Origin Genesis Review: Triple Titan Terror
by Ryan Smith on April 23, 2013 9:00 AM ESTFinal Thoughts
Though it didn’t go as initially intended, our time evaluating Origin’s Genesis ended up being enlightening for entirely different reasons. It’s one thing to look at a tri-SLI system, but it’s extremely rare that we get to look at any kind of liquid cooled GPU system, let alone one packing 3 cards as fast as NVIDIA’s GTX Titan. NVIDIA told us that they wanted to showcase tri-SLI Titan in an interesting manner, and though this isn’t quite what they had planned Origin has unquestionably done just that.
The Genesis, simply put, is obscene. With a heavily overclocked Core i7 processor, 3 overclocked GTX Titans, RAID-0 SSDs, liquid cooling throughout, and a number of other smaller touches, the performance of the Genesis is on a level all its own. Which almost presents us with a problem, since so much of the review process is comparative. The Genesis is essentially the fastest thing you can build in an ATX form factor, packing some of the most powerful components available today and built in a case heavy-duty enough to flatten someone ACME style. What can you even begin to meaningfully compare that to?
At nearly $9,000 for our system as equipped, the Genesis stands alone in every possible way. Perhaps it’s fitting then that it’s a lot like the GTX Titan itself: expensive, powerful, and impressive. With Titan NVIDIA set out to create a luxury video card, and the Genesis is the logical conclusion of that process, bringing Titan into a luxury computer. A $9000 gaming computer isn’t economical by any definition of the word, but for the few that can afford such a toy, there simply aren’t any other toys like this.
Ultimately in evaluating the Genesis it’s not a question of value for its potential customers, but rather a question of needs and tradeoffs. 3 Titans in tri-SLI offers a level of gaming performance that exceeds all but the most challenging games, and while even 2 Titans may be necessary to drive a single display, with 3 Titans it’s simply a foregone conclusion that it’s intended to drive surround gaming. It takes something this powerful to unlock the ability to run at the highest quality settings at the highest resolutions.
The tradeoff for all of this is that powerful systems consume a lot of power themselves, and the Genesis is no exception. The Genesis is built to consume 1200W in power and expel it as 1200W in heat, something it does extremely well thanks to the liquid cooling system. That liquid cooling system is always active however, so if the Genesis does have one drawback it’s that while it sings under load, that cooling system is singing under idle, too.
As for Titan itself, though Anand and I agreed in our look at Falcon Northwest’s Tiki that the SFF is the most interesting application of Titan right now in this age of power efficiency and quiet computing, tri-SLI Titan is a stark reminder that there are benefits for going big, too. Once you get past the hump of SLI versus the multi-monitor performance penalty, SLI scaling is at least solid on everything we’ve tested. And despite our concerns about being CPU limited, at multi-monitor resolutions and backed by a bleeding edge CPU there’s still plenty of room for Titan to soar. Tri-SLI Titan can handle everything we throw at it and then-some. Ultimately it’s serving a niche of a niche (of a niche), but the performance is there for a price.
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DanNeely - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - link
I'd swag it at 3-4 years for a $1200 box; and two more for the $600 pricepoint.We're probably 2 die shrinks from having similar performance levels in an x70/x80 card. The first shrink will put slightly better than titan level performance down the upper mainstream die size (assuming standard doubling); the second will give a single card with double that and since 3way SLI performance is significantly less than the 3x that linear scaling assumes the 2 die shrink GPU should be in the same ballpark.
That's only 3 years out. Depending on how competitive the market is that card could be anywhere between $250 and $600ish; the lower end of that range should easily make a $1200 system; the top of it will probably be a year behind with the $600 price point needing another die shrink so 2 more years for that or 6 total.
faroguy - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - link
NVIDIA had a demo system at GTC with 3 Titan's in it that was running Metro: Last Light. It was quite an awesome feeling to play on a system with that much power. Also, it wasn't terribly loud.Samus - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - link
lol, ridiculous BF3 scorekrazeyivan - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - link
If you want to see a beast system with 4 x Titans - check this link - probably the fastest 24/7 Rig aroundhttp://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1755071
Denithor - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - link
Well, now that you have enough GPU power to push those games, do some core count studies and see what games are seriously benefiting from 2/4/6 cores. This would clearly show where you're being held back by CPU versus GPU.DanNeely - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - link
Very few games are heavily threaded on the CPU today; so finding CPU bottlenecks would be about downclocking the chip not disabling cores. With the PS4 and xbox720 rumored to have 8 relatively lightweight CPU cores we probably will start seeing games able to take better advantage of the width of high end CPUs in a few years; but we're not at that point today.mapesdhs - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - link
Ryan writes:> 1340W at the wall is over 11 amps; we’re not to the point where the Genesis
> needs a dedicated circuit, but that’s the majority of a 15 amp circuit right there.
Less than 6A where I am. ;)
Finally Edison's daft low-voltage DC-bias legacy is revealing itself. Is it possible that top-end
PC tech development may eventually become limited by the comparatively low max power
available from a US wall socket? I hope not.
Ian.
Death666Angel - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - link
"Is it possible that top-end PC tech development may eventually become limited by the comparatively low max power available from a US wall socket? I hope not."Nope. You already have household items that use power in the thousand Watt range (vacuums, heaters, microwaves etc.), so a PC doing the same thing isn't a problem. And the drive in the PC industry is for lower power consumption overall. No one of the component vendors is pursuing 1k+ Watt PCs. It's the end manufacturers that offer that kind of power consumption beast on their own. And the few people that really need bigger PCs usually have their own circuits to run them off, along with specialized cooling solutions.
Death666Angel - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - link
I don't understand the choice of 2 120GB SDDs (in RAID 0 nonetheless). And 4x4GB RAM looks wrong in this type of PC. If you go crazy, go crazy on everything. :DAs for the water cooling, I'd rather have another case that supports something like 200/280/360/420 radiators and at least 2 of those. This setup is not very elegant. If you go with such a case, give me an external water cooling radiator like the 1080/1260 ones or install a 480 quad one on the side of the case.
hero1 - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - link
With that much money spent on the hardware I would expect them to have used a better case, custom one and bigger radiators to reduce the heat and noise. Poor job imo.