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Price Analysis & Conclusion
The Origin PC Millennium is a beautiful gaming desktop, with a custom-designed steel and aluminum chassis that can be configured with multiple orientations (inverted, 90-degree inverted), side panels (solid aluminum or tempered glass, for each side), and colors (interior and exterior) at no extra cost. The front-panel I/O sliding shroud and the front-panel door hide the generous connectivity and hot-swap bay, further adding to the sleek look of the Millennium.
The RGB LED logo and light strips add the bling that makes enthusiast gamers sing at no extra cost, and Origin PC even made the case lighting compatible with motherboard RGB LED software, giving the Millennium a degree of RGB synchronization not often seen in custom-shop PCs. (Many offer RGB LED components, but few set them up to work together.) Users can also control the logo and strip lighting by itself with the remote control (by turning off the LED toggle button), but we’re impressed with the thought Origin PC put into the RGB lighting synchronization among the case, memory, and motherboard, which is often an afterthought in ridiculously powerful custom gaming PCs like this one.
The overclocked Intel Core i7-8700K runs perfectly stable with its 360mm AIO liquid cooler, which is neatly hidden at the top of the chassis. The three 120mm intake fans are quite quiet even at full CPU load, but we were concerned that the radiator would add considerable ambient heat to the interior chassis (especially because the fans are configured as intakes). Our testing confirmed our fears, with the two EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards consistently running hot at 90C when fully loaded. This causes the fans to kick in rather loudly, with the blower-style coolers barely able to keep the GPUs from throttling. However, the overclocked GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards offer best-in-class gaming performance (the Millennium barely dropped below a 60 FPS average at 4K), even if they do run a little hot and loud.
When reviewing these types of high-priced custom-shop PCs, we often acknowledge that in terms of raw componentry, it would be cheaper to build the PC yourself. However, with the state of the current component market (such high prices for memory and graphics cards), this expensive configuration of the Origin PC Millennium actually offers a comparable value to a DIY build with nearly identical components (again, at the current market pricing). At the time of this writing (late January), we loaded up a Newegg cart with the same components (down to the remote-controlled RGB LED strips and five-slot hot-swap drive bay), only changing the GPUs, CPU cooler, and tempered-glass case to reasonably priced and in-stock comparisons, which rang up for $1250 each, $120, and $180, respectively. (To be fair, it would be a hard task to get a case quite like the Millennium for that price.)
The end result: Our Newegg cart totaled around $4,570 before tax and shipping, which is only $2 cheaper than Origin PC’s $4,572 sticker price for this particular configuration of the Millennium, before shipping costs. Although taxes and shipping for the components will vary by location, Origin PC doesn’t charge tax, and Newegg charges tax depending on which state you reside. If shipping and taxes are applicable, the price margin between a DIY system and the Millennium swings in favor of the custom-shop rig. This will obviously change when component pricing returns to its suggested MSRP (and component pricing is surely going to morph before this is published), but right now, the imperiled DIY market makes the Origin PC Millennium an excellent deal. Not the usual state of affairs, but what is, here in the PC-parts world of early 2018?
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