When you’re shopping for a gaming PC, you have a few choices. You can get a mass-produced prebuilt gaming PC from the likes of Alienware, or you can get an expensive-but-awesome boutique build. The Origin Millennium is somewhere in the middle. This is an extremely high-end gaming system, to be sure, but it lacks the kind of off-the-wall design language that you’d see in something from Maingear or Falcon Northwest.
Instead, the Origin Millennium is just a solid custom-ordered gaming rig with standard components. It’s still the kind of thing you can build yourself, but without the headache of actually getting in there and routing the cables. Oh, and you might have to deal with carrying a giant wooden crate up to your apartment like I did.
Design and Features
The Origin Millennium is a big computer. This is a full-tower ATX case and for some reason, Origin decided to make it even more imposing with these steel bars on all four corners of the system. The case, by itself, weighs 33 pounds, and that’s before adding heavy high-end components like the MSI RTX 5090 Gaming Trio, a power supply and a 360mm AIO. Add in the wooden crate the system was shipped with, and I definitely needed help to get this computer up to my third-floor walkup apartment.
The metal bars on the corner also present a unique problem for actually getting into the system. Now, the configuration I was sent for review won’t really need to be upgraded for a few years, but you’ll still need to open it occasionally for maintenance. However, the metal bar on the back left corner blocks the glass side panel from coming off smoothly. When I opened the system for the first time to get the weird little styrofoam insert out of the system, I legitimately winced when the glass side panel hit that metal bar when I was removing it.
To be fair, those metal bars are attached with allen bolts, so you can easily remove them, but that’s still more work than getting into a gaming PC like this should take.
Once you do get inside, though, it’s an incredibly spacious build. Even with the massive 14-inch graphics card, there is a ton of empty space, allowing for excellent airflow. What’s more, there are hardly any wires visible, except for what needs to be plugged into the system. Origin has done an excellent job with cable management, neatly arranging all of the cables behind the motherboard tray and channeling them through grommets right where they need to be plugged into the actual system.
However, in the interest of hiding wires, Origin made an odd decision. The case has three 120mm fans mounted in the front of the case for intake, but the wires powering those fans, along with the front panel connectors, are routed underneath the system. That means there’s a big bundle of wires that actually runs underneath and outside the computer. I’m still trying to decide if this is genius cable management or something completely unhinged. It’s likely somewhere in the middle, but even if it results in not seeing fan cables, it’s easy to imagine a situation where the wires get caught on something and break.
When you configure the system, you’ll be able to choose to have the front ports and power button mounted on the top or the bottom of the case, the one I was sent had everything mounted on the bottom. This is going to be the way to go if you plan on having this PC on your desk, but I like the option to have them mounted up top for anyone that plans to put this thing in their living room or on the floor under their desk.
That front panel has four USB-A and one USB-C port, which is more than enough. Luckily, there are even more ports around the back – shocking, I know. The Origin Millennium I tested is strapped with the Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero, the same board I use to test components, so it's packed with rear ports. There are four USB-C ports in the back, along with 6 USB-A ports, two ethernet, and an HDMI port for onboard graphics. The RTX 5090 also has three DisplayPort and one HDMI, which is standard for Blackwell GPUs.
All in the Configuration
No matter how awesome it looks, the configuration I was sent for review is probably overkill for most people. Luckily, Origin PC is a manufacturer that lets you configure the exact system you want, which is then built-to-order. Yeah, you could spend the $7,241 for this exact configuration and have a high-end rig that’ll last for years, but you don’t have to.
Instead, for most people, the sweet spot is probably going to be a configuration with an AMD Ryzen 5 9600X, 32GB of RAM and an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, which is still more than capable of 4K gaming, but with a much lower $3,392 price tag. That’s still kind of high for a gaming PC, but that just comes with the territory of this kind of gaming rig.
To build that mid-range version of the system yourself, even with the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT having an inflated price, you’re looking at around $2,397 total. That means you’re paying about a thousand bucks for Origin to assemble the PC for you. Or, for the high-end configuration that I reviewed, you could put that together with off-the-shelf parts for about $6,506 on PCPartPicker at the time of writing. Either way, you’re spending a considerable amount on the construction of the system.
That seems like a huge premium to pay for someone else to build a system, and while Origin did a good job building this rig, it’s not that simple. On top of the standard one year warranty you get with pretty much any prebuilt gaming PC, Origin also offers lifetime support. This basically means you can reach out for free customer support on any issue that comes up in the future. In fact, you can even send the system to Origin and they’ll upgrade it for free, provided you pay for the new parts.
Plus, that annoying wooden crate I whined about earlier is something that is completely unique to Origin. If you’re ok with paying the extra shipping cost associated with a giant wood box, it is basically the safest way to ship a desktop PC that I’ve ever seen. Just keep in mind that it’s very heavy.
Whether or not this is all worth the extra cash depends entirely on how comfortable you are with building and maintaining a PC, or whether or not you want to spend the time required to do it. Plus, Origin did a great job with cable management.
Performance
Corsair sent me an Origin Millennium with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 64GB of RAM, so it is an incredibly powerful gaming PC. However, with the amount of cash you’d be spending to get this kind of configuration, it kind of needs to be.
I tested the Origin Millennium at 4K, and nearly every game broke the three-digit barrier, and that’s without frame generation. Only two games failed to break 100 fps: Assassins Creed Shadows with 75 fps and Metro Exodus at 97 fps. The latter makes sense as a ray traced workload that I test without upscaling, as it only supports DLSS – and an old version at that.
With AC: Shadows, however, that 75 fps is an excellent baseline that makes the game more than playable, but you can absolutely enable frame generation to boost the framerate even further, at the cost of latency. Enabling frame generation makes the frame rate jump up to 132 fps, but also increases the latency to 42ms, from 33ms. That’s a pretty significant jump in latency, but it’s still not going to be noticeable for most people, especially in a single-player game like Assassins Creed.
Cyberpunk 2077 has a similar story. I tested the game with the Ray Tracing Ultra preset with DLSS set to performance mode. Without frame generation the Millennium spat out 127 fps with 23ms of latency. However, with Multi-Frame Generation set to 4x, that frame rate jumped up to 373 fps, with latency only increasing to 28ms. That’s a higher frame rate than my 240Hz monitor can even handle.
But even without frame generation, 127 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 is impressive. There aren’t really any games out there right now that you’d ever have to worry about compromising on image quality to play, at least with this configuration. Even extremely heavy games without frame gen can get high frame rates.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
