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Velocity Micro Raptor Signature Edition

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:45:16 -0600

First Windows 7 rig makes a smashingly fast, and pricey, debut

It is, perhaps, fitting that Velocity Micro’s new rig is called a Raptor.

That’s because anyone who has ever seen the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor in person and on afterburner knows just how overkill the F-22 is.

The same can be said of Velocity Micro’s Raptor Signature Edition. With people overjoyed just to have a $99 Athlon II X4 620, Velocity Micro decided to go shock-and-awe on the spec lists—and the wallet.

First up is Intel’s stellar Core i7-975 Extreme Edition. With a stock speed of 3.33GHz, Velocity Micro uses a custom CoolIt Domino ALC to get the processor to a very stable 4.2GHz. To “balance” this $1,000 CPU, Velocity Micro throws in probably $1,500 in GPUs in the form of three EVGA GeForce GTX 285s. Still not impressed? How about four SLC-based Intel X25-E Extreme 64GB SSD drives in RAID 0?

Mind you, these are not the pedestrian X25-M consumer drives; they’re enterprise-class drives that offer more than twice the write performance of the X-25M version and peg the read speeds at the SATA 3Gb/s limit. If you’re afraid of a four-drive RAID 0, you might feel better that the X25-E’s are designed for server use and should have 10 times the life of a consumer drive.

Quad-core, quad SSDs, and tri-SLI make the Raptor SE one fast--and expensive--machine.

Storage is handled by a single 1.5TB Seagate and two optical drives, one a Blu-ray burner. The entire rig is based on EVGA’s X58 SLI Classified motherboard. RAM is left to 6GB of Kingston DDR3/1600 modules. And, of course, there’s Windows 7 Ultimate in 64-bit mode, to boot. We’ve been taking a drubbing from the Mac fanatics for some time over Vista, but Win7 fixes all that and may even plant a Windows logo’d boot up OSX’s rear.

As much love as we have for Win7, it made comparisons with other systems difficult—up to now all the desktops we’ve reviewed have used Vista. On the other hand, the comparisons are valid as a PC purchased four months ago is likely still running Vista. If you buy into that line of reasoning, we can tell you that the Raptor SE is now the benchmark king in five of our six benchmarks. For a more direct comparison, we looked at the numbers from our September Dream Machines, which ran Windows 7, and as expected, those three boxes couldn’t touch the Raptor SE. For example, our midrange Core i7 Dream Machine (our new desktop zero point) puts out 37fps in Crysis at 1920x1200—the Velocity Micro pushes 70fps. The Raptor SE turns in no less than double-digit percentage gains in every test.

So, what’s the problem? Just like the F-22, which just got its ticket punched by a penny-pinching Pentagon and Congress—the price. At $9000, this is one of the most expensive rigs we’ve ever tested. With the 64GB X25-E drives each costing $800, a $1,000 CPU, and $1,500 in GPUs, the stratospheric price of the Raptor SE is enough to make even a DoD procurement clerk with use of the never-ending government Visa card cringe.

Still, we understand the need to be on top of the benchmarks, and respect that. We just wish it didn’t have to cost as much as a small nation’s GDP.

Velocity Micro Raptor Z90

Nathan Edwards — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:00:00 -0600

The Velocity Micro Raptor Z90 is the first production rig we’ve tested that boasts Intel’s new Core i7 microarchitecture—and it really cooks. Velocity cranked the 3.2GHz clock speed on Intel’s quad-core Hyper-Threaded Core i7-965 Extreme Edition to 3.6GHz with nary a hiccup, and cooled the dang thing with air. The machine also features 6GB of DDR3/1600 and dual 512MB Radeon HD 4870s.

The Z90 has a typical backup drive: a 1TB 7200rpm Hitachi Deskstar and a less typical C: drive: an 80GB X-25M Intel SSD mounted on a VelociRaptor IcePak heatsink. The drive enclosure in the front of the case isn’t screwless, but the whole bay can be removed by loosening two thumbscrews.

