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Aggressive in more ways than one
You already know that Nvidia’s Titan X is Kick Ass, but do you know what’s even more bad-ass? Three of them in SLI. With that philosophy in mind, Origin PC sent us its new Genesis rig to review. The box has three of those bad boys, all water-cooled, coupled with a 5960X CPU and 16GB of 2666MHz DDR4 RAM, wrapped up in the company’s own bold full-tower chassis.
Externally, the chassis still looks as striking as ever. Ours came in an all-black finish, but there are different color options available. You also have some fancy lighting options, both on the inside and outside of the case, that you can control via an included wireless remote. While the frame of the chassis is mostly metal, we’re not too fond of the external casing, which is mostly composed of plastic; it feels a little fragile. Both doors also come off completely, but don’t re-attach as easily as they should; we often found ourselves having to push them back on snugly before we could securely lock them into place. And like the Cooler Master stacker chassis before it, this case also has an expandable bay on the bottom. In our case (no pun intended), the bottom bay houses most of the chassis fans.
The black and red aesthetic gives it that HAL 9000 vibe.Speaking of cooling, the beautiful-looking water setup comes by way of Koolance, which water cools both the CPU and GPUs. In terms of performance, Origin PC’s box flew. In anticipation of some of the monster rigs to come, we’ve updated our desktop zero point PC to have three GTX 980s and a 5960X CPU, but this Origin rig completely blew it out of the water. Three 980s is a plenty fast setup, but in our newly updated suite of graphics benchmarks, three Titan Xs smokes it by 20–60 percent.
It is worth noting, however, that we did not initially see these graphical performance gains. As a matter of fact, in both the Batman and Tomb Raider tests, Origin’s system actually performed worse than our ZP. We tried playing around with and re-downloading drivers, but nothing worked. After scratching our heads for a few days and working with Origin to resolve the issue, we discovered that the system’s Asus X99-Deluxe motherboard had its PCI-e configuration set to auto, and wasn’t scaling up to Gen 3 mode. When we manually switched it over in the BIOS, our performance issues went away. Origin says it is working with Asus to solve this issue moving forward, and luckily it’s not hard to fix, but when you’re paying more than $9K for a PC, this shouldn’t be an issue.
The CPU performance also ended up being really impressive, besting our own closed-loop water cooled 5960X by 13–24 percent in our benchmarks. That’s a huge difference when you consider that both systems are running the same CPU. You can attribute that to Origin’s aggressive overclocking. Unfortunately, however, it appears that Origin might have gone overboard with its overclock by bumping its proc to 4.5GHz, as we encountered a CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT blue screen twice while running our multithread-heavy X264 benchmark. When we spoke to Origin about this, the company said that it might have been a result of the overaggressive overclock and said it is willing to help customers downclock their CPUs through multiple means of customer support if necessary. Still, when you’re spending so much cashola on this box, things like this shouldn’t happen.
Finally, another small gripe we had with the system is that one of its front-facing USB ports didn’t work right out of the gate. When we opened its internals, we found the USB connector to be a little loose on the motherboard, so we plugged it back in and that solved the issue. While you could chalk that up to a rush job, it could also have happened during shipping.
As you can see, the box is not perfect, and our various issues with it hold us back from giving the Genesis our Kick Ass seal of approval. Fortunately, these issues can be solved with a few simple tweaks. If you can stomach what might be isolated incidents, you’ll be left with one beautiful and bad-ass PC.
$9,278, www.originpc.com
Our desktop zero point PC uses a 5960X CPU, three GTX 980s, and 16GBs of RAM. Arkham City tested at 2560x1440 max settings with PhysX off. Tomb Raider at Ultimate settings. Shadow of Mordor at Max settings.
More...
You already know that Nvidia’s Titan X is Kick Ass, but do you know what’s even more bad-ass? Three of them in SLI. With that philosophy in mind, Origin PC sent us its new Genesis rig to review. The box has three of those bad boys, all water-cooled, coupled with a 5960X CPU and 16GB of 2666MHz DDR4 RAM, wrapped up in the company’s own bold full-tower chassis.
Externally, the chassis still looks as striking as ever. Ours came in an all-black finish, but there are different color options available. You also have some fancy lighting options, both on the inside and outside of the case, that you can control via an included wireless remote. While the frame of the chassis is mostly metal, we’re not too fond of the external casing, which is mostly composed of plastic; it feels a little fragile. Both doors also come off completely, but don’t re-attach as easily as they should; we often found ourselves having to push them back on snugly before we could securely lock them into place. And like the Cooler Master stacker chassis before it, this case also has an expandable bay on the bottom. In our case (no pun intended), the bottom bay houses most of the chassis fans.
The black and red aesthetic gives it that HAL 9000 vibe.It is worth noting, however, that we did not initially see these graphical performance gains. As a matter of fact, in both the Batman and Tomb Raider tests, Origin’s system actually performed worse than our ZP. We tried playing around with and re-downloading drivers, but nothing worked. After scratching our heads for a few days and working with Origin to resolve the issue, we discovered that the system’s Asus X99-Deluxe motherboard had its PCI-e configuration set to auto, and wasn’t scaling up to Gen 3 mode. When we manually switched it over in the BIOS, our performance issues went away. Origin says it is working with Asus to solve this issue moving forward, and luckily it’s not hard to fix, but when you’re paying more than $9K for a PC, this shouldn’t be an issue.
The CPU performance also ended up being really impressive, besting our own closed-loop water cooled 5960X by 13–24 percent in our benchmarks. That’s a huge difference when you consider that both systems are running the same CPU. You can attribute that to Origin’s aggressive overclocking. Unfortunately, however, it appears that Origin might have gone overboard with its overclock by bumping its proc to 4.5GHz, as we encountered a CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT blue screen twice while running our multithread-heavy X264 benchmark. When we spoke to Origin about this, the company said that it might have been a result of the overaggressive overclock and said it is willing to help customers downclock their CPUs through multiple means of customer support if necessary. Still, when you’re spending so much cashola on this box, things like this shouldn’t happen.
Finally, another small gripe we had with the system is that one of its front-facing USB ports didn’t work right out of the gate. When we opened its internals, we found the USB connector to be a little loose on the motherboard, so we plugged it back in and that solved the issue. While you could chalk that up to a rush job, it could also have happened during shipping.
As you can see, the box is not perfect, and our various issues with it hold us back from giving the Genesis our Kick Ass seal of approval. Fortunately, these issues can be solved with a few simple tweaks. If you can stomach what might be isolated incidents, you’ll be left with one beautiful and bad-ass PC.
$9,278, www.originpc.com
Our desktop zero point PC uses a 5960X CPU, three GTX 980s, and 16GBs of RAM. Arkham City tested at 2560x1440 max settings with PhysX off. Tomb Raider at Ultimate settings. Shadow of Mordor at Max settings.
More...