We used to own things. We had shelves of CDs, garages of tools, and disks of data. Today? Today we are digital subtenants. We pay for music, for movies, for photo storage, and now even for intelligence. But a metal box called the Olares One has just entered the scene, and with its RTX 5090 brutality, it says, "Enough is enough." This isn't just a computer, it's a rebellion against the feudalism of Silicon Valley.
If you look at the history of consumer technology, you’ll notice a pattern that’s more predictable than a German sedan in the left lane of a highway. Ownership gave way to services, services became subscriptions. We went from DVDs to Netflix, from MP3s to Spotify. But when AI came along, it skipped the ownership stage and went straight to “pay or be stupid.” Intelligence became a service, where for $20 a month you get the right to chat with a robot that owns your data. The Olares One turns that relationship on its head. It’s a device that squeezes an entire AI server into a shoebox-sized box and hands you the keys to the kingdom.
Hardware: When a laptop eats steroids
Let's start with the guts, because I know you're interested in that. The Olares One basically took the guts of a $4,000 laptop, ditched the screen and keyboard, and packed it all into a chassis that looks like Apple had designed a Mac Mini, but in between going to the gym and eating only raw steaks.
Inside beats the heart of an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor. It's a 24-core beast that ticks at speeds up to 5.4 GHz and has 36 MB of cache. It's the same chip you'll find in this year's most expensive creative laptops. But the real star of the party is the graphics card. We're talking about an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Mobile with 24 GB of GDDR7 VRAM. Yes, you read that right. 24 gigabytes of video memory. That's enough to simulate the universe, or at least run local AI models, without the system collapsing in on itself like a dying star.
The system offers a whopping 1824 AI TOPS of tensor performance and has a maximum TGP power of 175 W. Add to that 96 GB of DDR5 RAM at 5600 MHz and a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, and you have a workstation that is smaller than most speakers but more powerful than most offices. The dimensions are compact: 320 x 197 x 55 mm (12.6 x 7.7 x 2.2 in), and the weight is 2.15 kg (4.74 lbs) without the power supply.
“This is not a computer for reading email. This is a nuclear power plant in desktop format.”
Software: Linux for people with a life
Anyone who has ever played with Local Language Models (LLMs) knows that it's usually a nightmare. You spend hours and hours struggling with CUDA drivers, Python environments, and obscure GitHub repositories, only to find that you have seven terminal windows open and nothing works.
Olares OS runs on top of all this hardware and is open source. Out of the box, it acts like a personal cloud with an app store containing over 200 apps ready to install with a single click. Imagine Docker and Kubernetes, but without the need for a terminal. The interface is suspiciously clean, as if someone had finally asked what would happen if you gave a NAS server the polish of an iPhone.
You get chat agents like Open WebUI and Lobe Chat, AI search tools like Perplexica and SearXNG, and coding assistants. Everything runs locally. Your data stays on your hardware. Period. No spying, no sending your secrets to some corporate giant's cloud.
Chilling and Silence: A Whisper in the Storm
With that much power, you'd expect the thing to sound like a jet plane taking off. But Olares has used cooling from the world of high-end laptops. A 2.8mm (0.11in) thick vapor chamber and a 176-layer copper heatsink take care of heat dissipation. Two custom-made 54-blade fans keep the air flowing.
The result? At idle, the system emits just 19 dB. That's quieter than your breathing when you're trying not to wake your partner. Under full load, it climbs to 38.8 dB, which is still quieter than most gaming desktops. Temperatures remain stable at 43.8 degrees Celsius (110.8°F) under sustained load. That means you can train a 70-billion-pixel model or render a scene in Blender without your neighbors calling airport control.
Gaming and Connectivity: Because Work Kills
While this is primarily an AI tool, it would be remiss not to mention gaming. The RTX 5090 Mobile with 24GB of VRAM will devour any modern game on high settings. Olares is positioning this as a way to create your own cloud game streaming service. Install games on Olares One and stream them to your phone, tablet, or laptop anywhere in the world. It's like GeForce Now, except you own the server.
The connections are plentiful: Thunderbolt 5, RJ45 Ethernet at 2.5 Gbps, USB-A and HDMI 2.1. For wireless connectivity, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 are provided. Everything you need to be connected to the world, but at the same time independent of it.
Conclusion: The Price of Freedom
Olares One presents a brutal economic argument. If you use Midjourney for creative work, ChatGPT Pro and other tools, you probably spend thousands of euros a year. For a team of five, that quickly adds up $32,280 per year. Olares One It costs $2,899 (approximately €2,650) in pre-orders. The math is clear.
You pay once and the machine is yours. No speed caps, no price hikes, no terms of service updates that quietly change what the company can do with your data. If you’ve been looking for a way to bring AI into your home without sacrificing performance or convenience, this is probably the most polished attempt at that idea yet.
Is it expensive? Absolutely. But as any car enthusiast would say: speed costs money, it's just a question of how fast you want to go. In this case, it's also a question of: How much does it mean to you that your mind is truly yours alone?
