Origin Chronos Review: The Ultimate LAN Box?
by Dustin Sklavos on July 27, 2012 3:01 AM ESTApplication and Futuremark Performance
At a very substantial 4.6GHz (roughly as fast as Ivy Bridge can really get without serious cooling and certainly a touch beyond what our own Ian Cutress suggests is common), the Intel Core i5-3570K in our review unit threatens to offer the fastest single-threaded and lightly-threaded performance of all the systems we've tested. On the flipside, it's using a lot of voltage to get there (1.4V); I'm a bit antsy about this for obvious reasons, but I'll get into that in more detail later on.
The robust overclock and fast Samsung SSD give the Chronos pretty solid footing. iBuyPower's Ivy Bridge-based Erebus GT is really the one to beat, with its 4.4GHz i7-3770K and SLI'ed GeForce GTX 680s. In terms of raw clock speed, the Erebus has a slight disadvantage, but boasts substantially better threaded and GPU performance elsewhere.
The massive 4.6GHz overclock on the i5-3570K gives it fantastic performance in single-threaded tasks, but once software that can leverage the superior threading power of the hexa-core and/or hyper-threading enabled processors comes into play, the 3570K loses some steam. That's fine, though; most games aren't going to see any advantage from more than four physical/logical cores, making the robust single-threaded performance more relevant.
The fast CPU and respectable GeForce GTX 670 give Origin's system a strong showing in 3DMark. You really need to go multi-GPU to make a substantial break away from the GTX 670, especially after even a minor overclock is applied. It's essentially competitive with AMD's Radeon HD 7970 and nips at the heels of NVIDIA's own flagship GTX 680.
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mtoma - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
I'm amazed how his articles roll, on and on and on. Mr. Sklavos must be the most prolific writer on this site. Cases are one of my favorite topic and I am pleased. Although the competition is high, I can count only 2 models who can please me. Only one thing would be desired: keeping as long as possible the same test bed over a long period of time. Which, for the moment I don't see here happening.Dustin Sklavos - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
I'm going to try and maintain it as long as humanly possible. I'm not PSYCHED with the case testbed I'm using now, but it's at least a good starting point, I think. I HATE the idea of switching over to a new one (and thus breaking continuity with previous reviews).Death666Angel - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
"Which, for the moment I don't see here happening."This isn't a review of the case. It is the review of a completely built PC by a boutique (Origin) based on the Bitfenix Prodigy case, which was reviewed here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5867/bitfenix-prodig...
mtoma - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
It is not he review of a case, of course. But, one can extract bits and pieces of information, about: the BitFenix Prodigy, the Asus motherboard, of the video card. Different people have different fixations (mine being the PC case), different buying needs on a particular moment, and collecting all sorts of information, helps.CeriseCogburn - Sunday, July 29, 2012 - link
I'm supremely enjoying seeing the amd 7970 and 7950 getting utterly stomped in every game at 1920x1080, instead of the amd favoring 1920x1200 this website always uses.I was right, and here is the proof above.
Olaf van der Spek - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
No sound measurements?geniekid - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
That's the first thing I looked for as well. A box this small running a high end GPU is going to either overheat with extended use or be very noisy, and it would be good to see where this guy stands.The author does point out that it gets noisy under load.
cosminmcm - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
There is a mistake in the specifications box, the i5 doesn't have HT.Dustin Sklavos - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
Fixed. Stupid oversight on my part.Death666Angel - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
I completely agree! I have an adapter for a slim line optical drive (BluRay for me) and a 2.5" HDD with 2 USB ports. It is much more useful than just having a large ODD. It is also smaller than most normal sized ODDs I found which helps with keeping my TJ08-E innards clean and tidy.