- ORIGIN PC sponsored this video,
and boy, am I ever excited,
because inside this crate is not just a tiny gaming PC,
but a tiny all-AMD gaming PC that is among
the most powerful gaming rigs on the frickin' planet.
So let's pop this puppy open.
Oh no, I stripped it!
(upbeat electronic music)
(device clatters)
(beep)
The ORIGIN CHRONOS.
Good quality packing material,
in addition to the flippin' crate.
(gasps)
It's small.
That's what she said.
And she said it in exactly that tone. She was excited.
(crate slams)
- [Crew Member] Geez, watch the floors!
- [Linus] Oops. Yeah, you're right, Yvonne's gonna get mad.
Was that me?
That couldn't have been me.
For accessories, you've got a USB stick, 32 gigs,
so you can actually use that on an ongoing basis.
Power cord, we're gonna need that.
Extra power cables for the power supply,
those nice individually-sleeved ones, big fan of those.
Cable ties, SATA cables,
extra mounting hardware for the CPU cooler,
as well as a wireless antenna.
But we're going full wired today, ladies and gentlemen.
This looks like a custom case design.
I don't think I've ever seen even a chassis
that this would have been derived from.
Very interesting.
It's not as small as previous
CHRONOS designs that I've seen,
but I'm expecting the cooling on this thing
to even meet the Gamers Nexus standard of approval.
I mean, what's it made of?
It's made of plastic with vents, which he wouldn't like,
but mesh, mesh, and more mesh, followed by a touch of mesh.
Not bad.
(indistinct crew chatter)
I don't know if I would pay extra
for the tempered glass version.
I mean, with these kinds of fine meshes,
you can see through them anyway,
and then they can also breathe.
That's good stuff.
I/O is very complete here, you've got Type A and Type C,
along with an audio jack in the front,
and then all the USB-3 that most people could ever need,
and even a Postcode in the back,
so it's definitely an Asus ROG motherboard in there.
Now that's weird, is that an 80-millimeter fan?
It's been a long time since I've seen one of those.
And then, of course, our RX 6800 XT graphics card
is down here in the bottom, including a Type C output,
so that is not really for VR anymore,
that's just kind of a Type C display port.
The one thing that I feel like is kinda missing here
is ORIGIN'S optional metallic paint job,
would have been pretty sick in their pink color.
But at $250, I guess they wanted to send
a balls to the wall config,
but without anything unnecessary
for maximum gaming performance.
While I would think most people's first instinct
would be to immediately fire this thing up
and play games on it,
I actually really wanna know
how this case is laid out internally,
so let's crack it open.
Back here we've got the rear of our motherboard,
the intake for our power supply,
which has ample access to nice fresh air through the mesh.
We've got our two-and-a-half inch SSD,
as well as an RGB hub, and then one of these
little expander doodad-amajigs for LED strips,
so I'm expecting to find RGB strips,
but surprisingly there's nothing here on the...
(desktop slams)
back side, which would have actually looked really good,
especially with a strip along the top
with that mesh side panel.
- [Cameraman] Oh, maybe it's just on the front.
- Yeah, maybe they went full frontal with their lighting.
Very interesting.
I see some stuff.
So they've tucked all the cables kind of up here,
where the modular interface for the power supply is,
so you can't really see them under this mount
for what looks like a 240-millimeter radiator.
You can see, our graphics card is just plugged
directly into the motherboard,
and then it looks like there's a little USB,
internal USB header hub
that they've double-sided taped over on the bottom there.
What's really cool about this case is that,
look at this, every panel comes off.
So you have totally unrestricted access
to the internal components.
That is, as long as you move the mount for the AIO radiator.
It really is a thing to behold
when a system integrator designs a case,
because everything about it is like, man,
this is so easy to work in.
Clearly someone at ORIGIN PC is like,
"Look, I got sausage fingers,
I need to be able to work on the computers we sell."
Boom, there's your solution.
