- ORIGIN PC sponsored this video, and boy, am I ever excited, because inside this crate is
not just a tiny gaming PC, but a tiny all-AMD gaming PC that is among the most powerful gaming
rigs on the frickin' planet. So let's pop this puppy open. Oh no, I stripped it! (upbeat electronic music) (device clatters) (beep) The ORIGIN CHRONOS. Good quality packing material, in addition to the flippin' crate. (gasps) It's small. That's what she said. And she said it in exactly
that tone. She was excited. (crate slams) - [Crew Member] Geez, watch the floors! - [Linus] Oops. Yeah, you're
right, Yvonne's gonna get mad. Was that me? That couldn't have been me. For accessories, you've
got a USB stick, 32 gigs, so you can actually use
that on an ongoing basis. Power cord, we're gonna need that. Extra power cables for the power supply, those nice individually-sleeved
ones, big fan of those. Cable ties, SATA cables, extra mounting hardware
for the CPU cooler, as well as a wireless antenna. But we're going full wired
today, ladies and gentlemen. This looks like a custom case design. I don't think I've ever
seen even a chassis that this would have been derived from. Very interesting. It's not as small as previous CHRONOS designs that I've seen, but I'm expecting the
cooling on this thing to even meet the Gamers
Nexus standard of approval. I mean, what's it made of? It's made of plastic with
vents, which he wouldn't like, but mesh, mesh, and more mesh,
followed by a touch of mesh. Not bad. (indistinct crew chatter) I don't know if I would pay extra for the tempered glass version. I mean, with these kinds of fine meshes, you can see through them anyway, and then they can also breathe. That's good stuff. I/O is very complete here,
you've got Type A and Type C, along with an audio jack in the front, and then all the USB-3 that
most people could ever need, and even a Postcode in the back, so it's definitely an Asus
ROG motherboard in there. Now that's weird, is that
an 80-millimeter fan? It's been a long time since
I've seen one of those. And then, of course, our
RX 6800 XT graphics card is down here in the bottom,
including a Type C output, so that is not really for VR anymore, that's just kind of a Type C display port. The one thing that I feel
like is kinda missing here is ORIGIN'S optional metallic paint job, would have been pretty
sick in their pink color. But at $250, I guess they wanted to send a balls to the wall config, but without anything unnecessary for maximum gaming performance. While I would think most
people's first instinct would be to immediately fire this thing up and play games on it, I actually really wanna know how this case is laid out internally, so let's crack it open. Back here we've got the
rear of our motherboard, the intake for our power supply, which has ample access to nice
fresh air through the mesh. We've got our two-and-a-half inch SSD, as well as an RGB hub,
and then one of these little expander
doodad-amajigs for LED strips, so I'm expecting to find RGB strips, but surprisingly there's
nothing here on the... (desktop slams) back side, which would have
actually looked really good, especially with a strip along the top with that mesh side panel. - [Cameraman] Oh, maybe
it's just on the front. - Yeah, maybe they went full
frontal with their lighting. Very interesting. I see some stuff. So they've tucked all the
cables kind of up here, where the modular interface
for the power supply is, so you can't really see
them under this mount for what looks like a
240-millimeter radiator. You can see, our graphics
card is just plugged directly into the motherboard, and then it looks like
there's a little USB, internal USB header hub that they've double-sided
taped over on the bottom there. What's really cool
about this case is that, look at this, every panel comes off. So you have totally unrestricted access to the internal components. That is, as long as you move
the mount for the AIO radiator. It really is a thing to behold when a system integrator designs a case, because everything about it is like, man, this is so easy to work in. Clearly someone at ORIGIN PC is like, "Look, I got sausage fingers, I need to be able to work
on the computers we sell." Boom, there's your solution. The motherboard alone
costs as much as a PS5, it's a Crosshair VIII Impact, but this thing is loaded for bear. We got, I think it's a 5950X, 32 gigs of 3200 megahertz CL16 memory, we've got a 750-watt power supply. Check this thing out. This is like a special card
that takes two M.2 slots, and you can mount them to this thing and stick them out of the board, 'cause mini-ITX is just too small to put as much expansion as
they wanted to pack onto it. And then of course, as I
mentioned, a Radeon 6800 XT. There's no doubt, it's not as small as some previous CHRONOS's,
or CHRONI, or whatever. But if you know that
you're gonna be dealing with a generation of hardware
that can have graphics cards that can consume up to 400 watts, and CPUs that, when overclocked, can hit 150, 200, even 250 watts, I can see why they would
