Can A $4000+ Gaming Cube Still Deliver Value?
When we equate performance with money, our past build experiences lead us to expect roughly $.50 in gains for every $1 spent. But even that sounds like a pretty tall order for a system priced out to $4215. Or is it?
For 2.75 times the price, the Chronos only gains 17% over our own ASRock M8 build. But that’s not even in the same class! More appropriately, the Chronos provides 2.4% more overall performance than our $2550 System Builder Marathon machine, for 66% more money. Even if the warranty is worth 15% of its cost, that's just not right. And that’s because overall performance really isn’t a fair way to rate Origin PC’s machine.
Half of our game data, which we collected across several different machines at a variety of price points, is taken at either too low of a resolution or detail level to properly illustrate the difference between a mainstream graphics card and two of the highest-end boards you can buy in SLI. And the Chronos is a specialty gaming machine, not an overall performance pleaser like our Sandy Bridge-E-based $2550 build or the workstation-gone-Trekky machine delivered by Lenovo. High-end gaming is the only true measure of the machine’s worth.
Compared to our $2550 build, that same 66% price increase gets the Chronos a 29% gaming performance lead. We’ve come to expect a 2:1 cost-to-benefit relationship in high-end hardware comparisons, so we might have expected a 29% performance gain to cost 58% more or so. Yet, Origin PC’s build quality and warranty are easily worth the 8% difference between expected and actual price differences.
Performance-at-all-costs buyers who want a compact PC with as much graphics performance as possible need no further justification to spend their money on this exact system. Where else could one find a Core i7-4770K able to spin up to 4.7 GHz and two overclocked GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics cards protected against failure for three years at any cost? Given the luck-of-the-draw associated with scalable Haswell-based CPUs, simply hitting those frequencies is reason enough to be impressed.
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.
Ah, but 17+73=90. It never reached max fan speed :)
Quiet, powerful and a small footprint.
That is a great combination in my book :)