Origin PC Millennium
An overabundance of drive bays, customization options, and general beastliness
ORIGIN PC’S MILLENNIUM gaming rig has a ridiculous number of drive bays and other features that can take it to workstationclass levels—four horizontal bays for optical drives or extra USB ports, and five optional hot-swappable hard drive bays below. These have an interesting access mechanism: Pull up on the top lever of the bay cover, then pull down to reveal the hard drive; pull far enough, and the hard drive pops out. The aluminum door can be adjusted to open from either side, too.
The case also has two hinged tempered glass side panels that attach to the chassis with magnets, so accessing the interior on either side is easy. The unit we received also has a custom printed panel on one side, with Origin’s Vice logo, inspired by Miami, FL, in the ’80s, with white RGB components set to match the blue and pink color scheme of the logo.
There are four configurations for GPU mounting that include standard horizontal and vertical, and inverted vertical and horizontal. If you elect for the GPUs to be mounted vertically, it puts the backplate on top of the case. In such instances, the backplate is hidden by a ventilated plastic cover, with a channel in the back to neatly run cables to the GPUs and the rest of the motherboard ports.
But this case is massive hunk of hardware at 22.5 x 8.5 x 23.5 inches—too big for a regular gaming PC. There isn’t much of a reason to have all those extra bays either, as the model we received has a 500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus and a 3TB HDD. That’s more than enough space for normal work. But it’s the dual RTX 2080 Ti GPUs that are the cornerstone of this entire rig—overkill for casual gaming, but if you want 4K, ultra graphics, and more than 60fps with ray tracing turned on, dual GPUs are necessary. PLAYING BY NUMBERS In our benchmarks, the Millennium churned out 37,148 at 1080p, 26,322 at 1440p, and 16,104 at 4K in 3D Mark. The Port Royal ray-tracing benchmark spat out 17,545 at 1080p, or 81fps. Our ingame benchmarks at 1080p on ultra got a little strange when it came to one of the games. In TotalWar:Warhammer II, frame rates averaged between 99 and 142 across battle, campaign, and skaven modes, while Riseof the TombRaider ran a consistent 143fps. MetroExodus clocked an average of between 65 and 85fps with ray tracing turned on. But in
GhostRecon:Wildlands, the average fps dropped between eight and ten after each pass, with a high of 98fps and a low of 80fps. The results were similar after a second pass of four runs, waiting five minutes between runs, except for the first two. Between the first and second run, the fps dropped from 92 to 81, but waiting between the next two yielded 87 and 86fps. Current lack of proper SLI support doesn’t explain the frame-rate drops in back-to-back benchmarks.
Both GPUs hit a peak of 88 C, according to EVGA Precision X1, which came preinstalled on the machine. Judging by settings, both GPUs came overclocked, which explains the high temperature. However, after resetting everything to default, the scaling issue was still present.
Strange benchmark issues aside, the Origin Millennium is still an attentiongrabbing machine. But for those who just want to game, all those extra drive bays will most likely remain empty. For someone looking for a gaming PC that doubles as a workstation, there isn’t a lot of fan space nor intake ventilation, which is important for any machine running some serious hardware. The Achilles heel in this otherwise great build is the chassis and some SLI scaling issues, depending on the game. –JOANNA NELIUS
VERDICT 7 Origin PC Millennium
BOSS Innovative; robust customization options; easily accessible components; incredible performance.
BUST Huge, heavy case; expensive; runs hot.
$5,547, www.originpc.com