Velocity’s customized Lian Li aluminum chassis is long and low rather than tall (like most cases produced today), which leaves plenty of room between components and produces a clean, uncluttered look. And the wiring is equally fastidious, while still being accessible for component swaps. The Z90 is also one of the lightest rigs to enter the Lab: In an age of backbreakers, we thought Velocity had shipped us an empty chassis until we opened it up!

The Raptor Z90 blew through our benchmarks. It completed our Premiere Pro CS3 test in just 526 seconds. That’s nearly 30 seconds faster than November’s Digital Storm rig and nearly a minute faster than last month’s AVADirect system, both of which packed 4GHz-plus QX9770s. The Z90 was similarly speedy in every test we threw at it—our zero-point took nearly twice as long to complete our MainConcept test.

In fact, the Z90 failed to set records in just two benchmarks: Crysis and Photoshop, where it was bested by the AVADirect and Digital Storm rigs. The former, however, was running two 4870 X2s, while the Digital Storm ran three GTX 260s, so the Z90’s comparatively modest (though still respectable) Crysis performance is no surprise. The AVADirect and Digital Storm rigs were also clocked higher than the Velocity (4GHz and 4.2GHz, respectively), which explains their marginally better performance in Photoshop, a single-threaded app.

We have just one quibble with this rig. The snap-in front-panel bezels are hard to keep in place, and, in fact, were rattling around inside the case when we opened it for the first time. Fortunately, they’re so light, they didn’t cause any damage. We should also mention that the first unit Velocity Micro sent us suffered from instability issues likely due to shipping damage, but the second unit, the one tested here, was rock solid. Shoot, this $5,300 rig made mincemeat of much more expensive systems we’ve tested.

PC + Digital Cable = Not Ready for Prime Time

Michael Brown — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 13:35:36 -0500

Now that ATI is finally shipping its internal OCUR cards, which enable OEMs to build home-theater PCs that can connect to digital cable systems, we decided it was time to publish a small home-theater PC roundup (look for the full story in the August issue of Maximum PC). The three HTPCs we reviewed were impressive—except when it came to OCUR. I haven’t witnessed a product rollout botched this badly since Microsoft introduced the Zune.

Here’s a little background if you’re not familiar with OCUR. Following an FCC mandate, cable companies must now allow their customers to access their services using third-party equipment, as opposed to forcing them to rent a set-top box from the service provider. ATI and Microsoft, seeing a golden opportunity to move the PC into the living room in a big way, teamed up to create OCUR (Open Cable Unidirectional Receiver). Pair an OCUR with a CableCard from your cable-TV service provider and you can receive digital cable on your HTPC.

Internal OCUR cards are rolling out--to the sound of one hand clapping.

OCUR, believe it or not, was announced more than 18 months ago. But in order to pass muster with Hollywood, Microsoft had to build a massive DRM system into Vista, and ATI had to restrict the availability of OCUR cards (now known as the TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner) to OEM PC manufacturers. The only way you can purchase a TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner is as part of pre-built Vista PC: Do-it-yourself builders like you and me are left out in the cold: We can’t add them to an existing PC, and we can’t build them into a roll-your-own rig.

Two of the three HTPCs we received for review—a Voodoo Aria and a Velocity Micro CineMagix Grand Theater—had two internal OCUR cards each; the third system—an S1Digital Media Center FX Edition—had dual over-the-air HD tuners. S1Digital said they would be shipping OCUR-equipped systems by time our print issue hit newsstands.

HOW WE TESTED

Our office building is serviced by satellite TV, not cable, so we decided to test the TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuners in my downtown San Francisco apartment. And since the product was so new to the market, we decided to contact Comcast’s public relations department (Comcast is our local cable provider) about delivering and installing the necessary CableCards. (The FCC mandates that the cable companies give consumers an alternative to renting a set-top box, but they didn’t say the cable companies couldn’t insist on installing it for you, making a few bucks off the service call, and charging you a modest rental fee to boot.)

