origin and Intel reached out about doing a sponsored piece on the Kronos a
desktop PC that origin brags is the most
powerful and customizable small form factor
desktop a very bold claim but as a bit
of a small form factor Enthusiast the
idea of cramming unbelievable Hardware into a tiny enclosure isn't exactly new
to me so I wanted to go a totally different route with it and look at how
changes in Hardware have fundamentally
changed the kind of performance we can get out of tiny gaming PCs over the last
10 years welcome to Performance per
leader Through the
Ages so at about 10.6 L the origin
Kronos is bigger than some of the Indie SF F cases that I've seen the Dan case
a4sfx that we featured recently is a mere 7.25 L but the extra 3 lers seems
to have been put to good use at the front is an LED lit logo and a much more
reasonable front IO configuration then the A4 sfx's single USB 3 and power
button two USB 3 front audio power and
reset switches most of the panels are vented and the internals are laid out so
the four included Ed magnetic feet can be used to flip Kronos on its side
depending on your space requirements then over on the left above the video
card window is its biggest Advantage a
single water cooling radiator with a slim 120 mm fan that's responsible for
keeping the CPU and the socket area cool even with some overclocking moving to
the inside we find our Decked Out Hardware config including a core i7
extreme 6950x 10 core 16 gigs of ddr4
memory a Titan X Pascal a 1 TB Samsung
SSD with an additional hard drive for storage a 600 W power supply and an 80
mm cooling fan so that's where some of
the internal space went up to and some extra air flow for those
drives so let's take a look then at what we're putting it up against we went back
in time or at least we went to free geek Vancouver those guys are awesome and
have been keeping us supplied with old hardware for our projects for a little while now and we sced up these gaming
Enthusiast configs from 10 six and three
years ago each build should represent a
common Enthusiast DIY case at the time
in spite of Intel's best efforts ATX is still with us so they're actually pretty
similar in size the best of the best single CPU and a top tier GPU
unfortunately we couldn't get a working 8800 GTX in time for testing but we can
extrapolate values based on our 8800 GTS
and it's based on the same G80 chip so we'll start with pure CPU performance in
the last 10 years enthusiasts have gone from quad core machines that turn out
about 3500 points in CPU Mark and 250
points in cinebench to 10 core monsters that can do anywhere from 5 to nine
times that performance in multi-threaded workloads though it should be noted that
when it comes to single credit performance the gains aren't quite as
impressive at a little over double our
only real mixed CPU GPU Benchmark a 4K
video export of adobe's test project at our usual LTT presets yields much
smaller improvements a firmy or greater
Cuda GPU with a fast enough CPU is still
a great video editing solution with most of the perf per liter improvements
coming from Chrono his size moving on to
gaming we see impressive improvements on the performance side of things with an
older game like halflife 2 ending up CPU
bottleneck a few years ago at around 700 frames per second and a newer title like
Metro last Light scaling beautifully to the point where today's system is 20
times faster making it nearly 100 times faster per unit
volume so how then did all of this happen well part of it is the ever
shrinking manufacturing processes on which these components are built but
that accounts only for the improved performance not for the shrinking of the
systems so is it then that older systems
consumed much more power and therefore output more heat so they needed these
big enclosures actually not really going
back to 2006 our system consumed only about 250
Watts from the wall compared to 385 for our Kronos so a big part of the
story here seems to be thermal management these CPU temps that you're
looking at are interesting only from an academic perspective since we're using
Intel designed thermal Solutions on all the older machines rather than something
afterm Market or a consistent cooler across the board but what it does tell
us is that Intel went from considering nearly
70° acceptable back in 2006 all the way
down to targeting about 60° which happens to be the load temp of our 10
Core Extreme Edition gpus clearly
underwent a similar change NVIDIA thought 90° was cool back in 2011 then
dialed that back with GPU boost limiting the more modern chips to ADN
change the other big part of the story seems to be fashion Engineers are driven
by a demand from their management and ultimately consumers to create Sol
Solutions and the availability of smaller and smaller gaming machines has
increased dramatically in recent years presumably because people want them
though with that said back to origin's Claim about the Kronos being the most
powerful and customizable sfff gaming system even if we substitute the volume
of small form factor cases that were available at the times of our older
systems Silverstone ST1 and sto2 and
fractal design node 304 ignoring though
that the node 304 is a mini ITX case and there were no Mini ITX x79
boards thanks to the latest components today it still Stacks up very well no
matter how far back you go so thanks again to origin and Intel for sending us
the Kronos and sponsoring us to lock Jake in the warehouse last weekend to
complete all of these benchmarks for our Through the Ages investigation if you're
looking for a new pc check out the link to origin PC in the video description
they've got a ton of black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend deals including up
to $578 in savings on all Eon 9 series
custom desktop replacement laptops with the GTX 980m with free shipping and a
ton of promotions on their desktops including free shipping free gift cards
free ssds free backpacks or headsets and free games so check that out below
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