"Millennium PC by Origin: A Comprehensive Review"

When you're in the market for a gaming PC, your options range from mass-produced prebuilt systems like those from Alienware to high-end boutique builds from companies like Maingear or Falcon Northwest. The Origin Millennium strikes a balance between these two extremes. It's an exceptionally high-end gaming system, yet it doesn't venture into the realm of extravagant design like its boutique counterparts.

The Origin Millennium offers a solid, custom-ordered gaming rig built with standard components. While it's possible to assemble this system yourself, opting for Origin means bypassing the hassle of cable management and setup. However, be prepared for the challenge of transporting a hefty wooden crate, as I experienced when moving it to my apartment.

Purchasing Guide

The Origin Millennium starts at $2,788, but at this price, you're looking at a basic setup with an Intel Core i5-14600K and no dedicated graphics card—a configuration that hardly justifies the cost. Fortunately, Origin allows you to customize your system extensively on their website, tailoring it to your needs. Just remember, the more powerful you make it, the pricier it will become.

Origin Millennium – Photos

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Design and Features

The Origin Millennium is a substantial machine, housed in a full-tower ATX case accentuated by steel bars on all four corners, adding to its imposing presence. The case alone weighs 33 pounds, and when you add high-end components like the MSI RTX 5090 Gaming Trio, a power supply, and a 360mm AIO, the total weight increases significantly. The wooden shipping crate made moving this beast to my third-floor walkup apartment quite the ordeal.

Those corner steel bars, while adding to the aesthetic, can complicate access to the internals. The configuration I reviewed won't need upgrading for a few years, but you'll still need to open it for maintenance. Removing the glass side panel is tricky due to the metal bar on the back left corner, which can hinder smooth removal. Though the bars can be detached using allen bolts, this adds an unnecessary step to accessing your PC.

Once inside, the spacious interior is impressive. Even with a 14-inch graphics card, there's ample room for excellent airflow. Origin's cable management is top-notch, with cables neatly arranged behind the motherboard tray and routed through grommets to their necessary connections. However, an unusual decision was made to route the front intake fan wires and front panel connectors underneath the system, creating a large bundle of wires outside the case. While this hides the cables, it could pose a risk of damage if the wires snag on something.

You can choose to have the front ports and power button mounted on the top or bottom of the case. My review unit had them on the bottom, which is ideal for desk setups, but the option for top mounting caters to those who might place the PC on the floor or in a living room.

The front panel offers four USB-A and one USB-C port, supplemented by numerous ports at the back. My test unit featured the Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard, which provides four USB-C ports, six USB-A ports, two ethernet ports, and an HDMI port for onboard graphics. The RTX 5090 adds three DisplayPort and one HDMI, which is standard for Blackwell GPUs.

All in the Configuration

The configuration I received for review might be overkill for most users. Fortunately, Origin PC allows you to tailor the system to your specific needs. While you could splurge $7,241 on the high-end setup I tested, a more balanced option might be a configuration with an AMD Ryzen 5 9600X, 32GB of RAM, and an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, which still supports 4K gaming at a more reasonable $3,392.

Building this mid-range version yourself would cost around $2,397, meaning you're paying roughly a thousand dollars for Origin's assembly. The high-end configuration I reviewed could be assembled with off-the-shelf parts for about $6,506 on PCPartPicker. The premium for Origin's assembly includes more than just construction; it comes with a standard one-year warranty and lifetime support, allowing you to contact them for free assistance or even send your system back for upgrades at the cost of new parts.

The unique wooden crate, while cumbersome, ensures the safest shipping method for a desktop PC. Whether this extra cost is worth it depends on your comfort level with building and maintaining a PC and your willingness to invest time in the process. Origin's excellent cable management is a notable advantage.

Performance

The Origin Millennium I tested was equipped with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and 64GB of RAM, making it a powerhouse for gaming. At 4K resolution, nearly every game exceeded 100 fps without frame generation. Only two games fell short: Assassin's Creed Shadows at 75 fps and Metro Exodus at 97 fps, the latter due to its ray tracing workload without upscaling support.

In Assassin's Creed Shadows, the 75 fps baseline is more than playable, and enabling frame generation boosts the frame rate to 132 fps, albeit with increased latency from 33ms to 42ms—a noticeable jump, but not typically an issue in single-player games.

Cyberpunk 2077, tested with the Ray Tracing Ultra preset and DLSS in performance mode, achieved 127 fps with 23ms latency without frame generation. With Multi-Frame Generation at 4x, the frame rate soared to 373 fps, with latency only increasing to 28ms—far beyond what my 240Hz monitor can display.

Even without frame generation, the 127 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 is impressive, ensuring that you won't need to compromise on image quality for any current games with this setup.