have taken this approach and just gone, "Okay, look, you know what? Cooling first, then we'll
deal with everything else." I think the front logo
is the power button. Oh my god, this thing is so very RGB. I'm still not ready to
jump into games, though, because there's a feature that
I have been itching to try that is exclusive to systems just like this one for the time being, and it requires some
BIOS configuration first. I'm just gonna go into Boot, and make sure that I have CSM disabled, so if, for whatever reason, you install your OS with CSM enabled, you're actually gonna have to go back, completely re-install your OS. Then I'm gonna pop into Advanced, PCI subsystem settings,
turn on Above 4G decoding, and ah yes, Resize bar support, we're gonna turn that to Auto. Basically, what this feature does, AMD brands it as Smart Access Memory, and it's supported on
their 5000 Series CPUs with their 6000 Series GPUs, is it allows the CPU to have access to the entire up to 16
gigabytes of video memory all at once for what is supposed to be a significant real-world
gaming performance improvement. Now, this feature has existed
on Linux for years now, but it's just making its way to Windows, and can give you anywhere from a 0% to even a 5 to 7% fps improvement just from allowing the CPU to access more than just a 256-megabyte
chunk of memory at a time. So, why don't we start by
just checking the AMD drivers to see if there's any indication that Smart Access Memory is on? Nope, there's absolutely nothing in here to indicate that it's working, so apparently the only way to find out is to just benchmark with
and without it enabled, and see if you notice a difference. Fortunately, we are perfectly
well equipped to do just that. As I suspected, this thing is equipped with a 5950X, 16 cores N3 CPU, so I'm expecting this gaming performance to be pretty darn sick,
regardless of Smart Access Memory. We're kicking things off
with "Forza Horizon 4," running at 4K, completely cranked, with the one exception being, we've got Motion Blur set to short, 'cause quite frankly, it looks better. HDR's on, Dynamic Optimization is off, and we are ready to freakin' benchmark. Yeah I wanna continue. We've already got our numbers
without Smart Access Memory, so now we're gonna see how much of a performance uplift we get. Man, this is a pretty game already, and I've only seen the
loading screen so far. There's no ray-traced
shadows in this game, but that doesn't keep the shadows from looking absolutely sick. There's a hot air balloon above us! And the only reason I know is because it's reflected in the rear windshield. I haven't seen it dip below
100 frames per second, absolutely maxed out. So at night, you can actually see, the shadows of the headlights get affected by the other cars and everything. Look at that, look at that! (screams) How'd we do compared to
your previous numbers? - [Cameraman] Let's
see, that's 12 fps more. - Not bad. Oh wow, that's almost a 10% improvement. - [Cameraman] Yeah. And the minimum's 10 fps more. - Which is a 10% improvement. - [Cameraman] Yeah. - (beep), son! And it's not even loud. Man, all-AMD is starting
to look like a thing, eh? - [Cameraman] Yeah. - Of course, performance and noise are only part of the picture. We wanna know what the thermals are like. So if we Alt-Tab out of
our game, we can see... (exclaims) GPU's running at 97 degrees. But don't get too scared off by this, because what's happening
here is you're looking at the absolute hottest part of the dye, that's the T-junction, and you won't experience
any thermal throttling until you hit about 110 degrees. So if we look in Hardware Info, we actually see the average
temperature of the dye, which is more like what we'd expect, in the 80 to 83 degree range. What this fineness of temperature
measuring does for AMD is it allows them to push
the card as hard as they can without risking damage because
there's a hotspot somewhere that they weren't able to measure. In "Borderlands 3" we've got
everything cranked to ultra! We're running at 4K, we've
got HDR enabled, and... Wow. It's almost, like, too good. This art style doesn't lend itself to absolutely perfect,
crisp rendering in this way. (crew laughing) Like, it almost looks wrong. - [Cameraman] Yeah, I actually
thought it looked weird too. I like the PS2 look more. - That is so funny. And still managing 60 fps. 64.25, and frame time
millisecond average is 15.56. How'd we do? Did we beat it? Smart Access Memory for the win? - [Cameraman] By 2.25 frames. - 2.25 fps, okay, that's
not much, but that's 3%. If someone was like, "Come on
over here, come on over here. I got three extra percent
fps in here, you want it? You want it, boy?" You'd take it, wouldn't you? I would. - [Cameraman] Let's look
at the minimums as well. - [Linus] 54.59 is our one percentile fps. - [Cameraman] So that's three
and a tiny bit fps more. - Wow. So that's another,
like, 6% improvement. - [Cameraman] Yeah.
