Origin PC’s latest revision of the Chronos (starts at $1,540; $4,606 as tested) is a small-form-factor but mighty gaming desktop, packing big-tower power into a fraction of the space. Configured to the nines for our review with AMD’s flagship 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X processor and a 24GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card, it tackles 4K gaming and creative tasks with ease. The Chronos gets pricey in its upper-tier builds, but lesser ones deliver the same compact design and high level of quality. It snags our top recommendation for an ultra-performance small-form-factor desktop.
Fully Factory Customizable
The Chronos is aimed at gamers, though when equipped with a powerful graphics card like my test unit’s, it can pull double duty for creative work. (In practical fact, the GeForce RTX 3090 leans more toward the latter, with its lofty pricing and 24GB of onboard VRAM.) Every component, including the power supply and processor cooling, is configurable on Origin’s website. I’d like to see two years of warranty coverage instead of the standard one year, though I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend upgrading to three years on a PC in this league.
The base $1,540 model of the Chronos is pricey considering its six-core processor (either an Intel Core i5-10400F or an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X), GeForce GTX 1660 Super, 16GB of memory, and 250GB of solid-state storage, hardware that can be had in Lenovo’s Legion Tower 5i for around $1,200 as I type this. It’s not strictly a fair comparison since the Lenovo is much larger—some of the Chronos’ value is inherent in its small size. But it becomes more attractive when kitted out beyond the reach of budget towers.
The Chronos is indeed compact, at just 11 by 7 by 15.5 inches (HWD). Mainstream vendors like Alienware and Lenovo typically don’t produce gaming PCs this size, though you can find some boutique competitors such as the Maingear Turbo at comparable prices.
The unusual mesh (as opposed to the available glass) sides of my system are required for Chronos configurations with the Ryzen 9 5950X CPU, 240mm liquid cooling, and/or a GeForce RTX 3090. The latter, plainly visible, sends its exhaust through the mesh.
Removing the side panels is easily done by undoing thumbscrews at the back. The two fans behind the left panel belong to the 240mm CPU liquid cooling radiator. It’s an admirably tight fit.
Behind the right panel are Corsair-branded controllers for the RGB case lighting and the Chronos’ sole 2.5-inch drive bay, populated here by a 1TB Samsung SSD 870 QVO solid-state drive that serves as secondary storage. Configurations without liquid cooling can hold an additional 3.5-inch drive, though storage is still quite limited compared to a mid-tower. The RGB lighting is user customizable via the Corsair iCUE app. (Corsair is now Origin PC’s mother company.)
This view also reveals Origin’s deft cable management skills. Just visible at the top right, the 6.7-inch-square mini-ITX motherboard in my tester is an upper-level Asus B550-I ROG Strix. (Our review of the related Asus TUF Gaming B550M-Plus highlights the merits of the AMD B550 chipset.) It has one M.2 slot, populated in my unit by a 500GB Samsung SSD 980 Pro boot drive with Windows 10 Pro, and two memory slots with 16GB UDIMMs of Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4-3200 (32GB total, running in dual-channel mode). The memory is just visible through the top grate, as is the RGB-lit waterblock for the Corsair H100i RGB Pro XT liquid cooler.
The Chronos’ SFX-format power supply, vertically mounted in the front of the chassis, isn’t visible in the photos. The base power supply is 450 watts; power-hungry units like mine get upgraded to a top-of-the-line Corsair SF750 supplying 750 watts.
Servicing most components requires some disassembly, but end-user upgrades are certainly possible—apart from the custom chassis, the Chronos uses industry-standard components. This isn’t always true of small-form-factor PCs.
The system’s physical connectivity is good despite being more limited than it would be on a mid-tower with a standard ATX motherboard. You’ll find four USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (three Type-A, one Type-C), 2.5Gbps Ethernet, a trio of audio jacks (line-in, line-out, and microphone-in), and, interestingly, a USB-C port just for audio.
There is also a USB-A port for flashing the BIOS from an external storage drive. Wireless capability comes from an Intel AX200 wireless card supporting Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5. Its external wireless antennas must be connected to the gold-plated jacks. (They aren’t connected in the photos.) The video output connectors are disabled in my configuration since the Ryzen 9 5950X processor lacks onboard graphics. For that, the EVGA-brand GeForce RTX 3090 offers one HDMI and three DisplayPort connectors.
Wrapping up the connectivity, around front the Chronos has an audio combo jack (headphone/microphone) plus two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, one Type-A and one Type-C.
Testing the Chronos: The 5950X Is a Beast
The 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X in my Chronos is the first Ryzen 5000 series chip that PCMag.com has benchmarked in a commercially built system. (We’ve just tested the two Zen 3/Ryzen 5000 chips below it, the Ryzen 9 5900X and the Ryzen 7 5800X, as bare chips on our CPU testbed.)
Retailing for $799 a la carte, the CPU replaces the Ryzen 9 3950X as AMD’s flagship mainstream chip. It brings enhanced maximum clocks (4.9GHz, from 4.7GHz) and, according to AMD, improved gaming and single-threaded performance, areas where Intel has traditionally been on top. Let’s test those claims. I compared the Chronos to the desktops whose basic specifications are below.
