Origin's Genesis: Flagship Bling

Build, Noise, Heat, and Power Consumption

Before anything else, it's really just nice to see a boutique builder opt for a quality case. It's true that I may harp on cases too much, but the enclosure can play a big part of the overall experience and it's the first thing you see when you get a new tower. None of the cases Origin offers their towers in are chintzy, and their close relationship with Corsair means access to nice cases like the Obsidian series or in the case of this build, the Graphite 600T.

The component choices across the board are strong and I can't really split hairs in those respects, but it looks like the Intel Core i7-2600K in this machine may have drawn the short straw. Even with the Asetek liquid cooler running full bore (and oh how it runs full bore), you'll see temperatures are really quite high compared to other machines. At first it looked like my old nemesis, the Viscount von Lazyoverclocking, was rearing his ugly head, but a quick trip into UEFI revealed a fairly tuned overclock, complete with offset voltage. If anything it just looks like this particular chip needs a healthy amount of voltage pumped into it to hit high speeds; it idles at a higher voltage than my desktop i7-930 does. Under those circumstances I'm not liable to ding Origin for this.

On the other hand, what I will ding them for is just how damn loud this tower is. The Graphite 600T's fan controller isn't the greatest in the world, but everything else in the case completely overpowers the noise of the two 200mm fans at high speed. Honestly, the culprit seems to be the Asetek 570LC liquid cooler, which draws all kinds of attention to itself and even seems to smother the coolers on the well-spaced GeForce GTX 560 Ti's. Most damningly, you'll see it doesn't have a whole lot to show for itself either.

Those peak temperatures on the CPU aren't horrible, but they're not big winners either, especially not for a Sandy Bridge processor. The voltage this i7-2600K requires to hit 4.5GHz doesn't really make up for the mediocre cooling performance of the Asetek cooler or the overpowering fan noise. And with all that voltage...

Yeowch. I'm still inclined to chalk this up to a bad chip. The idle power consumption is really out of character (although the two GTX 560 Ti's don't help), and under load it's downright brutal. iBuyPower's system may have a lower overclock ("just" 4GHz), but that seems to help it keep power consumption down. CyberPower's system has a 4.4GHz overclock and it still manages to keep idle power low by requiring 0.7V less to hit its overclock than the Origin Genesis does.