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He Origin PC Neuron 3500X It looks like part of an expensive gaming PC. Corsair, in all its wisdom, ships its Origin PCs in huge wooden boxes that you have to open yourself. Nestled in that box is a box and, like a vaudeville act, inside that box is another box covered in a foam crown and foam shoes. If you’re like me, you bring your PC to your desk as excited as a kid at Christmas. You shouldn’t be like me because this is the case where if you open it incorrectly you can accidentally send one of the panels to the ground.
Origin PC Neuron 3500X
The Origin PC Neuron 3500X looks great on your desktop, but there are some issues with the 3500X’s case design.
Advantages
- Solid performance with high-end specs
- Quiet fans produce good airflow to keep everything cool
- The RGB lighting and aquarium design look amazing on a desktop.
Cons
- The top of the box is prone to bending under any weight.
- You must be careful when removing PC panels
- Arrow Lake setup doesn’t match pure gaming performance
This is the type of PC that looks much more structurally sound than it does in person. At least it stays cool and looks great. The air comes out from below and the air comes out from above and back. It’s an effective and well-tested design that will keep everything cool and quiet. The RGB lights offer a glow that fills my little gamer’s heart with subtle joy.
The aquarium tank box design has become popular for good reason. Now you can see your expensive gamer items from more angles. Unfortunately, I have issues with the craftsmanship of the Corsair 3500X mid-tower case. It looks nice, but you should avoid putting anything heavy on top to prevent your square box from turning into a toaster oven.
My Origin Neuron 3500X configuration would cost around $3,387 MSRP, but Origin reduced it to $2,888 at the time of this review. At least it comes with free shipping at this price, although you’ll have to break down the box to store firewood. It’s a fair price for what you get, but part of me knows you can demand more from your desktop towers. If looks were everything, the PC in your aquarium box would be perfect. Several details detract from the solid overall production.
Origin PC Neuron 3500X review: Build quality
The three Corsair-branded intake fans are especially nice and eye-catching, and the iCUE software installed by default makes it easy to change the fan color and pattern all at once. The Vengeance RGB DDR5 RAM and Capellix XT cooling unit fit the aesthetic. From every angle, it just looks good.
But I have other problems with the Corsair 3500 mid-tower. The Y-shaped grille looks clean but it also causes the top sheet to bend towards the center. You shouldn’t drop books or other knick-knacks into the PC’s main heating vent anyway, but its slightly concave shape makes it look less attractive. The top of the case comes with a single USB-C, two USB Type-A ports, and a 3.6mm headphone jack. There are two additional USB-Cs on the rear I/O panel of the MSI Z890-P if you need to connect some additional dongles or cables.
All panels are snap fit with ball joints. These managed to hold firm on the short trip from the box to my desk, but as soon as I opened the main panel to remove that pesky packaged phone, I accidentally pushed the front panel and almost made it fall to the floor. Both the main and rear panels are located behind the front glass. It’s best to remove the source panel before removing the sides, although there’s no cutout in the frame to make this easier. If you are considering this chassis, you may need to be very careful when diving into your fish tank for regular maintenance.
Unlike other pre-built desktops you can buy, like the Alienware Aurora R16, there is no special support for the GPU. Instead, it simply relies on the rear stand and PCIe Express slot to keep it balanced. This is really only a problem when you move the PC, but the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super is a big, loaded card. It will move if you apply some force to the free floating end beyond the base plate.
At least the PC is silent. The low hum of the idling fans offers relaxing white noise, and even under stress, the tower never rises enough to be distracting. 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 the back, you’ll find that the cables are neatly organized, that is, until you see the jumble of cables going in all directions towards the power supply.
But if you’re buying this PC to have a great-looking PC that bathes you in a refreshing RGB glow, the Origin 3500X does the job admirably. Origin’s engineers did a good job putting it all together, but I think there are too many design details for the Corsair case, which hurt its overall rating.
Origin PC Neuron 3500X review: Performance
The configuration Corsair sent me included 32GB of DDR5, 6400 MT/s of RAM, the RTX 4080 Super, and the latest high-end Intel Arrow Lake CPU, the Core Ultra 9 285K. That CPI normally reaches clock speeds of 3.7 GHz, but TurboBoost should boost it up to 5.7 GHz, at least according to the designers.
Until I was introduced to Origin, I had yet to fully immerse myself in Intel’s latest desktop-level CPU. I still don’t understand why the chipmaker would abandon last generation’s naming conventions in favor of more “Ultra” monikers, like its latest laptop chips.
Whatever the case, I’ve also heard some murmurs about the chip’s performance compared to top-of-the-line desktop chips from the last generation, like the Intel Core i9-14900K. In my own benchmarking, I found that the newest Intel chip couldn’t keep up with the 14900K: the Maingear MG-1 with the same GPU but Intel’s 14th Gen gaming CPU. The Ultra 9 scored about 200 points less in single-core Geekbench 6 and more than 1,500 points less in multi-core tests. The Ultra 9 performs best in Cinebench multicore rendering tasks by about 65 points.
None of my CPU benchmarks did anything to defeat chip fans’ claims that Arrow Lake is better at productivity but worse at gaming. In 3D Mark tests, head-to-head with an RTX 4080 Super, the Maingear PC performed better in the 3D Mark Time Spy and Steel Nomad benchmarks.
It’s not that you can’t get excellent gaming performance with this Origin PC. I put the machine through its paces in multiple games at different resolutions. In Cyberpunk 2077 In non-reference gameplay at 3440 by 1440 ultrawide resolution, you could hit around 50 FPS on the highest settings, with ray tracing enabled and without DLSS. With Nvidia’s improvement, you can get up to about 90 FPS in frenetic scenes. At 4K, Cyberpunk starts to drop to 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 in Act III, I played Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 and saw around 90 FPS in chaotic scenes.
You can expect to max out the most demanding titles. On average I was doing 70 FPS with DLSS on Forbidden West Horizon and around 90 FPS on God of War: Ragnarök. The system compares games well and also plays them well. The only problem is that it’s not as clean an experience as you’d get with Intel’s 14th Gen gaming-focused CPU. The Neuron model has options for up to an AMD Ryzen 9 9950x. To be on the safe side, you can wait for the long-awaited AMD 9950x3d to drop next year.
Origin Neuron 3500X Review: Verdict
Origin Neuron is a solid PC that looks especially good sitting on your bedroom desk and can bathe your entire bedroom in RGB glow. Remember to think carefully about your CPU choice if you go for the PC. It’s a beginner-friendly type of desk, although you can’t just rip it out of its wooden house and cardboard base and start playing without a little forethought. As sturdy as it looks, it has some poor design choices that require you to take care of it.
