MOST POWERFUL COMPACT GAMING PC in the WORLD
We have covered a lot of high-end pre-built PCs lately, but none of them have the super compact design. If you’re looking for the latest generation in a compact gaming PC, this one might be the one for you. He has loaned me this computer to review, but I am in no way obligated to say anything nice about it. In this video, I’m going to give you my honest and unbiased full review of the Origin Chronos V3 [music]. In this video, I’m going to quickly zip you through the unboxing and what’s included, and take you through some incredibly thorough gaming and Creator benchmarks. talk about the design and build quality, the internal thermal fan noise, overall ease of use, pricing breakdowns, comparing it to the competition, as well as my top pros and cons. If you get discouraged about purchasing this PC after anything that I say in this video, keep watching because I’m also going to be sharing with you some alternative PCs that I recommend for every budget. If you watch this entire video, I guarantee that by the end you will know if this PC or one of the others that I mentioned is right for you or not. But if you still have any questions after watching this whole video, just shoot me a comment, and if you’re publicly subscribed, I guarantee a personal response. This model that I’m reviewing for you today includes the latest 13th generation Intel I9 13900 KF processor, a Founders Edition Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 GPU, and 6 000 megahertz DDR5 RAM.
Unboxing
Now, starting out with the unboxing, they’re shipped in a crate, so you’ll need a drill or screwdriver to open it up before you even get into the box. The first little bonus we got here was a massive mouse pad. The footprint of this thing is actually going to take up more space on your desk than the computer itself, and then in this little extra box here, we’ve got something called the Rogue Strix. Hive This is actually a pretty useful hub that has a handy volume button, a bios flashback button, an AI overclock button, and a flex key button. It’s also got more USB ports and a headphone and microphone jack. Jack, then, we’ve got this very gamer-esque, sci-fi-looking Wi-Fi antenna that’s actually magnetic and a Rog USB 2.0 splitter cable. an ROG keychain an extra face plate for your CPU For some reason, an extra-power LED cable has a teeny tiny Q latch, which allows you to easily remove your SSD without any screws. an extra SSD thermal pad thank-you card, Rog Fanboy stickers, and you’re incredibly detailed. Rog Strix z790i gaming Wi-Fi motherboard user manual and another Fanboy item An Origin PC t-shirt, and then in this black bag, we’ve got a bunch of extra cables for more connectivity to the motherboard.
Desigh
Overall, the design of this PC is definitely more muted and simple than what I’m used to with gaming PCs. All six of these fans are supposed to be RGB, but for some reason even after reinstalling all the RGB software I could not get any color other than this bluish white. The way that all the fans were set up was pretty interesting, as all of them are intake fans. Basically, this means that the majority of these fans are all collectively blowing air into each other where they eventually get sucked out by the one exhaust fan on the top. For me personally, it feels
Ports
To access the ports, we just need to remove this top panel. Here we’ve got an HDMI and two USB 2.0 ports. One USB 3.2 gen 1 port, a 2.5 g ethernet, two Thunderbolt 4 USBs, and another super-fast USBC capable of speeds of 20 gigabits per second, along with three USB A ports at 10 gigabits per second This first one is made specifically to connect to that Rogue Strip Hive Hub that I showed you earlier. This Hub is also magnetic, so you can mount it anywhere, just not next to a mechanical hard drive. Then next to that are your Wi-Fi 6E connectors for that fancy antenna, and then over on the front two USB 3.0 ports is a 3.1 USBC. a headphone and microphone combo Jack and a reset button now to access
Internals
The internals you just need to unscrew and remove this side panel right here and then unscrew just the top of the 360 millimeter AIO and then move that to the side now removing the GPU is just a little more difficult than most cases since it was quite a bit tighter of a space to get your hands into. I do love Founders Edition GPUs. this 480 basically feels just as heavy and thick as the 490 and putting them side by side you can see that they pretty much look identical just above our GPU is our SATA SSD which is a Samsung two terabyte 870 qvo you don’t really see these included in pre-builts anymore underneath that SSD in this white box we’ve got a modular 850 watt Corsair sf850l which is a small form factor power supply I’d say that’s just barely enough for a computer with these specs then right next to that we’ve got our Corsair Dominator Platinum ddr5 Ram two 16 gigabyte sticks for a total of 32 then right here in the center is our CPU Cooler block which quickly transfers heat from the CPU underneath up through these tubes into this radiator where these three fans are actively pulling fresh cool air from the outside of the case to cool it back down then the last piece in here underneath this plate is our main nvme SSD that the operating system is stored on it looks like when they put this together they forgot to remove this plastic right here so that the thermal pad could actually make contact with the SSD.
