Orange OPC Review

1. Introduction2. Orange OPC: Exterior3. Orange OPC: Interior4. Software Configuration and Testing5. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage6. Synthetic: PCMark 77. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 20128. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.59. Synthetic: Super Pi10. Synthetic: CrystalDiskMark11. Real World: Media Encoding12. Real World: MKV Playback13. Technical: Acoustics14. Technical: Thermal Dynamics15. Technical: Power Consumption16. Closing Thoughts17. View All Pages

There are a large number of companies in the UK who would be willing to build a PC to your own specification providing you're willing to put up enough cash.  There isn't a whole lot which differentiates these PCs from each other, though, as you're usually restricted to the same set of basic components to choose from.  They might even look the same as most manufacturers use the same cases as a basis for their systems.

But what if you're looking for something a bit different?  There are fewer companies out there who are willing to build you a truly custom system and they usually charge top dollar for them. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA48UcAf6qQ']

Today we are going to take a look at a rather interesting computer from a company called Orange, the OPC.  Music enthusiasts may well recognise the Orange name as they are a well known manufacturer of amplifiers.  In fact, you'd be forgiven for mistaking the OPC for an amplifier as the case is based on the design of a guitar amp.  It features their trademark orange colour scheme which really makes it stand out from the competition.

More information about the Orange OPC is available here.

Orange supply the OPC in a plain brown cardboard box that lends no clues about what lays within.  The unit is suspended between polystyrene pieces within for protection.  There is a separate box inside for accessories but there isn't much included.  All we find is a power lead, a USB cable and a keyboard and mouse bundle.

At a glance the OPC could easily be mistaken for a guitar amp as there are no controls or ports on the front, just a large speaker grill with an orange badge and logo in the centre.  The main part of the unit is constructed from wood, like an amp, and features Orange's trademark orange coloured finish.

There are a few other details here and there such as metal protector plates on each corner of the system which stop the finish getting damaged.  There is also a large rubber handle on the top of the unit and an air vent in the left hand side.

Looking at the top of the unit gives the first clue that there is more to this unit than just an amp.  Alongside the couple of guitar inputs and audio dials we find a power button, Wi-Fi antenna, slot load CD drive and a single USB2.0 port.

Moving round to the back of the system we can see all the motherboard I/O connections along the bottom edge next to the power supply.  There are also left and right line in jacks and left and right output jacks on the rear.

The rear I/O pannel supports:

• 1x S/PDIF Optical
• 1x S/PDIF Analog
• 1x VGA
• 2x HDMI
• 4x USB2.0
• 1x eSATA
• 1x RJ-45 Ethernet
• 2x USB3.0,
• 6x 3.5mm Audio

Accessing the inside of the system is a little more difficult than with a normal PC.  It requires the removal of four separate screws; two hex screws on the top of the unit and two regular screws on the bottom which are covered with small plastic covers.  The whole PC assembly can then be slid carefully out the back of the wooden case.  The four cables connecting the system to the driver units in the front of the case must be removed before the PC assembly can be removed completely, though.

All of the components are mounted on a single sheet of thick metal which has been folded into shape.  It has been painted white and has various slots and screw holes cut into it for all the components.  It's an ingeniously simple design and seems to be very effective.

The system features a Gigabyte H67N-USB3-B3 Mini-ITX motherboard which is mounted on the floor of the system.  It features an Intel Core i3-2100 CPU which is a dual core model that runs at 3.1 GHz.  You can opt to upgrade this to an i5-2500K or an i7-2600K if you like but, at present, there are no Ivy Bridge alternatives.  The CPU is cooled using an Intel reference cooler.

Other components include 4 GB of Kingston dual channel DDR3-1333 memory, a slot loading DVD-RW drive and a 500 GB 7200RPM hard drive and an OEM 400W power supply.  There are a couple of other upgrade options available including adding an AMD Radeon HD 7750 graphics card and an extra 4 GB of memory, giving the system a total of 8 GB.

Considering the OPC has been designed and manufactured by a company who specialise in guitar amps, it's not surprising that it features a whole host of audio hardware that we've never seen on a PC before.  It has a built in dedicated audio interface which lets you plug a guitar and microphone into the top of the system and record in 24-bit audio with 1 ms latency.  The system also features a built in Orange solid state amplifier.

In the front of the system there are two 6.5” JBL Studio Reference speakers which pack quite a punch.

Orange supply the OPC with a relatively heavily customised version of Windows 7 Home Premium compared to most small PC manufacturers out there.  They also bundle a few pieces of software with the OPC which are all pre-installed.

We would usually consider a large amount of pre-installed software and customisation to be a bad thing but we really like what Orange have done with the OPC.

