Big, Bright, Fast and Loud

We agreed to review a workstation from Origin PC, a Miami-based company (founded by former employees of Alienware) that builds high-performance computers for gamers and hardware enthusiasts. According to the company’s website, its systems are hand-built using only the best quality/performing components and tested for 72 hours before being shipped to customers. Origin touts the fact that it assembles its systems in the U.S. and will build a computer using any chassis available. The company sells small form factor, mid-tower and full-tower systems as well as mobile workstations.

Imagine our surprise when the system arrived in a wooden crate weighing 92 lbs. After removing 14 screws to open the crate, we found the computer itself packed in a thick cardboard box. Inside that box, the system was supported by foam inserts and inside the computer was a foam block to protect components and keep them from moving during shipping. This is standard for all large Origin systems.

Once we got it unpacked, we paused for a moment to admire its size. The Origin Millennium Pro X2 is billed as the company’s mid-size professional workstation, but it is larger than many competitors’ full-tower systems. The beautifully sculpted case measured 9.75 x 24.8 x 21.44 in. (W x D x H) and weighed 55 lbs. But the steel frame was clad in many places with flimsy plastic and the recesses that appeared to be handles were anything but—adhesive labels warned: “Not A Lift Point.” The removable lockable side panel has a large window to show off internal components while a hinged front door conceals five 5.25-in. front drive bays plus five hot-swappable, lockable hard drive bays (the locks add $58 to the base price).

Our review unit came with a white removable panel on the left and the door hinged on the right, but the chassis can be oriented with the panel on the right and the door hinged on the left. Behind that door, two of the drive bays in our system contained a 40-in-1 media card and a 16x Blu-ray burner, options that added $21 and $86, respectively. You also have a choice of one of three standard colors a custom paint scheme.

A recessed area on the top of the case conceals the power button, four USB 3.0 ports, headphone and microphone jacks, a reset button, a manual fan control knob and a button to switch the fans to maximum cooling mode. Behind this recess, a perforated plastic panel covers the liquid cooling system’s three large fans. When powered up, the Millennium Pro X2 filled the room with a constant 60dB hum that climbed as high as 75dB under compute loads—the equivalent of a vacuum cleaner’s noise level. What’s more, the fan controls did little to alter this constant din.

The rear panel provides six more USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 keyboard/mouse socket, two RJ-45 network connections, an optical S/PDIF output port and six audio jacks (separate microphone and line-in jacks as well as line-out/front, side, rear and bass output speaker channels).

The interior is lit by an array of LEDs and a small remote lets you select from 16 light colors and four lighting effects, including flash and strobe. You can also dim these lights or turn them off entirely. Ultimately, we found the lighting effects to be quite distracting.

Configuration Options

Origin gives customers a huge range of options to choose from and guides them through the configuration process with a multi-step online wizard. The first step is to select a single or dual CPU. The Millennium Pro X2 we received is a dual-CPU system based on an ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS motherboard with a base starting price of $3,780. A pair of 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E5-2630 eight-core CPUs, 32GB of memory and a 500GB standard hard drive are included in that price, but no graphics card. From there, the configuration fun begins. You can choose your case orientation and color and then start adding and upgrading components.

Our system included a Frostbyte 360 X2 sealed liquid cooling system with its hoses routed to the radiator mounted below the perforated grill on the top of the case (a $68 option). Our evaluation unit was also equipped with a pair of Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 10-core Haswell CPUs. These processors, which added $3,162 to the cost of the system, have a base frequency of 3.1GHz, a maximum turbo speed of 3.5GHz, 25MB cache, and a thermal design power (TDP) rating of 160 watts. Origin offers a choice of 11 different CPUs including a pair of 18-core E5-2699 v3 CPUs.

To ensure adequate heat transfer from the CPU to the cooling system, our X2 also included the optional Gelid GC-Extreme thermal compound ($15). And because our system would be completely tricked out, Origin included its top-of-the-line 1500 watt 94% efficient Corsair power supply, which added another $327. You also have your choice of power supply cable colors.

The ASUS motherboard provides seven PCIe Gen3 x16 slots and can support up to four gaming cards or two workstation-class GPUs (graphics processing units). Origin offers six different NVIDIA gaming cards and a choice of seven NVIDIA Quadro or three AMD FirePro cards. Our system came with an NVIDIA Quadro K6000 GPU, featuring 12GB of discrete memory and 2880 CUDA (compute unified device architecture) parallel processing cores. Origin has since replaced this with the Quadro M6000, a $5,244 option with 12GB of GDDR5 memory and 3072 CUDA cores.

