More CPU cores than you’ll know what to do with.
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PC gamers do more with their PCs than just play games, but this has always been the case. Your gaming PC is also for web surfing, photo editing, video watching and editing, tax preparation, and more. But these days, even the gaming-related aspects of PC gaming are branching out. Maybe you broadcast gameplay. Perhaps you edit strategy guides for YouTube. It could be that you play games on one monitor with a dozen browser tabs open on a 2nd monitor. For some, a gaming PC has to be something more than just a big, expensive, powerful gaming console: it must do a lot of other heavy lifting.
If you’re one of those people, Origin's Millennium Threadripper (See it on Origin.com) might be sort of PC you need. With a 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen Threadripper 1950X CPU, 32 gigs of fast RAM, a fast SSD, and dual GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards, there’s not much you can throw at this PC that it can’t handle. It may not be the fastest gaming PC you can buy, but it’s one of the fastest "gaming and other stuff" PCs for anyone that's running multiple demanding programs in parallel.
Design and Features
You don’t buy from a custom boutique PC company like Origin PC to save money, or to get parts you just can’t get anywhere else. In fact, it’s a selling point that they use off-the-shelf parts, as the enthusiasts they sell to want the ability to swap everything out however they want. Nobody wants a custom power supply or motherboard that can't be upgraded, after all.
You buy it for the expert assembly and setup. You buy it to get a clean, perfectly-balanced PC with no extra software BS installed. You buy it for support and a warranty. And that’s exactly what you have here.
Here’s a quick rundown of the core specs:
CPU: AMD Threadripper 1950X Graphics: Dual Nvidia GeForce 1080 Ti in SLI RAM: 32GB G.Skill at 3000MHz Storage: 512GB Samsung 960 M.2, 4TB Western Digital Caviar Black Power Supply: 850 Watt EVGA SuperNova G3 Motherboard: ASUS X399 Zenith Extreme Price: $5,632
All of this is wrapped up inside Origin’s custom Millennium case, a heavy, full-size tower with plenty of room inside and some slick RGB lighting. The outside panels are available in a variety of colors, and it’s made so that the motherboard tray can be mounted four different ways: standard, inverted (graphics cards up top), rotated 90 degrees (so the “back” of the PC points out the top), or 90 degrees and inverted. My test unit was inverted, which has the benefit of moving those hot graphics cards away from lower in the chassis near the power supply and up near the fans that cool the radiator, which in turn cools the CPU. All the cables are neatly tied and tucked away, as you would expect from a high-end boutique PC vendor.
Of course, because Origin uses standard off-the-shelf components, it also gives you all the stuff that comes with them. You get a nice box with a USB recovery drive and all the extra cables, connectors, risers, and antennae that are included with the parts used in your system but not part of your particular build.
This motherboard is absolutely loaded with USB ports. There are 8 USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) ports on the back, along with two Gen 2 (10 Gbps) ports—one Type-A connector, one Type-C connector. Up on top of the case, along with the power and reset buttons, you’ll find four more USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports. Oh, and there are fan controls up there, too. That back panel is obscured with a nice mesh cover, but you’ll have to remove it to make room for all your external plugs and cables. It’s meant to occupy the back when the case is in its 90-degree configuration, with your plugs and cables coming out of the top.
Despite the fact that you have a three-fan radiator unit for the liquid-cooled CPU, and a pair of top-end graphics cards, the system is reasonably quiet: with one big exception. The 4TB Western Digital hard drive sits in a nice 5-bay hot-swap cage. That cage has its own small cooling fan, and when it spins up, it’s loud. Easily louder than almost anything else in the system. It’s a glaring weak spot in an otherwise lovely high-end desktop experience.
The Windows 10 software build is lean and clean, which is one of the perks you pay for when you buy from a custom PC vendor. The AMD CPU utility, graphics card clock speed utility, and motherboard utilities are loaded up, but nothing else. No spyware, nagware, or resource-sucking antivirus utilities. The only extra utility is Origin’s Sentinel program, which lets you remote-control your case’s lighting with a smartphone app or the included remote control.
While the build quality is great, I can’t help but wish for a little something you can’t easily get anywhere else, like ultra-quiet GPU cooling. This rig uses two Founder's Edition 1080 Tis, which are arguably the loudest variant of this particular GPU. Also, while the case is well-built and roomy it’s not especially attractive. It’s not ugly, just not what I'd call beautiful. In my opinion Origin’s mid-size cases are sexier.
Threadripper: It’s not for everyone
Threadripper is the ultra-high-end desktop chip in AMD’s hot new Ryzen line, and it’s really something special. This top-end model, the 1950X, is essentially two Ryzen 1800X CPUs together in the same package, with the base clock speed slightly reduced from 3.6GHz to 3.4GHz. That’s a total of 16 cores with 32 threads, four DDR4 memory channels, and 64 PCI Express lanes.