Software
So jumping into the software for this PC you’ll want to make sure that you downloaded the latest version of The Armory crate app on the dashboard here you can see we’ve got a bunch of current live stats for your PC we’ve got your frequencies for your CPU GPU and RAM your temperatures usage and fan stats and then without entering the BIOS you can set your AI overclocking right here it will require a restart though and then down here you can set your fan profiles based on whether you want your fans to be be ultra quiet or Ultra fast for better performance or at the top you can enable AI cooling which will let the computer choose what profile to use based on what you’re doing and then in the IQ software you’re supposed to be able to adjust all your RGB animations but unfortunately mine were not working properly mine would just not change from this bluish white the only thing that did work was the RGB Ram which you couldn’t see anyway and if you want to go absolutely crazy with your overclocking and fine-tune your PC there’s a bunch of different settings that you can adjust here within the BIOS if you’re one of the more advanced Gamers that really know what you’re doing.
Fan Noise
Now, when it came to the fan noise and quiet mode, it was hitting just under 42 decibels, and when moving up to Performance mode, it brought the fan noise up to just about 43 decibels, and then when pushing the fans to full speed mode, we got just under 44 decibels. You can see this is pretty much right there in line with the competition.
Thermals
now for The Thermals you can see in this thermal imaging time lapse from PC off to full on gaming where the source of most of the heat in this compact PC is right there on that back Edge is where the side of our GPU lies and then when removing the side panel and pulling back the radiator we’ve got an even more detailed look at what’s going on here still getting pretty hot right next to the CPU as well even with a 360 millimeter AIO most of my thermal testing time took place in actual gameplay though these were our CPU temps for several different games at 4K and as I expected with such a compact chassis it had almost the hottest temps for the latest gen PCS that I’ve tested this year it still did better than that Alienware Aurora R15 though and then similar results with their 4K temperatures on the GPU as well when compared to the competition overall out of most of the gaming PCs that I’ve tested it’s actually pretty close to average here in fact looking at the 4K gaming averages for the last 13th pre-built PCS that I’ve tested it’s pretty much smack dab right there in the middle and then when stepping back to the average CPU and GPU Temps at 1080p it’s also right there in the middle except with a much cooler GPU than previous gen
Performance
Now for the second most important part of this review: performance and gaming benchmarks. The most important section is the price-to-performance ratios, and we’ll get to that here in a sec. For geekbench 5, we got a single core score of 2269 and a multi-core score of 25 095. This is the highest score that I’ve seen yet, and for Cinebench R23, which simulates its 3D rendering power, we got a multi-core score of 34 986 and a single-core score of 2289. This is the highest single-core score that I’ve ever seen and just a hair below the R15 for the multi-core. Another helpful test for you 3D renderers is The v-ray Benchmark, and these were our Cuda RTX and overall v-ray performance scores. The v-ray GPU scores showed this computer’s 480 GPU to be basically halfway between previous generation 3090s and current generation 4090s, but the overall v-ray performance score showed it to be on top when it came to the longer CPU-based rendering. Somehow the CPU and this compact chassis outperformed all the massive pre-builts that I’ve tested, and for the 3D creators that use Blender, we got a CPU score of 532 and a GPU score of 9460. Now, comparing this GPU score to the others, you can see that it’s quite a bit lower than the other latest-gen pre-builts. This basically demonstrates that you’ll have about a 30 percent faster viewport for high polygon 3D modeling with those other full-size machines with the more powerful 4090 GPUs, but the one thing that really took me by surprise was the fact that it took the number one spot when it came to the blender CPU score in Cinebench v-ray, and now blender is all together proving that this PC ranks at number one for 3D rendering, very impressive results for a compact pre-built and the last benchmarks for creatives before we get into gaming.
Puget Benchmarks
The Puget benchmarks for DaVinci Resolve we got were 2397, which you can see here is only just barely above what last generation could do with Adobe Premiere 1164. Again, just a hair above previous generation and losing to all the other latest generation pre-builts that I’ve tested, Adobe Photo Photoshop 1577 has almost the highest score that I’ve gotten, second only to the Corsair Vengeance A7 300, and Adobe After Effects 1367, which really isn’t that much of an improvement over last generation gem rebuilts.
