Origin PC Neuron 3500X Review: A Fish Tank of Light

The Origin PC Neuron 3500X looks the part of an expensive gaming PC. Corsair, in all its wisdom, ships its Origin PCs in huge wooden crates you need to burst open yourself. 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 kid on Christmas. You shouldn’t be like me because this is the case where, if you open it the wrong way, you may accidentally send one of the panels tumbling toward the ground.

This is the kind of PC that looks far more structurally sound than it is in person. At least it keeps cool and looks cool. The air comes from underneath, and the side flows out to the back and top. It’s an effective, well-proven layout that will keep things cool and quiet. The RGB lights offer a glow that fills my little gamer’s heart with a subtle joy.

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

My config of the Origin Neuron 3500X would cost about $3,387 MSRP, but Origin’s knocked it down to $2,888 as of the time of this review. At least it comes with free shipping at this price, though you’ll need to break up the crate for firewood. It’s a fair price for what you get, but a part of me knows you can demand better from your desktop towers. If looks were everything, the PC in its aquarium tank case would be picture-perfect. Several details detract from the overall solid production.

Origin PC Neuron 3500X Review: Build Quality

© Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

The three Corsair-brand intake fans are especially pleasing and eye-catching, and the iCUE software installed by default makes it easy to change the fan color and pattern on everything at once. The Vengeance RGB DDR5 RAM sticks and the Capellix XT cooling unit fit the aesthetic. From every angle, it simply looks good.

But I have other problems with the Corsair 3500 mid-sized tower. The Y-shaped grating looks clean but also makes the top sheet bend toward the center. You shouldn’t be plopping any books or other knickknacks on the PC’s main heating vent anyway, but its slight concave shape makes it look less appealing. 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 on the MSI Z890-P rear I/O panel if you need to plug in some extra dongles or cables.

All the panels are pressure-fitted with ball and socket joints. These managed to hold tight in the short trip from the box to my desk, but as soon as I opened up the main panel to remove that obtrusive packing phone, I accidentally nudged the front panel and nearly sent it tumbling to the floor. Both the main and rear panels sit behind the front glass . You’re better off removing the font panel before removing the sides, even though there’s no cutout in the frame that makes that easy. If you’re considering this chassis, you may need to be extra careful when diving into your fishbowl for regular maintenance.

Unlike some other pre-built desktops you can buy, like the Alienware Aurora R16, there’s no special bracket for the GPU. Instead, it relies merely on the rear bracket and the PCIe Express slot to keep it balanced. This is really only an issue when you’re moving the PC, but the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super is a large and in-charge card. It will wiggle if you apply some force to the end that’s free-floating beyond the motherboard.

At least the PC is quiet. The low hum of the fans when idling offers soothing white noise, and even under stress, the tower never picks up 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 up the rear portion, you’ll find the cables are neatly organized, that is, until you see the jumble of cables going every which way into the PSU.

But if you’re buying this PC to have a great-looking PC to bathe you in cooling RGB glow, the Origin 3500X does the job admirably. Origin’s engineers did a fair job putting it all together, but I find there are too many design details for the Corsair case, which hurt its overall rating.

Origin PC Neuron 3500X Review: Performance

© Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

The config Corsair sent me included 32GB of DDR5, 6400 MT/s RAM, the RTX 4080 Super, and the most recent top-end Intel Arrow Lake CPU, the Core Ultra 9 285K. That CPI normally hits 3.7 GHz clock speeds, but TurboBoost should overclock that up to 5.7 GHz, at least according to the designers.

Until I met the Origin, I had yet to dive into Intel’s latest desktop-level CPU fully. I still don’t understand why the chipmaker would abandon the past generation naming conventions in favor of more “Ultra” monikers like its most recent laptop chips.

Whatever the case, I also heard some murmurings about the chip’s performance compared to the last gen’s top-of-the-line desktop chips like the Intel Core i9-14900K. In my own benchmarking, I found the newer Intel chip couldn’t keep up as well as 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 Geekbench 6 single-core and more than 1,500 points less in multi-core tests. The Ultra 9 does perform better in Cinebench multi-core rendering tasks by about 65 points.

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

It’s not like you won’t get excellent game performance from this Origin PC. I put the machine through its paces in multiple games at different resolutions. In Cyberpunk 2077 non-benchmark gameplay at 3440 by 1440 ultrawide resolution, I could hit around 50 FPS at the highest settings, with ray tracing enabled and without DLSS. With Nvidia’s upscaling, you can get up to around 90 FPS in frenetic scenes. At 4K, Cyberpunk starts to dip into 30 FPS.

You really can’t expect more from a PC at this price. Baldur’s Gate III 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 I was seeing 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 in Horizon Forbidden West and around 90 FPS in God of War: Ragnarök. The system benchmarks games well and plays them well, too. The only issue is that it’s not as clean an experience as you would get with the 14th-gen Intel gaming-centric CPU. The Neuron model has options for up to an AMD Ryzen 9 9950x. To be extra safe—you could wait for next year’s drop 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 bedroom in RGB glow. Remember to think carefully about your CPU choice if you opt for the PC. It’s a beginner-friendly type of desktop, though you can’t simply rip it from 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 you to baby it.