXT also offers it in a stealthy matte black.
This is a PC you can proudly display in a living room or on your desk. The lack of case lighting is somewhat disappointing, though there's no denying the case looks classy with its tinted front glass and perforated side panels.
The metal is unflinchingly sturdy; no plastic is used inside or out. The unit shows no tendency to tip over. Most of the heat exhaust goes out the rear and left side.
Similar Products
Corsair One a200
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i (2021)
MSI MEG Trident X (2020)
The power button, a headphone jack, and two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports—one Type-A and one Type-C—decorate the front top edge.
The rest of the connectivity is around back …or is it?
No, this mini-PC's elegance would be ruined if a bunch of cables stuck out horizontally. Instead, the connectivity is concealed in a cavity under the tower.
This location requires tilting the tower to connect cables, but that's something you shouldn't need to do often. The motherboard offers a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C port (good for 20Gbps), seven USB Type-A ports (two 3.2 Gen 1, three 3.2 Gen 2, and two legacy 2.0), 2.5Gbps Ethernet, and three audio jacks (microphone, line-in, and line-out). Its video outputs are disabled in favor of the one HDMI and three DisplayPort outputs on the EVGA-brand GeForce RTX 3060.
The two gold-plated antenna jacks are for the motherboard's Intel AX200 Wi-Fi 6 wireless card. The antenna, not connected in the photos, is somewhat awkward since it's external rather than integrated into the case, though its cable is long enough that you can situate it away from the tower.
Everything Is Upgradable
Compact desktops sometimes rely on proprietary components or are difficult to upgrade, but neither is true for the H1 Mini Plus. Everything in this PC is user-accessible and upgradable in minutes.
Getting inside is straightforward: both the tempered-glass front and the grated rear panels pop off by hooking your fingers under the bottom edges and pulling, after which you can lift away the one-piece, three-sided metal exterior. The tall, washable dust filters attached to the latter are easily removeable.
Access to the Gigabyte Z590I Aorus Ultra mini-ITX motherboard is also simple; two screws allow the CPU's 140mm liquid-cooling radiator to hinge away for unobstructed access.
The board has two UDIMM memory slots, occupied by a pair of 8GB DDR4-3000 modules for a dual-channel total of 16GB. A lone M.2 Type-2280 slot holds a 1TB Intel 660p solid-state drive, which in turn holds the Windows 10 Home operating system, blissfully free of bloatware or unwanted trial apps.
Traditional storage expansion is limited to two 2.5-inch drive bays (empty in our test model), a not-unexpected limitation in a mini-PC. The fully modular 650-watt NZXT power supply is also a special SFX-L format designed for mini-PCs.
Build-it-yourselfers can buy the H1 case from NZXT for $349, which seems pricey but includes the power supply and CPU liquid cooler. (The original H1 case had a rocky debut, but the issues it had have since been resolved, NZXT assures.) That said, today's soaring graphics card prices strongly deter the DIY approach versus buying prebuilt. And when NZXT assembles the H1 Mini Plus so elegantly, the argument for doing it yourself is even harder.
Mini Size, Mid-Tower Performance: Testing the NZXT H1 Mini Plus
Our H1 Mini Plus review unit includes an eight-core, 3.8GHz (5.1GHz turbo) Intel Core i7-10700K processor, a 12GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. Its standard two-year warranty compares favorably to most gaming desktops' one year.
The abovementioned Corsair One a200 comes briefly to mind as an H1 Mini Plus competitor until you remember its lofty price (it starts at $3,399 with a GeForce RTX 3080). The MSI Trident X is more in line; I found model AS 10TG-1681US on Newegg for $1,758 with an RTX 3060 GPU, though that system had a slightly slower, non-K-series Core i7-10700 processor.
Our H1 Mini Plus is the middle of three configurations. Esports players can do well with the $1,399 H1 Mini, equipped with a six-core Core i5-10400F and GeForce GTX 1660 Super card; meanwhile, the $2,499 Mini Pro model includes 32GB of memory, bolsters the SSD with a 1TB hard drive, and upgrades to a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti card. None of the three versions comes with a keyboard or mouse.
Let's go testing. The NZXT will go head-to-head against the gaming desktops listed below.
This pair aren't entirely fair comparisons for the H1 Mini Plus—the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i is an entry-level mid-tower, while the Maingear Turbo now in our review pipeline is an expensive custom build—but they're the most appropriate available until more gaming desktops pass through our new benchmarking regimen. (See more about how we test desktops.)
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. The H1 Mini Plus predictably outscored the Legion with a solid showing.
Our other three 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 Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro 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).
Our final productivity test is 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.
Though the H1 Mini Plus uses a 10th Generation Core i7-10700K, not the latest "Rocket Lake" Core i7-11700K, it's still a fine choice for heavy lifting. It easily outpaced the six-core Core i5 chip in the Lenovo, though it naturally couldn't keep up with the Maingear's colossal 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X.
We also ran our slate of workstation-grade tests on the NZXT and its competitors, which proved mainly interesting for the results in Adobe Premiere Pro video content work...
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. The NZXT's GeForce RTX 3060 delivered superior performance to the Legion's GeForce GTX 1660 and, unlike that card, supports ray tracing.
Moving on, our real-world game testing involves 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. On desktops, we run the games at their highest quality presets (F1 2021 at Ultra High, Valhalla and Siege at Ultra) at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions.
The NZXT is highly capable for 1080p gaming and suitable for 1440p, especially since its GeForce RTX 3060 has 12GB of video memory. Playing at 4K resolution is a little out of its reach unless you dial down the detail settings.
A Class Act for Compact Gaming
NZXT has a winner on its hands with the H1 Mini Plus. Far more compact than a mid-tower, it offers excellent serviceability and performs strongly in the $1,799 configuration we tested, which is notably covered by a two-year warranty.
Its only real downsides are the inherently limited storage room of towers this size and its lack of case lighting. Overall, the H1 Mini Plus stands out as one of our favorite gaming mini-PCs and earns a well-deserved Editors' Choice award.
NZXT's cleverly constructed H1 Mini Plus offers the performance and serviceability of a mid-tower gaming desktop in a fraction of the space.
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