Gaming Benchmarks
Now for 3DMark, which is a great benchmark used to determine a computer’s overall gaming ability, we got an overall score of 25 625, a graphic score of 27 416, and a CPU score of 18704. One weird thing that I’ve seen with the latest generation of pre-builts is lower 3Dmark CPU scores. Not exactly sure what that’s about, but you can see here that overall it’s about 5,000 points lower than the other newer pre-builts that I’ve tested now for the main drive, the SSD that everything is stored on. I got speeds of 3.5 gigabytes read and 3.45 gigabytes write. That’s almost half as fast as the read speeds on the ssds of the other newer pre-builts that I’ve tested, but also not a very expensive upgrade. You can also choose the Samsung 980 Pro on the website if you want your main drive to be on par with the competition. Actual gaming benchmarks are probably what you guys care the most about, though these are where our average FPS results we got for several games at their highest preset settings in HD. You can see it actually held its own pretty well here in most games except for Witcher 3, despite being a less expensive compact case with a weaker GPU, and then when moving up to 4K, you can see an even bigger gap compared to the competition as higher resolutions always put more pressure on the GPU. 40 90 gpus as you can see here handle those higher resolutions way better and then averaging all gaming test FPS numbers together and comparing them with the last 14th best-selling pre-built PCS that I’ve reviewed gives you an even greater perspective on how it Stacks up against a competition when gaming at 1080p resolutions but as you can see at 1440p it starts to fall behind a little bit more and again even more so at 4K resolutions I’m kind of Blown Away with how much more FPS we get with the 4090s versus last year’s 3090s here are the HP Omen 45l actually takes the top spot my full review for that one coming soon but spoiler alert it’s the best that I’ve seen so far for high resolution gaming.
Pricing
Okay, so pricing, don’t worry if this is too much for you; I’ve got recommendations for every budget. This PC with a 4080 GPU and 13th gen I9 will run you a little over thirty seven hundred dollars, which honestly I think is a little steep for a PC with these specs when a lot of the pre-builts with 4090s are only a few hundred dollars more than this like the HP Omen 45l here with the 4090 and 13th gen I9 for four thousand dollars and the AMD version of the Corsair Vengeance the A7 300 with double the SSD storage and double the RAM also at four thousand dollars, and the same thing here with the i7 400, also at four thousand dollars. If I were to match the RAM and the SSD for this Origin Chronos, it would also cost four thousand dollars, the same price for a PC with a 4080 versus the computers with a much faster 4090. Matching those same specs on the Alienware Aurora R15 would cost you an insane fifty-one hundred dollars, though, so at least it’s not that overpriced.
Price-to-performance ratio
and finally my favorite most important charts the price to Performance ratios you can see here that for 1080p gaming you get the most bang for your buck out of all the popular latest gym pre-builts that I’ve tested with the lowest dollar per FPS ratio just barely though however when moving up to 1440p gaming it quickly gets less worth it as the HP Omen 45l and Corsair Vengeance gaming PCs give you more FPS for your money and then when pushing these computers to their absolute limits with 4K gaming you can see that the HP Omen 45l takes first place for the most bang for your buck lowest dollar per FPS ratio top tier gaming PC it was actually the best bang for your buck pre-built for 4K gaming that I’ve ever reviewed here so if you’re wondering what I think you should get if you can afford this PC these are my recommendations by the way I’ve got links Below in the comments and description for all of them as well now for just a little bit less than this computer a couple hundred dollars above that three thousand dollar price point I would go with the cyberpower PC Gamer Supreme with the 13th gen I9 and 4090 GPU actually better specs than this more expensive origin Chronos with my experience with cyberpower PCS though they do get a little bit hotter than the competition I personally don’t don’t mind a hotter PC though if it’s going to squeeze more power and give me more bang for my buck or if that’s still too much this same PC with the 4080 rather than a 40 90 is only 2600 and for those with a budget closer to two thousand dollars then this version of the skytech prism 2 is a great deal last year this was the most frequently purchased PC that I saw come through affiliate links on this channel and then closer to one thousand dollars the HP Omen 25l and for under 1000 at 800 the Cyber power gamer Master this is the bare minimum that I would recommend for decent gaming you definitely won’t be able to have high graphic settings on that PC if you want a decent frame rate.
Pros and Cons
and responsiveness, so my overall top con for this computer is that, although it had a great price-to-performance ratio when it came to 1080p gaming, it was one of the least bang for your buck when it came to 1440p and 4K gaming with the latest generation pre-builts. My next con is upgradeability. This PC is basically maxed out with what you can put in it. I would not put a 40 or 90 in it with how hot they get, and honestly, you really couldn’t fit a larger power supply to support it. There’s also no room for a larger mechanical drive if you need more storage space, and we’re also completely maxed out with how many RAM slots are available. People looking for a compact PC are usually willing to accept these sacrifices, though my overall top Pro for this computer is its rendering performance. This PC performed very well in every category, but as you saw in the tests, it did exceptional with 3D rendering. It was the number one top performer for all 3D rendering tests. The fact that this PC was cooler than most of the competition in such a compact chassis is pretty impressive. I was honestly expecting it to overheat or thermal throttle, and I didn’t see any of that. My next one is portability. At just under 25 pounds, this PC is very easy to take with you to other locations.