The Corsair One a100 provides an ideal comparison with its previous generation Ryzen 9 3950X and 11GB GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. The other AMD machine is the iBuyPower Creator RDY-IWRG205; it combines a 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X with the same GPU as the Chronos. Last are two 10-core Intel Core i9 desktops, the Alienware Aurora R11 and Corsair Vengeance i7200, that will be illustrative on the CPU tests.
Storage, Media and CPU Tests
Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, a holistic performance suite that simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both benchmarks yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
We like to see at least 4,000 points in PCMark 10 from high-performance PCs, but heck, how about we double that, to 8,184 points? That makes the Chronos the highest-scoring PC that we’ve tested to date in the productivity benchmark. The Origin’s showing in PCMark 8 is also in line with what we expect for PCs with bleeding edge solid-state drives.
Next up are two CPU-crunching tests: Cinebench R15 stresses all available processor cores and threads while rendering a complex image, while in our Handbrake test, we transcode a 12-minute 4K video down to 1080p.
The Chronos was unsurprisingly dominant in both tests. It bested the Corsair One a100 by about 12 percent in Cinebench R15, a respectable generational leap for its new Ryzen processor. And the comparison with the Core i9 in the other Corsair system just isn’t pretty.
The final test in this section is photo editing. We use an early 2018 release of Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud to apply 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG image, timing each operation and adding up the totals. This test is not as CPU-focused as Cinebench or Handbrake, bringing the performance of the storage subsystem, memory, and GPU into play.
This may be the most interesting result yet. Intel machines typically dominate this test, yet the Chronos left even the Alienware and its up-to-5.3GHz Core i9-10900K in the dust. Based on the Chronos’ massive 30-second advantage over the Corsair One, AMD’s claim of improved single-threaded performance seems well-founded.
Graphics Tests
Our first two benchmarks in this section measure the gaming performance potential of a PC. In UL’s 3DMark, we run the Sky Diver (lightweight, capable of running on integrated graphics) and Fire Strike (more demanding, for high-end gaming PCs) tests, both DirectX 11-based. Unigine Corp.’s Superposition is another gaming simulation; it uses a different rendering engine to produce a complex 3D scene.
I had to increase the Y axis on both charts to fit the Chronos’ numbers. The CPU-limited 3DMark Sky Diver and Superposition 720p tests show just how much extra oomph the Ryzen 9 5950X brings to the table. On the contrary, the Superposition 1080p test is mostly GPU-limited, so it makes sense that the Chronos performed in line with the Alienware, which was also packing a flavor of RTX 3090 card.
Finally, we run the real-world games Far Cry 5 (DirectX 11) and Rise of the Tomb Raider (DirectX 12) at various resolutions at their highest image quality presets.
The Chronos performed very well, though it didn’t distinguish itself from the pack. That’s not a jab, just a reality check—since these games’ performance is largely dependent on a system’s GPU, the Ryzen 9 5950X is complete overkill when similar frame rates can be achieved using less expensive chips.
Workstation Tests
The GeForce RTX 3090 in my Chronos obligated me to put it through our workstation tests. Though it’s a formidable gamer, its immense investment (the card retails for about $1,500) is usually only worthwhile over an RTX 3080 if your daily workload includes creative, rendering, or scientific tasks that can make use of its massive 24GB of dedicated GDDR6X memory.
We’ll start with the POV-Ray 3.7 CPU assessment. This test uses ray tracing to render a three-dimensional image. (Note that it doesn’t use the ray tracing features of Nvidia’s RTX-class GPUs; this is purely processor-focused.)
The Chronos made short work of this test thanks to its high core and thread count. Now we’ll move on to Cinebench R15’s OpenGL test, which taps the hardware rendering capabilities of the GPU.
This test is CPU-limited on desktops like these, so the Chronos again had no trouble coming out on top. Now on to our last, and most workstation-savvy, benchmark: SPECviewperf 13, which renders and rotates wireframe models using real-world viewsets from popular ISV apps.
These machines all performed closely since their GPUs are of a similar performance level. This benchmark doesn’t use nearly enough memory to let the GeForce RTX 3090 stretch its legs.
As a last word on performance, the Chronos kept its cool throughout my testing. Its fans stayed relatively muted despite the open nature of the case.
Verdict: A Mini Tower With Super Power
The Chronos pushes the performance capabilities of a min-ITX-based tower to the max. All it truly lacks next to a mid-tower or larger desktop is expansion room for more storage drives (especially for multiple 3.5-inch platter drives) and add-in cards.
Naturally, the Chronos doesn’t come cheap, especially when configured with the Ryzen 9 5950X processor and GeForce RTX 3090 GPU of our test unit. As pure components, those two parts will cost you $2,250 together at retail. But this tightly designed PC is well made and fairly priced for what’s inside. For achieving peak desktop performance in a fraction of the bulk of its competitors, the Chronos deserves a top recommendation.
