Origin Genesis (Intel Core i7 920) Video

Origin Genesis (Intel Core i7 920) Video Transcript

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>> Hi, I'm Rich Brown, Senior Editor for CNET.com. Today, we're going to take a look at the ORIGIN Genesis. So this is a high-end gaming PC from a company called ORIGIN. So ORIGIN is a new name in high-end gaming PCs. But its founders are actually refugees from Alienware. So that means they've got plenty of experience in building systems like this and it definitely shows from what we've seen so far. This config runs about $5,000, that makes it clearly an upper echelon of what most gamers are willing to spend on a desktop, but it comes with pretty much all the bells and whistles we expect to find in a PC in this price range. It's pretty typical. It's a giant black tower that creates a pretty strong impression on your desk or wherever you put it. Go down the front, you can see it's nice and clean and on the top, you can see we've got a handful of ports. You've got a Blu-ray drive, DVD burner combo, as well as a series of hard drives hidden behind this door right here. So the hard drives in particular are a stand-out feature. But the four drive bays you see here are for the standard, 3.5 inch desktop hard drives. Each comes out on its own sliding tray and they're also hot swappable, which means you can take them in and out when the system is on. Now for the motherboard ports you get pretty much everything we look for in a system like this. You get all kinds of USB drives, digital audio, coaxial digital, 7.1 analog, a couple ethernet slots, Firewire and a couple of eSATA ports. The only missing feature is USB 3.0. Now there are newer motherboards out there that do have USB 3 and ORIGIN has added them to configerator. So you can see the two graphics cards here. Each has a pair of DVI outs and a mini display port adapter. There's no HDMI port, so you'll have to get a separate adapter if you want to connect this system to a giant television. But given its size, we don't think it's really too living room friendly. So lastly on the back, you'll notice this system is elevated a little bit to create a little bit more airflow on the bottom. ORIGIN also includes a filter for the fans on the bottom that you can take out for easy cleaning. That's not completely unique, we've seen other systems that have it, but it's a nice feature none the less. So inside you can see that ORIGIN definitely knows what it's doing as far as building a clean, high-end gaming PC. The liquid cooling set up is pretty interesting looking. This all lights up when it's turned on. It goes down to the CPU here, and there's no cables really visible for any other components. So for the CPU, this is actually an Intel Core i7 920 chip. That's 2 point GIG chip that ORIGIN has clocked at 4 GHz. That's the most we've seen anybody leap that chip up, and it's maybe a little bit questionable whether or not ORIGIN can ship out every Core i7 920 at that speed. We found that this one, at least, is stable. Now you can see a pair of Radeon HD 5970 cards here. Each of these is a dual chip card, which means this system has 4 GPUs total. We found it is actually the fastest gaming system to come through our lab. Now, there are some games that don't really see a big benefit from 4 GPUs, but others definitely will though, and it's especially worth it if you have a nice, big monitor that can take advantage of playing games at high resolutions. Now you get a little bit of expandability in the system. You can see a few free expansion card slots in there. And looking over here, you can see the hard drives are nice and compartmentalized. This is all the 3.5 inch drives we mentioned earlier. You can get to those through the front. You don't ever have to mess with the wires. Down here, take off the sliding panel, you can see the two solid state drives a Raid 0 config down there. So, while the Genesis is the fastest gaming desktop to come through our lab it's not the fastest for general productivity. There's a six core chip from Intel out right now that other vendors have used that actually turn in faster performance than this one, believe it or not. ORIGIN has added the 6 core chip, so you can definitely shift the config around to meet your needs. But for what we've seen with this particular build, the ORIGIN definitely knows what it's doing. So I'm Rich Brown. This the ORIGIN Genesis. [Music]