Origin Genesis X99

Origin Genesis X99 Review – Welcome to crazy town, population the Origin Genesis X99. Origin PC is known for building ridiculously high-end PCs, but this one takes the cake. There’s a reason it costs close to nine grand, but if you’ve got the money to burn you’d be hard pressed to find anything more extreme than this machine. We’ve got one qualm with it though, but more about that in a bit.

The Genesis comes in a custom case, and it’s an absolute ripper, built to last, with excellent styling. It’s also absolutely massive, and ships in a giant wooden packing crate just to show you that you’re getting your money’s worth. Make sure you’ve got a strong friend nearby to help you move it, as it weighs more than is healthy for one person to lift.

At the heart of this system is Intel’s octa-cored i7 5960X processor. This has a maximum speed of just 3.5GHz, but the inclusion of an Origin Cryogenic custom water cooling system means Origin has been able to pre-overclock it to a blazing 4.5GHz. It’s hosted on the brilliant ASUS Rampage V Extreme motherboard, which was an absolute must considering the amount of graphics hardware installed within.

Not one, but TWO Radeon R9 295X2 graphics cards are installed. For those who are unaware, each of these cards has two R9 290 GPUs installed, making this a quad-CrossFire system. It’s able to smash through 4K games with ease, but we are a little concerned about the use of these cards. To put it bluntly, the R9 295X2 has heat issues, and we’ve had several anecdotal reports of friend’s cards dying. We’re also a little unhappy with AMD’s Radeon driver team, who release WHQL drivers about as often as EA releases free DLC for its games – rarely, if ever. Thankfully it’s possible to select different GPUs if you so desire, with AMD’s latest range about to hit Origin’s online store. We can only imagine how four Fury X graphics cards will perform. Twin Kingston HyperX 240GB drives are installed in RAID 0 mode for the OS install, while a powerful 1500W power supply delivers the high levels of electricity required by such an over the top build.

This machine is obviously intended for 4K or higher gaming, but we chose to stick with our standard settings so you could see how it compares to the other systems. Unfortunately at this low resolution the quad-GPU system doesn’t have the chance to flex its muscles, with the CPU being the limiting factor. Expect performance to soar when running at 4K resolution though, where this machine will simply cream the competition. Only the 3DMark benchmark really showed how fast this thing is, running rings around the other systems.

There’s one hitch with this build, and that’s how rowdy it gets when the thing heats up. It’s not too bad at first, but after running the Grid benchmark on looping mode, we noticed the two graphics cards started pumping out a decent amount of fan noise. Again, this is an issue that could be solved if quieter, more thermally efficient cards were installed, such as NVIDIA’s GTX 980 Ti.

There’s no denying that this is a supremely expensive PC, but it’s aimed at those who don’t mind paying for the absolute best hardware on the market. It’s also customisable enough to get around our quibbles with the GPU selection, and there’s no denying that Origin knows what it takes to build a record-breaking system.

Pros

• Beautiful build quality
• Insane specifications
• Quad GPUs !!

Cons

• Get noisy under load
• Very expensive
• R9 295×2 has questionable reliability
• Too much power consuming

Origin Genesis X99 Specifications

• Form-Factor
  Full-Tower
• Size and Weight
  Height: 25.26 ”
  Width: 9.75 ”
  Depth: 24.8 ”
  Weight: 40 lbs
• Variable Mounting Technology
  Standard
  Inverted
  90° Standard
  90° Inverted
• Color Options
  Standard: Red, Black, White
  Custom (Side Panels or Complete Chassis): Custom Paint,
  Metallic (Side Panels Only): Cyborg Green, Atmos Blue, Horizon Yellow, Sabot Grey, Atmos Blue,
  Themes (Side Panels Only): Shredder Blue, Shredder Green, Shredder Red, Neurons
• Ports
  4 X USB3.0
  1 X Microphone
  1 x Headphone
• Bays
  34 X Internal 2.5″
  12 X Internal 3.5″
  7 X External 5.25″
• Special Features
  Variable Mounting
  16 LED Color Lighting Settings
  Remote Controller LED Settings
  Switchable Manual/Auto Fan Control
  5 Bay Hot Swap Cage
• Cooling Support
  Up to 3 X 360mm Radiators
• Product page : https://www.originpc.com/gaming/desktops/genesis/