Gadgetory

so about a month ago Origin PC did a livestream of building a very special machine one for me so it's finally here in a massive wooden crate and naturally the first thing I'll be doing is tearing it apart welcome to another unbuild blog here on - tech tips if I could only get this on the table okay so I don't know who came up with origins premium shipping containers but this thing is amazing it actually feels like the stuff inside is worth $4,000 which is this case is probably because it is quite a high-end config so you start by removing all the screws from the top of the wooden crate you can do this by hand but I would strongly recommend that you whip out an electric drill if you're not looking to beef up those forearms then the side comes off you slide the cardboard box out of the wooden crate remove these plastics lock things and lift the whole top of the box up to reveal the accessory carton with some good stuff like extra power supply cables or magnetic Wi-Fi antennas and whoo an RGB lighting controller and some less useful stuff like CDs and a DVI to VGA adapter as well as the most glorious soft cell foam I have ever laid my hands on I mean I know I'm going on and on about the packaging at this point but it just keeps getting better the case is shrouded in this cloth scratch cover and when you lift that off BAM more badass foam this bag stuff works by mixing a couple of expanding chemicals when you break the internal separator kind of like a glow stick then what it does is it expands to fill in all the nooks and crannies making it much safer to ship systems with graphics cards pre-installed I remember looking into these back when I worked for a system integrator we've got a couple of samples and then decided against it due to the ching-ching that they were going to cost us now I've seen origins millennium case at shows but I've never really been hands-on with it it is surprisingly well thought out mine is a mid tower configuration without the modular bottom piece for more drives or cooling and with a beautiful red accent paint job that goes perfectly with the component choices inside I let them pick the hardware since they're the ones ponying up for the system here so I removed this back cover this is here because the motherboard can go in for or different ways or something like that so the IO might not always end up going to the rear and fired up the system there's that RGB lighting it's got the same basic controls as you'd expect so whatever color you want on the inside sort of front top side accent pieces and the front logo but with a twist there's a button on the case but you can push to control a completely separate UV LED strip I don't have any UV reactive parts in this machine but it's a nice touch for those who do with the system fired up I checked out the pre-installed programs actually nothing too bad in here and then I ran some stress tests to ensure that system temperatures and performance were as expected one cool note is that while I took my readings from i-264 in software the CPU temp can also be read from a little display directly on the motherboard cool the video cards brought about the first challenge in my unbuild even I fix it couldn't save me from these skinny holes to reach the GPU screws so I needed my old jeweler screwdrivers and a pair of pliers to extract them and actually no not quite I also needed some side cutters since the PCI Express power connectors were cleverly cable managed to the fan power for the video card so they would not move at all speaking of the video card though these are MSI gaming series gtx 980ti s normally I prefer rear exhaust cards but this case has ample airflow between the rear top and bottom fans for the extra heat that gets blown around inside the case and these types of coolers do do a better job of keeping the card itself cool and you can see that in the results from cooling even though it was 32 degrees outside on the day that I was doing this testing the CPU cooler is a custom job II from ASA tech you can tell from the design of the hold down with origins branding on the block and the long quarter-inch tubes go over to the front where they're connected to the radiator before we look at that though we'll pull out the CPU the core i7 6700 K is pretty much the perfect choice for us of this class as long as you don't intend to add more graphics cards or a ton more PCI Express expansion cards keeping it cool is a massive triple 120 millimeter radiator something I had wished for from the major AIO makers for ages with three origin branded fans running through a clever little cable management grommet to a fan splitter on a custom PCB near the front of the chassis hiding behind the five and a quarter inch bays it should be noted that this is one of the few things on this case that is not symmetrical for power it doesn't get much more overkill than a 1300 watt EVGA g2 and while the supernova blows up everything and takes everything else with it branding of EVGA power supplies doesn't make a ton of sense to me I can't argue with the quality or in this case the cable management I don't know why more case makers like people who just make cases not origin who has their case designed and put systems in it I don't know why more case makers don't build their products like this there are so many cable management points they cost nothing extra to manufacture and make life so much easier for the Builder who wants to do a professional job of cable management behind the motherboard tray origins motherboard choice is a little more overkill than I would normally opt for for a personal system but I can't fault the features of the z170a gaming m9 ACK it's got the onboard sound isolated from the rest of the PCB dual MDOT two slots for up to 2 m2 SSDs it's got a ton of i/o including USB type-c dual front USB 3 headers for the forefront ports on this case it's got ample cooling and a flashy thank goodness I don't have to install anything but the bare driver killer networking solution for Ram it appears at first that they've gone with plain-jane dual channel HyperX fury ddr4 but wait oh what's that I want HyperX RAM with my name on it that is freaking awesome which I guess leads us to mass storage I really liked the hot-swap system for this case one of the weird things is that only three of the bays are plugged in out of the factory so you might have to guess and check a little to find out which ones have SATA connections there's no reason that they shouldn't have been able to run a couple more cables and do them all but overall the one terabyte Seagate drive that ships in the system should be well protected and well cooled by this aluminum five bay hot swap cage with expansion being a piece of cake our optical drive is well you guessed it it's an optical drive woohoo it's one of those things that used to have sex appeal actually and now is about as interesting to enthusiasts as a USB powered Jack O'Lantern probably less there are a few things that I want to take a closer look at here on the case it took me a while but I finally figured out the front logo illumination and how that happens without any power leads going to it there's an LED that comes out of that custom PCB that they have in the in the front top of the case but handles the IR receiver for the RGB lighting as well as all the front i/o and front buttons and all of that good stuff I also figured out how they mount the motherboard in the different configurations so you just take these rails unscrew them and there are just a ton of holes in this baby so depending on what orientation you want to mount it in let's say we wanted to reverse ATX you just move them around to where they go and you slide the motherboard tray in the other way you put some screws back in and there you have it while I was doing that though I discovered that one of the RGB lighting strips was in the way of trying to orient the motherboard the other way and it turns out this is really cool origen actually did up their own RGB lighting strips that actually like got their name right on the back of the PCBs so these use a hard PCB rather than a flexible one and then they are hard mounted with standoffs and ruse to the case rather than relying on adhesive as you guys probably know if you've ever used LED strips that adhesive can come off pretty easily especially over time that's an over engineered solution to the problem of LED strips falling off and shipping but I really really like it so there you have it guys my unbilled treatment of origin pcs masterpiece is complete i have reduced it to its bare components and if you guys were thinking well gee linus that is a crying shame because I'd love to have an Origin PC we've actually got a link in the video description including an offer code it's Linus OPC and get yourself free CPU and GPU overclocking from those guys but if you liked the video and you're not looking to buy a computer necessarily all you got 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