Origin PC Chronos Review: A Powerful Small Form Factor Desktop PC For 4K Gaming
Origin PC Chronos: 3DMark, Heaven And Valley
Futuremark’s graphically intense 3DMark Fire Strike is designed specifically for gaming PCs. It has both Normal and Extreme modes: Normal runs at 1920x1080, while Extreme runs at 2560x1440 and is intended for high end gaming PCs.
Origin PC did not opt to overclock the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti inside our review system, but the Chronos doesn't suffer from it. While not the fastest gaming rig we have ever tested, the only systems that put up higher scores and frame rates in 3DMark's Fire Strike Extreme benchmark are ones equipped with multiple graphics cards. And in some cases, the Chronos performed better than some configurations with dual graphics cards.
Unigine's Heaven 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. It features hardware tessellation with DirectX 11 and focuses solely on the GPU with real-time global illumination, screen space ambient occlusion, volumetric clouds, and adjustable settings. Valley offers a similar evaluation, and like Heaven it can be used both as a benchmark and a stress testing tool.
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The benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a high quality depth of field filter. We tested the Cybertron CLX Ra on the Extreme preset.
Origin PC did not opt to overclock the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti inside our review system, but the Chronos doesn't suffer from it. While not the fastest gaming rig we have ever tested, the only systems that put up higher scores and frame rates in 3DMark's Fire Strike Extreme benchmark are ones equipped with multiple graphics cards. And in some cases, the Chronos performed better than some configurations with dual graphics cards.
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Unigine Heaven 4.0
As configured, the Chronos is significantly faster than Lenovo's IdeaCentre Y710 Cube. The only way to achieve any kind of noticeable improvement in gaming performance would be to add a second graphics card to the mix, and even then the difference would mostly be observed in benchmarks.
The other thing to note is that there is more than enough muscle here for gaming at 1080p. With an average approaching 170 frames per second, the Chronos is not breaking a sweat in Heaven, even at Ultra quality settings.
When switching gears to Valley, the Chronos slingshots to the top spot. Part of the reason why is because Valley does not do a good job utilizing multiple graphics cards. However, we should not dismiss the results in this test—there are many games out there that are not fully optimized for multiple graphics cards. When that is the case, the Chronos and its lone 1080 Ti are capable of outpacing the competition, as we see here.
The other thing to note is that there is more than enough muscle here for gaming at 1080p. With an average approaching 170 frames per second, the Chronos is not breaking a sweat in Heaven, even at Ultra quality settings.