While most manufacturers would just preload a custom desktop background onto the system, Orange has taken it one step further and has replaced all the system sounds with various guitar sounds.  Some might find this a little annoying but we think it is something that most people who purchase this system will appreciate.

The pre-installed programs aren't the usual barrage of ‘free trials' that many larger manufacturers install on their systems.  In fact, all of the included programs go some way to enhancing the functionality of the OPC and enable a number of the features.

These programs include AmpliTube 3+, PreSonus Studio One, Acoustica MixCraft 5 and EZdrummer Lite. If you are budding musician you will already know the software.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the processor is running at 3.1 GHz and the memory is running at 1333 MHz with timings of 9-9-9-24.  Our test system doesn't have the optional discrete graphics card included so the system relies on the integrated Intel HD 1000 Graphics.

Unfortunately there isn't an SSD option with this system and we feel that 500 GB is a little small these days, especially considering this is reduced to around 450 GB when formatted in Windows.  We would like to see Orange offering SSD options and hard drive upgrades to 1 TB or 2 TB with this system.

Testing Methodology

For testing today we will be using a combination of synthetic and real world tests.

Software:

PCMark 7
3DMark Vantage
SiSoft Sandra 2012 SP3
Cinebench R11.5
CrystalDiskMark
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.5
VLC Media Player
Performance Monitor
Super Pi 1.5 Mod
CPUID Hardware Monitor
CPU-Z

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

In this test we can see the lack of  graphics performance with this system.  This is down to the lack of a discrete graphics card.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

A good score for the system in this test considering the weak graphics performance.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

A good set of results for the system in this test.

Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores.

In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

Here we can see how the CPU performance benefits from having hyper threading enabled as we see more than two times scaling with multi threads enabled.

Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 2 millionth pace after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU.

This program tests the single core performance of the system.  The results are quite impressive considering the low-cost CPU in the system.

CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.

Not bad results for a hard drive but we would like to see an SSD option from Orange with this system as it would improve performance considerably.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 1.09GB 720p MKV file (44mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version of this program with ‘faster conversion' enabled.

The system performed quite well in this test considering the low power CPU.

Many people who have media systems will be familiar with the Matroska (.mkv) file format which is often used for high definition video. In this test we will be using VLC Media Player to play a 1080P MKV file while recording CPU usage using Performance Monitor.

The CPU usage is quite high in this test but you wont run into any issues unless you have a lot of background tasks active.

We measured the noise emissions of our entire test system at the wall while loading the CPU using Prime95 and GPU using FurMark. We placed our digital sound level meter 1m from the front of the case when recording results.

The Orange OPC registered less than the 30 dBA minimum sensitivity on our noise level meter.  There's only one fan in the system on the CPU cooler so the whole system is very quiet indeed.

To observe the thermal performance of the system we used CPUID Hardware Monitor alongside Prime95 and Furmark to load the system. Idle temperatures were measured after 15 minutes of ‘resting’ at the Windows 7 Desktop and load temperatures were measured by running Prime95 and Furmark V1.10 for 15 minutes then recording the maximum temperatures during this time period.

The temperatures aren't too bad considering the relatively weak airflow through the chassis.

We measured the power consumption of our entire test system at the wall while loading the CPU using Prime95 and GPU using FurMark and also recorded results with the system idling at the desktop.

The system consumes very little power indeed so won't rack up your electricity bill too much.

Overall we are very impressed with what the Orange OPC has to offer.  It's not often that we see a PC that truly stands out from the crowd but this model certainly does!

The build quality of the system is very impressive.  The case is constructed from a combination of wood and metal and feels extremely well put together.

The only slightly negative aspect of the system as far as quality goes is the power supply which is an unbranded OEM model.  We would prefer to see a quality branded unit in the system.

Performance is quite good, with the exception of the graphics.  However, we doubt many keen gamers would buy this system just for playing the latest titles and there is a discrete graphics card available for those who want to engage in some casual gaming.

Orange offer an upgrade to i5-2500K or i7-2600K processors if you need some extra performance but the H67 motherboard kills any chance of overclocking so this probably won't be worthwhile.  We would prefer to see Orange using a Z77 motherboard and an Ivy Bridge CPU in the system in the future.

At a price of £800 inc. VAT, the OPC may seem a little expensive considering the specification.  However, we feel that it's special enough that it's worth the price premium over similarly specified PCs from other manufacturers.  It's completely unique and looks fantastic.

The inbuilt amplifier is sure to whet the appetites of guitar enthusiasts and the plethora of bundled software only sweetens the deal.

Pros

• Great build quality.
• Unique design.
• Crystal clear built in speakers.
• Built in Amplifier.
• Very quiet.
• Extensive software bundle.

Cons

• No Ivy Bridge.
• Limited graphics performance.
• Cheap PSU.

KitGuru says: A bright choice which is ideal for musical PC users.

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