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Origin PC Chronos: Two GeForce GTX 780 Tis In A Mini Gaming Cube

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Origin PC proves you can get two GeForce GTX 780 Tis and a heavily overclocked Core i7-4770K into a microATX form factor using BitFenix's popular Phenom M chassis. Yes, the combination is expensive, but it's also oh-so fast. We deconstruct it for you.

Power And Heat

Quad-core processors typically use less power than six-core models, and the systems in this comparison based on quad-core chips enjoy the additional advantage of leveraging newer architectures and more advanced manufacturing. But an extra graphics card affects the Chronos' average power consumption. The same issue affects our $2550 System Builder Marathon machine, which also stumbles under the draw of a six-core Sandy Bridge-E-based CPU. At least it serves as a sturdy space heater during cold winter benchmarking sessions.

We measured the thermal output of our dual-GPU configurations from the hotter card, though none of the boards exceeded the capabilities of their fan maps. The CPUs on the Origin PC and AVADirect boxes run surprisingly warm by liquid-cooling standards, particularly when the overclocked Lenovo machine pushes the heat of six cores into a similarly-sized radiator.

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.
35 Comments Comment from the forums
  • envy14tpe
    But that price tag. Yikes!
    Reply
  • sbudbud
    Price is stupid, kill it with fire!!!
    Reply
  • Kingpin007
    great one would love to have one... if i had the money
    Reply
  • outlw6669
    Ouch, that is expensive!
    Loving the small form factor and performance though.

    How loud does this system have to get to handle all that heat?
    I am guessing that it will be pretty noisy; probably the biggest downside to putting so much performance in such a small package.
    Reply
  • bemused_fred
    21+73=94.That's a 94c peak CPU temp! Jay-soos! I'm pretty sure that's not a good thing.....
    Reply
  • Crashman
    12551434 said:
    Ouch, that is expensive!
    Loving the small form factor and performance though.

    How loud does this system have to get to handle all that heat?
    I am guessing that it will be pretty noisy; probably the biggest downside to putting so much performance in such a small package.
    Nope, it's quiet. The reason it's quiet is that it uses GeForce 780 Ti's. They use what's probably the best GPU cooler ever devised.

    12551444 said:
    21+73=94.That's a 94c peak CPU temp! Jay-soos! I'm pretty sure that's not a good thing.....
    Ah, but 17+73=90. It never reached max fan speed :)
    Reply
  • outlw6669
    12551478 said:
    Nope, it's quiet. The reason it's quiet is that it uses GeForce 780 Ti's. They use what's probably the best GPU cooler ever devised.

    Quiet, powerful and a small footprint.
    That is a great combination in my book :)
    Reply
  • Zeh
    I'd rather not have a 1 TB SSD. It's expensive as it is and 256gb is more than enough, at least for me. Heck, I have a 60gb and I'm fine with it.
    Reply
  • quilciri
    I have a pair of 120gb ssd's in raid0, and it's nearly full with about 1/4 of my steam library, I'd like a 1tb ssd, but really don't want to shell out for one. the Hybrid drives are looking prety good, though. I'm suprised, with all the other money they dumped into this system that the storage drive wasn't a hybrid.
    Reply
  • larsoncc
    The internals are just amazing. Look at how beautifully compact it all is. I bet it's surprisingly heavy for its size; those 850W power supplies have some heft to them.
    Reply