- Not bad. We've got an fps emergency going on. They're testing the fire alarm. Doesn't matter, the point
is, we averaged 104, and our 95th percentile was 82. - [Cameraman] That's the same. - That's the same, okay. So do I still have "Borderlands"
running in the background? Nope, this system just
straight up don't care if you've got another game
running in the background. I guess that's probably
why AMD doesn't mention "Shadow of the Tomb Raider"
in their literature. "Dirt 5" they do, though, so let's go ahead and run
this puppy cranked up. Man, "Forza" looks so much
better than this game. Like, to be clear, this is
fine, it's good, it's great. But, like... - [Cameraman] This is not good lighting. - Yeah, but look at these
window reflections and stuff. It's just way less exciting. Very small improvement for average fps, but our 1% lows are,
what was it, 72 before? - [Cameraman] Yep. - Okay, so that's another 4 to
5% improvement. I'll take it. "Red Dead Redemption 2" wasn't on the list of games to benchmark from ORIGIN PC, and actually we didn't run it
without Smart Access Memory. I just wanna see what this puppy can do. So I've got it cranked to
absolutely the maximum. You know what the best part of this is? Running at 60+ fps, absolutely cranked. And this thing is barely making a peep. It's definitely kicking off heat. That's happening. But sound? Just a touch of GPU coil whine, but you gotta get pretty close. Very impressive for an all-red gaming PC. Wow, those horse motion
captures are pretty good. Hold on, let's go somewhere
where there's not snow, let's see if the animations change. Look at that, see the
horse stops high-stepping and starts just stepping normally once you get onto the cobblestone here. That's cool. The CHRONOS is optimized
first and foremost for gaming, with parts that were chosen specifically for their gaming grunt. You can also customize the
heck out of these machines, not just the core components,
but even custom paint as well, and each purchase includes ORIGIN's 24/7, 365 technical
support if you need it, and you can check it out at the link in the video description. So, I hope you guys enjoyed it. Thanks to ORIGIN for
sponsoring this video. We will see you next time. If you guys wanna check out
another sweet ORIGIN PC, we did a, well, you could say this build was ahead of its time. A showcase of a cyberpunk-themed one that they built and sent
over quite a while ago when they were expecting
the game to come soon.
Incase people dont want to read the comments.
Case is QBX line, specifically QBX Kaze, only differences are front (naturally, I/O change, it has type-c!), top, and the plate for the AIO mount on the side...
daz it (I have 2)
I wish there were more (and nicer) SFF cases in the HTPC form factor which can accommodate a full sized GPU like the Node 202. Instead I keep seeing these tower style cases.
I like how youtubers start with nice "how to tweak here and there to get the most from earth-level stuff and what you already have at home" and in a year or so they end up benchmarking and building stuff that cost more than a middle class three month's pay.
I have to say, the thing is fantastic.
Linus packaging tips
They never say the price because it is expensive. I cannot afford this.
I like that linus finds cool prebuilds but I hate when he gets one with everything at the max options and then goes "whoa it runs doom and csgo so well". I'm like yeah it runs well you literally bought the max of AMD. That build is around 8k and you're shocked it runs that well?
The video is all nice and dandy, but Linus is saying a lot of bullcrap when he's in the bios.
Having CSM enabled is not equivalent to having uefi boot disabled (which is the only thing that could somewhat force you to reinstall the whole OS), and "firmware architecture" has totally nothing to do with whether you are using a SATA or M2 system drive.
Nice they mention linux has already been forcing resizable BAR since years though, so that the message isn't "you either have the setting in the options or you are SOL".
It’s a rebranded Cougar QBX.