Gadgetory

origin and Intel reached out about doing a sponsored piece on the Chronos a desktop PC that Origen brags is the most powerful and customizable small form factor desktop a very bold claim but as a bit of a small form-factor enthusiast the idea of cramming unbelievable Hardware into a tiny enclosure isn't exactly new to me so I wanted to go a totally different route with it and look at how changes in hardware have fundamentally changed the kind of performance we can get out of tiny gaming PC's over the last 10 years welcome to performance per liter through the ages so at about ten point six liters the origin Chronos is bigger than some of the NDS FF cases that I've seen the Dan case a for SFX that we featured recently is a mere seven point two five litres but the extra three litres seems to have been put to good use at the front is an LED lit logo and a much more reasonable front IO configuration than the a4 sfx's single USB 3 and power button two USB 3 front audio power and reset switches most of the panels are vented and the internals are laid out so the four included magnetic feet can be used to flip Chronos on its side depending on your space requirements then over on the left above the video card window is its biggest advantage a single water cooling radiator with a slim 120 millimeter fan that's responsible for keeping the CPU and the socket area cool even with some overclocking moving to the inside we find our decked out hardware config core 16 gigs of DDR 4 memory a Titan X Pascal a one terabyte Samsung SSD with an additional hard drive for storage a 600 watt power supply and an 80 millimeter cooling fan so that's where some of the internal space went up to and some extra airflow for those drives so let's take a look then at what we're putting it up against we went back in time or at least we went to free gig Vancouver those guys are awesome and have been keeping us supplied with old hardware for our projects for a little while now and we scrounged up these gaming enthusiasts configs from 10 6 & 3 years ago each build should represent a common enthusiast DIY case at the time in spite of Intel's best efforts ATX is still with us so they're actually pretty similar in size the best of the best single CPU and a top-tier GPU unfortunately we couldn't get a working 8800 GTX in time for testing but we can extrapolate values based on our 8800 yes and it's based on the same dat chip so we'll start with pure CPU performance in the last 10 years enthusiasts have gone from quad-core machines that churn out about 3500 points in CPU mark and 250 points in Cinebench to 10 core monsters that can do anywhere from five to nine times that performance in multi-threaded workloads though it should be noted that when it comes to single threaded performance the gains aren't quite as impressive at a little over double our only real mixed CPU GPU benchmark a 4k video export of Adobe's test project at our usual LTT presets yields much smaller improvements a fermi or greater CUDA GPU with a fast enough CPU is still a great video editing solution with most of the perf per liter improvements coming from Chronos is sighs moving on to gaming we see impressive improvements on the performance side of things with an older game like half-life 2 ending up CPU bottlenecked a few years ago at around 700 frames per second and a newer title like Metro last light scaling beautifully to the point where today's system is 20 times faster making it nearly 100 times faster per unit volume so how then did all of this happen well part of it is the ever shrinking manufacturing processes on which these components are built but that accounts only for the improved performance not for the shrinking of the system's so is it then that older systems consumed much more power and therefore output more heat so they needed these big enclosures actually not really going back to 2006 our system consumed only about 250 watts from the wall compared to 385 for our Kronos so a big part of the story here seems to be thermal management these CPU temps that you're looking at are interesting only from an academic perspective since we're using Intel designed thermal solutions on all the older machines than something aftermarket or a consistent cooler across the board but what it does tell us is that Intel went from considering nearly 70 degrees acceptable back in 2006 all the way down to targeting about 60 degrees which happens to be the load temp of our 10 core Extreme Edition GPUs clearly underwent a similar change Nvidia thought 90 degrees was cool back in 2011 then dialed that back with GPU boost limiting the more modern chips to adn change the other big part of the story seems to be fashion engineers are driven by a demand from their management and ultimately consumers to create solutions and the availability of smaller and smaller gaming machines has increased dramatically in recent years presumably because people want them though with that said back to origins claim about the Chronos being the most powerful and customizable SFF gaming system even if we substitute the volume of small form-factor cases that were available at the times of our older systems Silverstone's sto 1 + sto 2 and fractal designs node 304 ignoring though that the node 304 is a mini ITX case and there were no mini ITX x79 boards thanks to the latest components today it still stacks up very well no matter how far back you go so thanks again to Origen and Intel for sending us the Chronos and sponsoring us to lock Jake in the warehouse last weekend to complete all of these benchmarks for our through the ages investigation if you're looking for a new PC check out the link to Origin PC in the video description they've got a ton of Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend deals including up to five hundred and seventy-eight dollars in savings on all Aeon 9 Series custom desktop replacement laptops with the gtx 980m with free shipping and a ton of promotions on their desktops including free shipping free gift cards free SSDs free backpacks or headsets and free games so check that out below thanks for watching guys get subscribed like dislike all that good stuff and we will see you again next time