The Origin PC Neuron 3500X looks like part of an expensive gaming PC. The designers, in all their wisdom, ship their Origin PCs in huge wooden crates that you have to crack open yourself. Inside that box 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 at Christmas as excited as a child. You shouldn’t be like me because this is the case where, if you open it the wrong way, you can accidentally send one of the panels tumbling to the ground.
Origin PC Neuron 3500X
The Origin PC Neuron 3500X looks great on your desk, but there are some issues with the design of the 3500X case.
Positives
- Solid performance with top specs
- Quiet fans produce good airflow to keep everything cool
- the RGB lighting and aquarium design look striking on a desktop
Disadvantages
- The top of the case is prone to bending under any weight
- You must be careful when removing the panels from the PC
- The Arrow Lake configuration doesn’t match up for pure gaming performance
This is the kind of PC that looks much structurally sounder than it does in real life. At least it stays cool and looks cool. The air comes from the bottom and the side flows backwards and upwards. It’s an effective, proven layout that keeps things cool and quiet. The RGB lights provide a glow that fills my little gamer’s heart with subtle joy.
The aquarium tank enclosure design has caught on for good reason. Now you can view your expensive gamer gear from more angles. Unfortunately, I have issues with the workmanship of the Corsair 3500X mid-tower case. It looks good, but you should avoid putting anything heavy on it to prevent your square cabinet from turning into a toaster.
My configuration of the Origin Neuron 3500X was supposed to retail for around $3,387, but Origin has dropped 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 out the crate for 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 the aquarium tank housing would be a beauty. Several details detract from the overall solid production.
Review Origin PC Neuron 3500X: Build Quality
© Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
The three Corsair-branded intake fans are particularly pleasing and eye-catching, and the standard installed iCUE software 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 match the aesthetic. From every angle it just looks good.
But I have other problems with the mid-sized Corsair 3500 tower. The Y-shaped grille looks sleek, but also causes the top plate to bend toward the center. You shouldn’t throw books or other trinkets on the PC’s main heating vent anyway, but the 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 additional USB-C on the MSI Z890-P I/O back panel if you need to connect some extra dongles or cables.
© Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo 
© Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo 
© Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo 
© Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
All panels are pressure mounted with ball joints. These managed to hold tight during the short trip from the box to my desk, but as soon as I opened the main panel to remove that obtrusive pack-in phone, I accidentally bumped the front panel and nearly dropped it on the floor. Both the main and rear panels are behind the front glass. You’re better off removing the font panel before removing the sides, even though there isn’t a 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 off-the-shelf desktops you can buy, like the Alienware Aurora R16there is no special bracket for the GPU. Instead, it relies solely on the rear bracket and PCIe Express slot to keep it balanced. This is really only a problem if you move the PC, but the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super is a large and powerful card. It will wobble if you apply any force to the end that is floating freely above the motherboard.
At least the PC is quiet. The low hum of the fans while idling provides 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 the back section, you’ll see that the cables are neatly organized, that is, until you see the mess of cables going every which way into the PSU.
But if you’re buying this PC to have a great-looking PC that can bathe you in a cooling RGB glow, then the Origin 3500X does its job admirably. Origin’s engineers put it all together well, but I feel there are too many design details for the Corsair case, which hurts the overall rating.
Review Origin PC Neuron 3500X: Performance
© Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
The configuration the company sent me included 32 GB DDR5, 6400 MT/s RAM, the RTX 4080 Super, and the latest top-end Intel Arrow Lake CPU, the Core Ultra 9 285K. That CPI normally reaches a clock speed of 3.7 GHz, but TurboBoost should overclock it to 5.7 GHz, at least according to the designers.
Until I met the Origin, I had yet to fully dive into Intel’s latest desktop-level CPU. I still don’t understand why the chipmaker would abandon the naming conventions of the previous generation in favor of more “Ultra” names like the most recent laptop chips.
Be that as it may, I also heard some grumbling about the chip’s performance compared to last-generation top-end desktop chips like the Intel Core i9-14900K. In my own benchmarking, I found that the newer Intel chip couldn’t keep up as well as the 14900K: the Main gear MG-1 with the same GPU but Intel’s 14th generation 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 performs better in Cinebench multi-core rendering tasks by about 65 points.
None of my CPU benchmarks have done anything to refute chip enthusiasts’ claims that Arrow Lake is better at productivity but worse at gaming. In 3D Mark tests, pitting it against an RTX 4080 Super, Maingear’s PC scored better in the 3D Mark Time Spy and Steel Nomad benchmarks.
It’s not that you won’t get excellent gaming performance from this Origin PC. I put the machine to the test in multiple games at different resolutions. In Cyberpunk 2077 In non-benchmark gameplay at an ultra-wide 3440 by 1440 resolution, I was able to get around 50 FPS on the highest settings, with ray tracing enabled and without DLSS. With Nvidia’s upscaling you can get up to around 90 FPS in hectic 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 about 87 FPS in town Act III. I played Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2. I saw around 90 FPS in chaotic scenes.
You can expect to max out the most demanding titles. On average I did 70 FPS with DLSS in it Horizon Forbidden West and about 90 FPS in God of War: Ragnarok. The system compares games well and plays them well. The only problem is that it’s not as clean an experience as you’d 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 release of the expected AMD 9950x3d
Origin Neuron 3500X Review: Verdict
The Origin Neuron is a solid PC that looks particularly good sitting on your bedroom desk, and can bathe your entire bedroom in RGB glow. Don’t forget to think carefully about your CPU choice if you opt for the PC. It’s a beginner-friendly type of desktop, although you can’t just yank it out of its wooden home and cardboard bed and start gaming without any thought. As sturdy as it seems, it has some poor design choices that will require you to baby it.