Origin PC Shows Us How To Build A Case With Project Prime

The Rubber Meets The Road

November to December 2013: Metal cutting, bending, punching, stamping, injection molding, and surface treatment coating (along with CNC machining) were involved in Prime’s fabrication process.

Manufacturing The Pieces

This is the mold for the front door logo, the upper side lenses, the hard drive LED, and the IR cover.

More Molds For Project Prime

And this is the left door cavity.

This Is The Config You're Used To...

In the past, enthusiasts had to choose a different chassis depending on their motherboard orientation needs (Ed.: Typically, this has to do with graphics card or CPU cooling requirements; windowed display considerations come into play, too). One of the goals of Project Prime was to allow multiple motherboard orientations in one chassis, without the need for modification.

This picture shows a standard ATX motherboard in the Genesis full-tower.

...And This Is The Same Hardware, Flipped And Rotated

And here’s the same enclosure with a 90-degree (vertical) orientation, inverted so that the motherboard tray is on the other side of the case. If your system sits on the right side of your desk, and you really want to show off your three-way GeForce GTX 780 Ti array, this is the way you’d do that.

Adding Capacity For Cooling Or Storage

This is a shot of the bottom of the Prime chassis, which allows the Millennium to turn into the Genesis. It’s able to house two radiators or additional hard drives, depending on what you need. In this picture, Origin PC has the base loaded up with 12 3.5" disks.

Accessible From Either Side

Matching the invertible motherboard tray, Prime’s front panel is equipped with dual hinges to swing to the left or the right.

Top-Accessible I/O

Prime’s I/O panel sports a fan controller that either uses the motherboard or bypasses it to dictate fan speed. It also includes audio I/O, four USB 3.0 ports, and a power button.

Remote-Controlled Lighting

Origin PC includes a remote with its Genesis- and Millennium-based builds that controls lighting and effects, giving you an extra degree of customization. 

From Cardboard To CES 2014 Showcase

Ed.: A scramble ahead of CES paid off; the Origin PC team was able to show off its Genesis and Millennium in its own suite and on the show floor. Here, you see a custom-painted configuration driving three Ultra HD screens in Nvidia's booth, yielding a Surround resolution of 11,520x2160. Naturally, pushing more than 24 million pixels requires some serious graphics hardware.

It's easy for us as enthusiasts to dismiss a new case, or a mouse, or a power supply when new CPUs and graphics cards are so much more complex. However, today's walk through Origin PC's Genesis and Millennium cases demonstrate how much time and effort can go into something like a well thought-out enclosure.

A special thanks to Kevin Wasielewski, CEO and co-founder, Richard Cary, president, Jorge Percival, technical marketing manager, and the rest of Origin PC's team for giving us this behind-the-scenes look at how Project Prime came to be. If you'd like to try configuring your own Genesis or Millennium system (or even the small form factor Chronos), check out the company's PC Gaming Desktop landing page.