14 DAY TRIAL // Home-theater personal computers are the sort of thing that usually emphasize minimalistic hardware, but Origin PC decided to turn its latest series into one that provides a broader performance and feature range.
It even chose a grand-sounding name for the product line, Origin PC Omega. Overused or not, the word has a certain allure even if it never really lives up to its meaning as “the end of all things.”
After all, it's not like this is the last line of HTPCs that Origin PC will ever launch, or that anyone else will ever make.
Semantics aside, the new systems do have more potential than the vast majority of their peers out there. Or at least the large ones do.
The Origin Omega line can reach gaming PC level
Home-theater personal computers are mainly intended to play movies, music videos and other media at home, to substitute for going to the cinema. They act like mergers of PCs, DVD players and media players all in one.
That means that, these days, they usually make do with whatever GPU is integrated into the CPU, or sometimes use a mobile GPU to complement the chip. The type normally found in laptops.
The new Origin PC Omega units, however, or some of them, can possess not only one add-in desktop graphics card but two.
Indeed, they can include the wonders of SLI technology, when two video cards work in concert to supply a computer with 50% more performance than a single board would be capable of alone.
In addition to that, the systems have hot-swappable hard disk drive bays which, naturally, also support solid state drives and hybrid drives. The top capacity is 14TB.
All this should be more than enough to run 4K videos at a refresh rate of 60 Hz or more, as well as most games in DirectX 11 or 12 mode.
As for software, you are looking at the Windows OS, or you can get the Steam OS instead if you're feeling adventurous. The latter even allows for boot into Steam's Big Picture Mode, which lets the HTPC operate akin to a game console, with support for wireless controllers and gaming via Steam Library.
Availability
The Origin PC Omega series of home-theater personal computers should be up for sale soon enough, if it isn't already. The price is determined by the hardware you choose during the ordering process.