The motherboard alone costs as much as a PS5,
it's a Crosshair VIII Impact,
but this thing is loaded for bear.
We got, I think it's a 5950X,
32 gigs of 3200 megahertz CL16 memory,
we've got a 750-watt power supply.
Check this thing out.
This is like a special card that takes two M.2 slots,
and you can mount them to this thing
and stick them out of the board,
'cause mini-ITX is just too small
to put as much expansion as they wanted to pack onto it.
And then of course, as I mentioned, a Radeon 6800 XT.
There's no doubt, it's not as small
as some previous CHRONOS's, or CHRONI, or whatever.
But if you know that you're gonna be dealing
with a generation of hardware that can have graphics cards
that can consume up to 400 watts,
and CPUs that, when overclocked,
can hit 150, 200, even 250 watts,
I can see why they would have taken this approach
and just gone, "Okay, look, you know what?
Cooling first, then we'll deal with everything else."
I think the front logo is the power button.
Oh my god, this thing is so very RGB.
I'm still not ready to jump into games, though,
because there's a feature that I have been itching to try
that is exclusive to systems
just like this one for the time being,
and it requires some BIOS configuration first.
I'm just gonna go into Boot,
and make sure that I have CSM disabled,
so if, for whatever reason,
you install your OS with CSM enabled,
you're actually gonna have to go back,
completely re-install your OS.
Then I'm gonna pop into Advanced,
PCI subsystem settings, turn on Above 4G decoding,
and ah yes, Resize bar support,
we're gonna turn that to Auto.
Basically, what this feature does,
AMD brands it as Smart Access Memory,
and it's supported on their 5000 Series CPUs
with their 6000 Series GPUs,
is it allows the CPU to have access
to the entire up to 16 gigabytes of video memory
all at once for what is supposed to be
a significant real-world gaming performance improvement.
Now, this feature has existed on Linux for years now,
but it's just making its way to Windows,
and can give you anywhere from a 0%
to even a 5 to 7% fps improvement
just from allowing the CPU to access
more than just a 256-megabyte chunk of memory at a time.
So, why don't we start by just checking the AMD drivers
to see if there's any indication
that Smart Access Memory is on?
Nope, there's absolutely nothing in here
to indicate that it's working,
so apparently the only way to find out
is to just benchmark with and without it enabled,
and see if you notice a difference.
Fortunately, we are perfectly well equipped to do just that.
As I suspected, this thing is equipped
with a 5950X, 16 cores N3 CPU,
so I'm expecting this gaming performance
to be pretty darn sick, regardless of Smart Access Memory.
We're kicking things off with "Forza Horizon 4,"
running at 4K, completely cranked,
with the one exception being,
we've got Motion Blur set to short,
'cause quite frankly, it looks better.
HDR's on, Dynamic Optimization is off,
and we are ready to freakin' benchmark.
Yeah I wanna continue.
We've already got our numbers without Smart Access Memory,
so now we're gonna see
how much of a performance uplift we get.
Man, this is a pretty game already,
and I've only seen the loading screen so far.
There's no ray-traced shadows in this game,
but that doesn't keep the shadows
from looking absolutely sick.
There's a hot air balloon above us!
And the only reason I know is because
it's reflected in the rear windshield.
I haven't seen it dip below 100 frames per second,
absolutely maxed out.
So at night, you can actually see,
the shadows of the headlights get affected
by the other cars and everything.
Look at that, look at that!
(screams)
How'd we do compared to your previous numbers?
- [Cameraman] Let's see, that's 12 fps more.
- Not bad.
Oh wow, that's almost a 10% improvement.
- [Cameraman] Yeah.
And the minimum's 10 fps more.
- Which is a 10% improvement.
- [Cameraman] Yeah.
- (beep), son!
And it's not even loud.
Man, all-AMD is starting to look like a thing, eh?
- [Cameraman] Yeah.
- Of course, performance and noise
are only part of the picture.
We wanna know what the thermals are like.
So if we Alt-Tab out of our game, we can see...
