A Light Fish Tank

U Origin PC Neuron 3500X it looks the part of an expensive gaming PC. Corsair, in all its wisdom, ships its Origin PCs in huge wooden crates that you need to break open. Snuggled in that crate is a box, and like a vaudeville act, inside that box is another box covered with a foam crown and foam shoes. If you’re like me, you rush your PC to your desk as excited as a child at Christmas. You should not be like me because this is the case where, if you open it incorrectly, you can accidentally send one of the panels tumbling towards the ground.

This is the kind of PC that looks much more structurally sound than in person. At least it stays cool and looks cool. The air comes from below, and the side flows in the back and at the top. It’s an efficient, well-proven layout that keeps things cool and calm. The RGB lights offer a glow that fills my little gamer’s heart with subtle joy.

The design of the case of the aquarium tank has taken for a good reason. Now, you can see your dear gamer goodies from more angles. Unfortunately, I have issues with the craftsmanship of the Corsair 3500X mid-tower case. It looks good, but you should avoid putting anything heavy on the top to prevent your square case from turning into a toaster oven.

My setup of the Origin Neuron 3500X will cost about $3,387 MSRP, but Origin has dropped it to $2,888 at the time of this review. At least it comes with free shipping at this price, even if you have to break the bank for the firewood. It’s a fair price for what you get, but part of me knows you can ask for better from your writing towers. If the appearance was everything, the PC in its aquarium tank case would be perfect for the image. Several details detract from the overall solid production.

Origin PC Neuron 3500X Review: Build Quality

The three entry fans of the Corsair brand are especially pleasant and attractive, and the iCUE software installed by default makes it easy to change the color and pattern of the fan all at once. Vengeance RGB DDR5 RAM sticks and Capellix XT cooling units fit the aesthetic. From any angle, it looks just fine.

But I have other issues with the mid-size Corsair 3500 tower. The Y-shaped grill looks neat, but it also causes the top sheet to curve toward the center. In any case, you should not knock any books or other glasses on the main ventilation of the PC heating, but its slightly concave shape makes it look less attractive. The top of the box comes with a single USB-C, two USB type-A ports, and a 3.6mm headphone jack. There are two extra USB-C ports on the MSI Z890-P rear I/O panel if you need to connect some extra dongles or cables.

All panels are pressed with ball and socket joints. These managed to hold tight on the short trip from the box to my desk, but as soon as I opened the main panel to remove that intrusive phone packaging, I accidentally nudged the front panel and almost sent it tumbling to the floor. Both the main and rear panels are located behind the front glass. It is better to remove the font panel before removing the sides, although there is no cutout in the frame that makes it so easy. If you are considering this chassis, you may need to be more careful when diving into your fishbowl for regular maintenance.

Unlike some other pre-built desktops you can buy, such as the Alienware Aurora R16there is no special support for the GPU. Instead, it relies solely on the rear support and the PCIe Express slot to maintain balance. This is really only a problem when moving the PC, but the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super is a great card and in charge. It will move if you apply some force to the free-floating end beyond the motherboard.

At least the PC is quiet. The low hum of idling fans offers soothing white noise, and even under stress, the tower never picks up enough to distract. The inside of the PC offers a spacious interior where you still have two RAM slots and a single PCIe Gen 5 slot to play with if you opt for the larger Nvidia cards. When you open up the back, you’ll find that the cables are well organized, that is, until you see the jumble of cables going all the way into the PSU.

But if you’re buying this PC to have a great-looking PC to bathe yourself in refreshing RGB light, the Origin 3500X does the job admirably. Origin’s engineers did a fair job putting everything together, but I found there to be too many design details for the Corsair case, which hurt its overall rating.

Origin PC Neuron 3500X Review: Performance

The configuration Corsair sent me includes 32GB of DDR5, 6400 MT/s RAM, RTX 4080 Super, and the latest flagship Intel Arrow Lake CPU, the Core Ultra 9 285K. That CPI normally hits the clock speed of 3.7 GHz, but TurboBoost should overclock that up to 5.7 GHz, at least according to the designers.

Until I met the Origin, I had not yet immersed myself in the latest Intel CPUs at the desktop level. I don’t understand why the chipmaker would abandon the naming conventions of the past generation in favor of more “Ultra” monikers like its most recent ones. laptop chips.

Whatever the case, I’ve also heard some grumbling about the chip’s performance compared to last-generation flagship desktop chips like the Intel Core i9-14900K. In my own benchmarking, I found that the latest Intel chip couldn’t keep up with the 14900K Maingear MG-1 with the same GPU but the 14th-gen Intel gaming CPU. The Ultra 9 scored about 200 points lower in single-core Geekbench 6 and more than 1,500 points lower in multi-core tests. The Ultra 9 outperforms Cinebench multi-core rendering tasks by around 65 points.

None of my CPU benchmarking has done anything to defeat chip enthusiasts’ claims that Arrow Lake is better at productivity but worse for gaming. In the 3D Mark tests, going head to head with an RTX 4080 Super, Maingear’s PC scored better in the 3D Mark Time Spy and Steel Nomad benchmarks.

It’s not like you won’t get excellent gaming performance from this Origin PC. I put the machine through its paces in several games at different resolutions. In Cyberpunk 2077 non-benchmark gameplay at 3440 by 1440 ultrawide resolution, could hit around 50 FPS at the highest settings, with ray tracing enabled and no DLSS. With Nvidia upscaling, you can get up to around 90 FPS in hectic scenes. At 4K, Cyberpunk starts dipping into 30 FPS.

You really can’t expect more from a PC at this price. Baldur’s Gate III it was buttery smooth, doing 105 FPS outdoors in Act 1 and around 87 FPS in the city of Act III, I played Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 Seeing around 90 FPS in chaotic scenes.

You can expect to max out the most demanding titles. On average I got 70 FPS with DLSS on Horizon Forbidden West and about 90 FPS in God of War: Ragnarök. The system benchmarks games well and plays well too. The only problem is that it’s not as clean an experience as you’d get with the gaming-centric Intel 14th-gen CPU. The Neuron model has options for an AMD Ryzen 9 9950x. To be more safe – you can wait for next year’s fall of the expected AMD 9950x3d

Origin Neuron 3500X Review: Verdict

The Origin Neuron is a solid PC that looks especially good sitting on your bedroom desk, and it can bathe your entire room in RGB light. Remember to think carefully about your choice of CPU if you opt for the PC. It’s a beginner-friendly kind of desktop, although you can’t just tear it out of its wooden house and cardboard bed and get to gaming without some forethought. As sturdy as it looks, it has a few poor design choices that require the baby to do so.