Home/News/Origin's 'Big O' Is a Gaming PC With a Console Crammed Inside
Origin's 'Big O' Is a Gaming PC With a Console Crammed Inside
It's, uh ... *looks at smudged writing on hand* snow time?
Jordan Mallory Follow on Twitter January 6, 2020
Origin's new "Big O" gaming PC isn't a building-sized art deco mecha, and it's not piloted by a man who fulfills a much needed job, here in the City of Amnesia. There's no charming android sidekick involved either, and if you want a butler with an eye patch, you'll have to provide your own. These are all marks against the Big O, which I felt were important enough to address right up front, before we dive into what Origin's latest creation actually is. If Origin didn't want me devoting the intro paragraph to this, well, it should have called its absurd new computer something else. Actions have consequences.
Anyway, Origin's Big O is a gaming PC with either a PlayStation 4 Pro or an Xbox One S shoved in there, your choice, for as little as $2,327 or as much as $8,793, depending on how you customize it. (And yes, that does say Xbox One S and not Xbox One X — perhaps the X was a bit too much meat to squeeze into Corsair's modified Crystal Series 280X Micro-ATX case.) Each half of the system has its own power input and AV outputs in the expected formats, meaning that you can use the console side without having to boot up the computer side, and vice-versa. This configuration also allows Big O to be run to a traditional monitor and television simultaneously, which is helpful for people who might use this as a streaming solution. Also helpful for those people: the optional built-in Elgato 4K Pro capture card.
Origin offers a full suite of processors for the Big O, with the default being an Intel Core i5 9600K, or you can swap that out for an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 and Origin will cut $62 off the cost of the machine. Alternatively, you could add $270 to the build by opting for an Intel Core i9 9900K, or add $588 and go with a Ryzen 9 3950X. Options between these two extremes are also available.
Likewise, Big O comes equipped with an nVidia GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER (6GB) graphics card by default, but you can add a couple grand to the receipt and slot in an RTX Titan if you really want to. Other, less ridiculous cards are available at more reasonable premiums, such as a GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition (8GB) for an extra $190, or an AMD RX 5700 XT (the only AMD card on offer) for an extra $202.
It's all about what you'd expect from a custom gaming PC outfit like Origin on the computer side of things. The main weird hiccup is that Big O's default configuration only comes with a 240 gig SSD for storing the OS — if you want any additional storage, which you'll definitely need because this is a gaming PC, you'll have to pay extra for it. Don't expect to pop out another $50 for a 2TB hybrid drive or something either; Origin will only sell you NVMe M.2 SSDs, and the cheapest 1TB option is $120. I suppose you could buy a normal drive at a regular price somewhere else, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to crack open my bespoke $2,500 hybrid console/PC and start screwing around in there.
Big O is a weird trick based on an earlier, weirder trick, and it's cool that it exists for the novelty of it, but I couldn't in good conscience actually recommend that anyone buy this thing. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are both out next year, y'all. Don't spend used car money on a super fancy version of a console that's soon to shuffle off this mortal coil.
CES 2020CorsairOriginPCPlayStation 4 ProXbox One S
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Jordan Mallory
Jordan Mallory has spent more than a decade in the games industry and is now severely ill-equipped to work in other fields as a result. Right now he's eating generic Frosted Flakes out of a red party cup and wondering why he chose to rewrite his bio at 5:31 a.m.
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