You can play video games anywhere, and with any device. That is, until you get into the hard-core, memory-heavy games that require a ton of power and speed. For that, you need a serious rig – like Origin’s Millennium. This flagship full tower desktop is massive in both size and price. It stands 20 inches tall, weighs at least 30 pounds, and starts north of $2,000. The fully equipped box, with a Core i9-9900K and dual Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti video cards, runs a whopping $5,750, but it’s totally worth it.
Design
Origin was among the first custom PC builders to switch its flagship desktop to a custom enclosure. That enclosure was updated to its second-generation last year. The massive Millennium combines a sleek metal front, which swings out to reveal the optical drive and hot-swap hard drive bays, with tempered glass flanks secured by magnets. The result is a sleek, clean, imposing silhouette.
The Millennium’s chassis is built from steel and most surfaces are either glass or aluminum, which gives the case some serious weight. The front-facing port panels are made from a thin piece of plastic that doesn’t exactly jive with the rest of the PC.
The custom enclosure allows you to customize the rig. Origin designed the case so it can be configured multiple ways. The motherboard can be located on either the right or left side of the case, and oriented so the motherboard ports face towards the rear or the top.
You can order the Millennium in a configuration that works best for your gaming space. An enthusiast who often tinkers with the system and frequently swaps peripherals might want to have the motherboard ports facing up for ease of access, while a video editor building a god-tier rig might steer towards a more traditional setup.
The Millennium’s front-facing ports are located with accessibility in mind. A slide-down panel hides the power button, rest button, two USB-A 3.1 ports, a USB-C 3.1 port, and the headphone/microphone jacks. It’s a standard setup, but the ports are located exactly where they need to be.
Rear-facing ports will depend on the motherboard, but even the least expensive configuration includes multiple USB 3.1 ports with one additional, rear-facing USB-C 3.1. You’ll also receive 7.1 audio.
Thunderbolt 3 is not available, however. None of the Millennium’s available motherboards support it. You’ll have to buy Origin’s L-Class workstation if you want that.
The Origin Millennium’s guts are pleasantly familiar once you dig into them. Alternative configurations, like those that tilt the motherboard ports towards the top, might slightly confuse new enthusiasts. The case is large, of course, so there’s no shortage of space for upgrades. A basic configuration will have only one PCI slot used, offering room for multiple video cards or other add-in PCI cards. There’s also room for up to nine hard drives, counting the m.2 and hard drive bays together. You can up that to ten if you also take advantage of optional Intel Optane graphics.
Specs
The top-dog Origin Millennium with an Intel Core i9-9900K processor has a standard base clock speed of 3.6GHz, which can turbo up to 5GHz. This is an extremely powerful eight-core chip with hyper-threading, which delivers outstanding results, and a great balanced blend of single-core and multi-core performance.
It’s hard drive performance is also spectacular, with a Samsung 970 Pro m.2 drive that can reach speeds over 3 gigabytes per second and write speeds over two gigabytes per second, and it’s Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti graphics card achieves 4k gaming with ease.
Bottom Line
The Origin Millennium is a gaming powerhouse. The Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti is the fastest video card offered to gamers right now. Two of them, of course, is even better, tacking an extra 40 percent to the average frame rate. We could go so far as to say that the Origin Millennium is a stand-out among custom gaming desktops.
A less expensive system could serve you better if raw performance value is your goal, but the Millennium lines up with competition from other custom PC builders, and it will serve you for years. Internal hardware does go out of date, but the Millennium’s enclosure will remain useful so long as desktop PCs continue to be a thing.
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