(exclaims)
GPU's running at 97 degrees.
But don't get too scared off by this,
because what's happening here is you're looking
at the absolute hottest part of the dye,
that's the T-junction,
and you won't experience any thermal throttling
until you hit about 110 degrees.
So if we look in Hardware Info,
we actually see the average temperature of the dye,
which is more like what we'd expect,
in the 80 to 83 degree range.
What this fineness of temperature measuring does for AMD
is it allows them to push the card as hard as they can
without risking damage because there's a hotspot somewhere
that they weren't able to measure.
In "Borderlands 3" we've got everything cranked to ultra!
We're running at 4K, we've got HDR enabled, and...
Wow. It's almost, like, too good.
This art style doesn't lend itself
to absolutely perfect, crisp rendering in this way.
(crew laughing)
Like, it almost looks wrong.
- [Cameraman] Yeah, I actually thought it looked weird too.
I like the PS2 look more.
- That is so funny.
And still managing 60 fps.
64.25, and frame time millisecond average is 15.56.
How'd we do? Did we beat it?
Smart Access Memory for the win?
- [Cameraman] By 2.25 frames.
- 2.25 fps, okay, that's not much, but that's 3%.
If someone was like, "Come on over here, come on over here.
I got three extra percent fps in here, you want it?
You want it, boy?"
You'd take it, wouldn't you? I would.
- [Cameraman] Let's look at the minimums as well.
- [Linus] 54.59 is our one percentile fps.
- [Cameraman] So that's three and a tiny bit fps more.
- Wow. So that's another, like, 6% improvement.
- [Cameraman] Yeah. - Not bad.
We've got an fps emergency going on.
They're testing the fire alarm.
Doesn't matter, the point is, we averaged 104,
and our 95th percentile was 82.
- [Cameraman] That's the same.
- That's the same, okay.
So do I still have "Borderlands" running in the background?
Nope, this system just straight up don't care
if you've got another game running in the background.
I guess that's probably why AMD doesn't mention
"Shadow of the Tomb Raider" in their literature.
"Dirt 5" they do, though,
so let's go ahead and run this puppy cranked up.
Man, "Forza" looks so much better than this game.
Like, to be clear, this is fine, it's good, it's great.
But, like...
- [Cameraman] This is not good lighting.
- Yeah, but look at these window reflections and stuff.
It's just way less exciting.
Very small improvement for average fps,
but our 1% lows are, what was it, 72 before?
- [Cameraman] Yep.
- Okay, so that's another 4 to 5% improvement. I'll take it.
"Red Dead Redemption 2" wasn't on the list
of games to benchmark from ORIGIN PC,
and actually we didn't run it without Smart Access Memory.
I just wanna see what this puppy can do.
So I've got it cranked to absolutely the maximum.
You know what the best part of this is?
Running at 60+ fps, absolutely cranked.
And this thing is barely making a peep.
It's definitely kicking off heat.
That's happening. But sound?
Just a touch of GPU coil whine,
but you gotta get pretty close.
Very impressive for an all-red gaming PC.
Wow, those horse motion captures are pretty good.
Hold on, let's go somewhere where there's not snow,
let's see if the animations change.
Look at that, see the horse stops high-stepping
and starts just stepping normally
once you get onto the cobblestone here.
That's cool.
The CHRONOS is optimized first and foremost for gaming,
with parts that were chosen
specifically for their gaming grunt.
You can also customize the heck out of these machines,
not just the core components, but even custom paint as well,
and each purchase includes ORIGIN's
24/7, 365 technical support if you need it,
and you can check it out
at the link in the video description.
So, I hope you guys enjoyed it.
Thanks to ORIGIN for sponsoring this video.
We will see you next time.
If you guys wanna check out another sweet ORIGIN PC,
we did a, well, you could say
this build was ahead of its time.
A showcase of a cyberpunk-themed one
that they built and sent over quite a while ago
when they were expecting the game to come soon.