Origin also included an NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU accelerator, providing an additional 12GB of GDDR5 memory and another 2880 CUDA cores. This is the same GPU accelerator provided last year by Microway in the WhisperStation we reviewed. It added another $3,863 to what was already becoming an expensive system and really didn’t contribute much to our benchmark results. So why buy a Tesla? There are hundreds of applications across a wide range of fields that are optimized for GPU computing. In the world of CAD/CAM/CAE, some aspects of many popular CAD programs—such as the surface and mesh modeling and rendering functions of AutoCAD, Inventor, CATIA and NX—take advantage of GPU acceleration. When you move into the realm of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), structural analysis and simulation, most directly support the Tesla GPU.

Both NVIDIA cards require auxiliary power connections, and when you realize that together they consume 485 watts, you can understand the need for the large power supply. Even with both boards installed, we still had access to three PCIe slots and more than enough capacity to power additional add-ons.

The ASUS motherboard provides eight DIMM (dual in-line memory module) sockets and supports up to 512GB of memory. Origin equipped our review unit with 64GB of RAM installed as four 16GB ECC registered 2133MHz modules, adding another $694 to the price. The company currently offers the X2 motherboard with up to 128GB of RAM.

Our system also came with an upgraded primary hard drive, a 1TB Samsung 850 Evo series SSD (solid-state drive)—a $434 option—installed in an additional drive bay nestled below the hot swap bays. That meant that there was still room in the massive case for three more drives in the standard bays plus five in the hot swappable bays. RAID arrays are also available.

Other options include an ASUS ThunderboltEX II Expansion card ($74), optional audio boards, upgraded networking cards, and so on. After completing the configuration, the next page of the wizard offers mouse pads, T-shirts, posters and hats. On this page, you will also find a choice of keyboards. Since a keyboard and mouse are not included in the base price (and were not included with our evaluation unit), we added the least expensive options—a $20 Microsoft USB keyboard and $15 Microsoft USB optical mouse to our system—but choices here go as high as $215 for a keyboard and $145 for a mouse. Other selections include monitors, speakers, webcams and more.

Price, Performance and Verdict

By the time we added everything up, the total came to $18,186, which was $703 less than the MicroWay WhisperStation. With two very fast 10-core CPUs, plenty of RAM, an ultra-high-end GPU and the Tesla GPU accelerator, we knew it was going to be fast. But would its performance match its price?

On the SPEC Viewperf tests, the Millennium Pro X2 blew away the competition on almost every data set, thanks in large part to its K6000 GPU. With the newer NVIDIA M6000, we would expect those results to be even better. But on the SPECapc SolidWorks benchmark, the Origin workstation lagged a bit behind the Lenovo ThinkStation P900, in spite of both utilizing the same CPU. And on the AutoCAD rendering test, a multi-threaded test on which faster systems with more CPU cores have a distinct advantage, the Origin PC Millennium Pro X2 came up quite short—its 36.50 second average rendering time, while still fast, was more than double that of the Lenovo P900—despite identical CPUs and the equivalent of 40 cores.

We also ran the SPECwpc workstation benchmark. Here, the Millennium Pro X2 captured most of the honors, though it lagged behind both the Lenovo P900 and the MicroWay WhisperStation on some of the individual tests.

Origin pre-loaded Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. Windows 8.1 Pro is also available, or you can save $129 by ordering your workstation without an operating system. Ours also came with a three-year warranty, a $269 option beyond the one-year that comes standard.

Our Millennium Pro X2 was definitely equipped well beyond the needs of most Desktop Engineering readers. Eliminating the Tesla card and opting for a less powerful GPU would immediately save nearly $10,000. But for those running high-end engineering analysis applications, a system this powerful may be warranted.

That said, we had to ask ourselves: Would this computer be appropriate in an office environment? Our conclusion was: probably not. No matter what you put inside, the Millennium Pro X2 looks like a gaming system. Its lighted interior is distracting and the din emanating from the fancy case was more than just loud, it was annoying. A hardware enthusiast in a small shop might find the Origin PC Millennium Pro X2 quite attractive, but we doubt it will find a home in many corporate environments.

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