Origin PC Neuron review — A small, compact desktop for mainstream gamers

After sending me a gaming laptop with a custom Cuphead panel on the cover, Origin PC supplied me with a desktop gaming computer. I tried out the Origin PC Neuron desktop (with the Corsair Carbide 175R variant) with some of the most recent PC games.

It was a beefy machine that costs $2,671, and now this week various latops like it are going on sale for Black Friday promotions. You can get one with laser etching, HD UV printing, and paint options to personalize a custom-built PC.

Origin PC has a number of new Neuron desktops and Evo 16-S laptop models available now.

The details

The machine came with an Advanced Micro Devices Ryzen 9 3900X 12-core processor that’s overclocked. And it had an 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super graphics processing unit (GPU), also overclocked. They were housed on an MSI X570 motherboard. The case was a Carbide 175 R black case with tempered glass side panels so you could see the glowing colors on the graphics card inside.

It was 8.27 inches thick, 19 inches tall, and 17.7 inches deep. It came with 16GB Corsair Dominator Platinum 3200 MHz RGB memory. For a primary drive, it had a Corsair 1 terabyte MP600 Gen4 NVME, and the secondary drive was a 2TB Seagate 2.5-inch FireCuda hard disk drive.

The cooling system was an Origin RGB Frostbyte 360 Sealed Liquid Cooling system. And it came packed in a wooden crate that kept it nice and safe. When it arrived, it sat in my garage for a while. And when I turned it on, it didn’t start. So I called them and they eventually told me to press the on button in the back, in addition to the on button on the top. Silly me.

Benchmarks

Here’s the benchmarks for the system:

• Cinebench 15 (Single Core): 194
• Cinebench 15 (Multi-Core): 3,188
• Cinebench 20: 7,399
• Geekbench (Single Core): 5,498
• Geekbench (Multi-Core): 46,167
• CrystalDisk Mark (Read/Write): 5,000 / 4,274
• Time Spy: 11,157
• Time Spy Extreme: 5,181
• Sky Diver: 61,387
• Port Royal: 6,198
• Fire Strike: 22,925
• PC Mark 8 Work Conv.: 4,034
• PC Mark 8 Home Conv.: 5,002
• PC Mark 8 Storage: 5,075
• PC Mark 10 Express: 5,888
• 3D Mark Fire Strike: 22,982
• 3D Mark Fire Strike Extreme: 12,358
• 3D Mark Fire Strike Ultra: 6,532
• 3D Mark Port Royal (1080p): 6,135
• Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (1080p Ultra): 68fps
• Battlefield V (1080p Ultra DLSS On, DXR On, UI Scaling High): 82fps
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider (1080p Ultra): 115 fps
• Ghost Recon: Wildlands (1080p Ultra): 71.8 fps
• Metro Exodus (1080p RTX In-Game): 66fps
• Fortnite (1080p Epic): 171fps
• Civilization VI (1080p Direct X 12 Ultra): 148fps

What I played

I played a few games on the Origin PC model over a few weeks. They included Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Red Dead Redemption 2. These are pretty demanding games. Modern Warfare uses real-time ray tracing to highlight both bright and dark images within the same scene at the same time.

Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn’t use it, but it also makes liberal uses of well-lit and shadowy areas in its graphics. I also played around with a lot of web browser windows running at the same time, and it’s pretty good at keeping them all going, since it has 24 threads operating at the same time.

What you’ll like

Decent performance

As long as you don’t get carried away, this is a good machine that can play a lot of games at high speeds, supposing you stay focused on 1080p performance. It’s a little less powerful on graphics performance on 3DMark than the more powerful Falcon Northwest PC that I recently tried. But it also has a less expensive graphics card.

It’s small for the power

I like how the machine had a fairly small footprint. It wasn’t one of those gargantuan machines with super-loud fans. It was silent and easy to carry around when I needed to do that. The machine is quite beautiful and the craftsmanship is great. But there sure is a lot of stuff packed into the innards of the machine.

What you won’t like

It chugs running games with the highest settings

I played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare for the PC on the machine. I had it set at high settings at the outset. But the machine stuttered multiple times in both the single-player campaign and in multiplayer combat. So I had to throttle it back to lower settings to get a good frame rate.

Red Dead Redemption 2 actually turned green for a while, and I had to turn it off and reboot it. That game has had a lot of problems, so I don’t know if it was the game or the computer that choked. But the performance was pretty smooth after that.

But once you throttle it down, you’re not going to be crying. I looked at imagery like smoke and water effects, and it still looked very pretty in both of the games that I played. Various testers say you can hit 4K at 60 frames per second on a 2070 Super graphics card, but you have to drop the settings down to High to hit that target.

It’s not cheap

The model I tried out was fairly expensive at $2,671, but new models are replacing it shortly. Dell and HP target machines below $3000 or $2,000. But it was a lot cheaper than the $4,300 Falcon Northwest model I tried out.

Conclusion

It’s a good machine for the price, but it’s hard to play some of the beefiest games on the market and see the machine slow down. The latest generation of machines arriving shortly are more powerful and cost-effective, so that the gaming computer can do a better job catching up with the most demanding games on the market. But if you’re a gamer in the middle of the market, it’s not a bad choice.

Score: 80/100

Origin PC supplied me with a desktop for the purpose of this review. Our coverage remains objective. The OriginPC.com site will honor a promo code for VentureBeat readers. Just type in VBCARBIDE175R19 as a coupon code during checkout. It has a lifetime warranty, 24/7 tech support, free lifetime labor, and free shipping. You get some accessories like a T-shirt, poster, desktop sleeve, mouse pad, and accessory box with documentation and a 32GB USB recovery drive with a factory restore image of the PC.