The Origin Millennium is the first gaming PC to feature the new Nvidia Ampere RTX 30 series cards, and you can imagine my excitement to finally have a system powered by the RTX 3080. Having reviewed the Nvidia RTX 3080 Founder's Edition a while back, I was curious to see how well this graphics card would perform outside of a test bench environment. seems like a good candidate for such a huge GPU.

As you may have heard, the RTX 3080 has proven to be hard to find since its release. In fact, for a while the only way to get one was to order an entirely new system and order the parts in.

The Origin Millennium PC is completely customizable: you can choose from three different cases, Intel or AMD, and even install an RTX 30 series GPU.

The system we will be reviewing includes a 10th generation Intel Core i7 (overclocked), 32GB Corsair Dominator Platinum RAM, and most importantly, the excellent MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio to handle all graphics all graphics functions. This particular build sells for a hefty $3,601, which puts it in the middle of the field as far as the Millennium configuration is concerned.

Modern high-end desktops typically use a combination of SSDs and HDDs as a storage solution, and like the Maingear Turbo, this product uses a similar setup. In this configuration, the primary drive is a 1TB Samsung PM981 NVMe M.2 SSD and the additional storage is a 3TB HDD. While not the fastest SSD on the market, it is my opinion that with high-capacity SSDs becoming more common, if you have already spent thousands of dollars on a premium gaming rig, why not purchase a high-capacity SSD and future-proof your storage?

The Corsair Obsidian Series 500D is a thing of beauty, with double tempered tinted glass panels. Even for a mid-tower, this imposing PC often feels like it's looming over your desk as you work, and the RGB lighting peeking through the tinted glass is a stunning effect, giving the PC an intimidating presence, as if it were a piece of supervillain technology.

What I like most about this case is the screwless access to all the internals. However, because the PC is closed with magnets instead of screws, there is a risk of accidentally opening the panel when you decide to move the machine. It would be nice to have a clamp or mechanism to hold everything in place. Screwless and security are not mutually exclusive. You will see why later.

The centerpiece of the Origin Millennium is the RTX 3080, which fits inside. However, a peek inside reveals that this case was not designed to hold such a large graphics card. It appears to be just stuffed in, with brackets sticking out that need to be secured with power cables.

When not held in place by the cables, the brackets stick out enough to prevent the case from closing. As a result, the magnets are not strong enough to hold the panel open permanently. Upon further inspection, the bracket itself is only a few millimeters in contact with the GPU fan.

We contacted Origin about this and were told that there may have been a problem with the way the instapack was installed during shipping, which may have bent the GPU support. The bracket itself was provided by MSI, and the fix provided by Origin was simply to push the bracket back far enough to allow the case to close. This simple and dirty fix was enough to continue testing, but it still doesn't look good.

Thankfully, the tinted glass panel obscures my repair work. This is a shame, as I have seen Origin's manufacturing quality improve recently.

Now that the bracket battle drama has died down, let's return to the main event and see how the Millennium handles gaming. This hard-to-find GPU delivers amazing gaming performance (especially in 4K) at an affordable price; you may have noticed some additional scores in the Benchmarks boxout. [The RTX 3080 is a huge performance leap from the previous generation of RTX GPUs; it's not uncommon for games to exceed 100 fps at 1080p. So I'll add 1440p and 4K scores for more detail. The sweet spot for my games has always been 1440p, so a system that averages 110fps is pretty wild. Most surprising, however, are the scores with ray tracing turned on. Despite the drop-off, I was able to hit over 100 fps on Shadow of the Tomb Raider and 75 fps on Metro Exodus at 1440p.

4K gamers will be pleased to read that the RTX 3080 had no problem producing a near-steady 60 fps on nearly everything I played. The exceptions were Metro Exodus (with ray tracing turned on) and Crysis Remastered, which I would argue are not that optimized for graphics testing in the first place, but I still recorded a range of 45-55 fps on multiple runs.

There is a lot to like about the Origin Millennium as a high-end gaming PC. Frankly, I would have rated the Origin Millennium much higher had it not been for the design issues with the case and GPU.

For a system this expensive, people are paying this kind of price to avoid the headache of building their own PC. The smart thing to do is to choose another case option (this case looks great, but the magnets are a problem for me) or wait until the GPU support issue is addressed on Origin's end before hitting checkout on the shopping cart.

Alternatively, it might be best to wait for a system builder to create a setup specifically created with the new RTX 30 series cards in mind. But that means waiting longer to get the RTX 3080.

Update 15/10/2020:

After the original review was published with a score of 75, Origin sent a replacement GPU and bracket.

These parts are covered by Origin's parts warranty. Both fit the system perfectly and were able to boot without issue.

To ensure that there were no significant changes in performance, we re-benchmarked all games used in the review and updated the scores to reflect overall system performance and subsequent "after-sales" experience, as suggested in the text above.