Origin PC Millenium: How Does It Stack Up?
At $3,073, our test configuration of the Origin PC Millennium is far from inexpensive. But compared to $7,000+ full-tower systems sporting Intel Extreme Edition processors and dual-GPU graphics cards, the Millennium will put a lot less hurt on your bank account. Meanwhile, it still delivers enough compute performance to make easy work of all but the most arduous processing tasks. Although the Millennium's three GeForce GTX 660 Ti graphics cards could complicate your next upgrade, they deliver enough pixel-pushing power for running today’s games at high settings across three screens, with only occasional frame rate dips in the most demanding titles.
You could build the Millennium up with a trio of GeForce GTX 680s or pair of 690s to push performance even higher, but you’ll certainly pay more in the process. That could be advisable if you want to dedicate a card to Nvidia's PhysX technology, for example, and maintain playability at 5760x1080. Likewise, if you’re setting up a triple-screen system with 120 Hz displays and Nvidia’s 3D Vision glasses, you’ll probably want to invest in a higher-end graphics subsystem to counteract the performance hit that comes with enabling stereoscopy.
Aside from those most extreme cases of gaming on three monitors at the highest available detail settings, this $3,073 Millennium build is an all-around strong performer. The thanks goes not only to the three graphics cards, but also to the overclocked processor and pair of SSDs in RAID 0.
If we were configuring our own Millennium, we'd opt for a larger storage hard drive to make sure there's always enough room to keep the vulnerable boot drive backed up. It costs but a measly $29 to step up from a 1 TB drive to a 2 TB model on the Millennium’s configurator page. Considering the overall price of the system (not to mention current hard drive prices), that's a tiny price to pay to keep from losing your operating system image should one of one of the SSDs goes south.