Honestly, it’s way more than almost any modern PC game can use. Most games aren’t that heavily multi-threaded and if you just want to play a game at the highest possible frame rate, you’re better off with a really fast quad-core chip. The current king of the hill is Intel’s Core i7-7700K. For playing games alone, that chip is cheaper, faster, and uses less power.
But what if you want to run OBS to create high-quality streams, and record master footage, while playing at high resolution and maximum detail settings? If you want to take your game footage and edit it together with Premiere and After Effects to produce fancy YouTube videos? If you want to do any “heavy lifting” outside of gaming? The Ryzen Threadripper 1950X is going to stomp all over just about any other consumer processor you can buy.
There is one problem though. Some games don’t like the Threadripper "two-CPUs-in-one architecture" and can sometimes behave erratically or run slower than they should. So AMD has built a “Game Mode” into it’s Ryzen Master utility software. Just click that and restart, and it disables half of Threadripper's cores, leaving you with a single 8-core 16-thread CPU, running with a memory access mode that reduces bandwidth but also cuts down on latency. The results vary: in most games you’ll see a small improvement from Game Mode. The other mode, Creative Mode, enables all cores and threads, and runs the memory in full Uniform Memory Access mode, and is best for 3D rendering, video editing, and other tough compute jobs.
Performance
If you spend over five grand on a PC, it had better be fast as hell. And trust me, this big red box certainly is. The 3DMark Time Spy test turned in a score of 14,852, which is faster than 99% of the PCs out there. Compare that with a score of 8,649 for a Core i7-7700K with a GeForce 1080 Ti (a top-tier gaming setup by anyone’s definition) and we see it's a 71 percent improvement, which is astonishing.
This Threadripper PC whipped through the standard Blender 3D rendering benchmark in 183 seconds, while a 7700K took 439. That’s almost 2.5 times faster. Cinebench? Threadripper's score was 2,898, while a 7700K scores just under 1,000. I encoded a 4K video file down to 1080p using Handbrake in 368 seconds while the 7700K took 720. Put another way: when you perform really daunting non-gaming tasks, this thing cranks through them two or three times faster than the Core i7 7700K, which is the best pure gaming CPU on the market.
But what about games? There, the story gets a little more complicated. To isolate CPU performance alone, we compared game benchmarks using just one GTX 1080 Ti card in both the Threadripper system and a Core i7-7700K system, then ran some benchmarks at 1080p with low graphics settings. In some games, the Threadripper system manages to get close to the Intel CPU. Rise of the Tomb Raider, for example, clocked in at 135fps on the AMD system and 137fps on the Intel system. Usually, the 7700K pulls further ahead. Shadow of Mordor ran at 198fps on the Intel box and 173 on the AMD box, and the Unigine Heaven benchmark blazed along at 322fps on the 7700K while the 1950X pushed “only” 198fps.
To some degree, that’s all academic. You don’t buy a $5,600+ PC with a 16-core CPU and two top-tier graphics cards to play games at low resolutions and settings. As you crank up the resolution settings in your games, they become increasingly bottlenecked by graphics performance rather than CPU speed. This system can most definitely game at 4K. Rise of the Tomb Raider on its highest settings with SMAA anti-aliasing enabled ran at 82fps in 4K. Shadow of Mordor, maxed out, delivered 128fps. Metro: Last Light Redux chugged along at a brisk 89fps with all the settings cranked up. You can hook this thing up to that brand new 4K monitor and stay comfortably above 60fps in the most demanding games, no problem.
Still, it bears repeating: Threadripper is for those who want to game at high resolutions and crush heavy, non-gaming workloads. If all you want to do is run games as fast as you can, or if you plan to run at lower resolutions, get a fast quad-core CPU like the Core i7-7700K and save yourself a bundle of money.
Note: We ran our game benchmarks with the CPU set to Game Mode, and we suggest most gamers play this way (at least until there are more games optimized for lots of CPU cores). All our other benchmarks were run in the default Creative Mode.
Purchasing Guide
The Origin Millennium is available on the company's website in a variety of configurations. The unit sent to us for review is an extremely high-end custom build priced at $5,632 but there are many less expensive ways to configure it too:
The Verdict
Boutique custom PCs rarely deliver amazing bang-for-the-buck. If you had the patience to build this system yourself, you could do so for roughly $1,000 less. You buy a system like this for its expert craftsmanship, warranty and support, and because you want an epic PC without the hassle of doing it all yourself. As it usually does, Origin does a fine job of delivering that high-end experience with this PC. I only wish it was a little sleeker, and a little quieter.
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