I don’t know about you, but the idea of having Larry the Cable Guy hollering “Git-r-done!” while futzing around with my $7,000 home-theater PC scares the crap out of me. Fortunately, the technician Comcast dispatched turned out to be very experienced with PCs. He was, in fact, a Maximum PC reader who had built several of his own rigs. But let’s face it, a PC-savvy cable installer is not the norm. You’re more likely to get an independent contractor whose experience is limited to stripping and terminating coax.

So I either lucked out or Comcast’s PR department hand-picked the tech. The PR department, however, failed to inform the tech that I needed to install two PCs with a total of four TV Wonder cards, so he showed up with only two CableCards. And then he wanted to know where the OCUR boxes were. “The tuners are inside the PCs,” I said. “Really? I haven’t seen that before,” he replied. “I’ve only connected two PCs to cable, and they both used external boxes.”

You'll need a CableCard from your service provider to make an OCUR card work.

The tech told me he’d receive training direct from Microsoft, but none of it covered internal tuners. We both agreed that the process should be the same, since the only difference is that the slots are inside the case, versus in an external box. The tech then proceeds to install the CableCards, connect the tuners to coax line, fire up the PC, and begin the software configuration. This step involves activating the TV Wonder with a product-activation code, and calling the Comcast office to exchange some information.

We should have had a picture at this point, but we didn’t. After double-checking all his connections, running diagnostics on the cable itself, and conferring with the home office, the tech decides to call his contact at Microsoft who had personally trained him how to install external OCUR boxes. And this is when the installation process went from absurd to ridiculous—especially since the tech—unbeknownst to the people he was speaking to—had his push-to-talk cellphone on speaker.

GIT-R-DONE!

Comcast Tech: Hey, this is ** from Comcast. I’m trying to hook up a customer’s PC to our system, but I can’t get it to work. Can you help me out?

Microsoft Guy: Yeah, well, we don’t have our tiered tech support set up yet, but I can try to walk you through it. What are you hooking up?

CT: Well, he has two computers, one from Voodoo PC and one from Velocity Micro.

MSG: He’s got both those machines?! That’s $13,000 in computers!

CT: Yeah, he’s reviewing them. He’s an editor at Maximum PC.

MSG: Oh.... Sh*t, they’re supposed to tell us before they send those things out to the press.

CT: Both these machines have internal OCUR cards, too; I’ve never worked with the internal cards before.

MSG: [Still unaware he’s on a speakerphone] Yeah, those are really tricky. But don’t tell the guy that, or he’ll write it up. You’re gonna start seeing Dells like that come through your system like crazy.

The tech then proceeds to explain the steps he’s gone through and the results he’s achieved—none, the tuner simply reports it has no connection to TV—at which point the Microsoft guy punts:

MSG: I’m not sure what the problem is then. Call so-and-so at this number and see if he can help you.

The tech calls so-and-so and gets voicemail—not very helpful since the tech is on a service call in his customer’s living room—so he pushes “0” in the hope of getting an administrative assistant.

Operator: Thank you for calling Microsoft. How may I direct your call?

CT: Hi, This is ** from Comcast, and I’m trying to reach so-and-so to help me with a service call.

O: He’s apparently not in his office, but I can put you through to his voicemail.

CT: Yeah, I got his voicemail and pressed zero. That’s how I got to you. Is there anyone else you can connect me to who might know how I can get in touch with him right now?

O: Well, all I can do is put you through to his voicemail. Would that help?

CT: No, that’s not going to help. Thanks anyway.

At this point, the cable tech hangs up and calls his first Microsoft contact again.

CT: Hi, it’s ** again. So-and-so isn’t in his office. Is there anyone else who might be able to help me?

MSG: Here’s his cell-phone number. Try him on that.

IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED...

So the tech connects with Microsoft Guy No. 2 on his cell phone. This person also doesn’t realize he’s on a speaker phone.

Comcast Tech: Hi, this is ** from Comcast. Whoozit said I should contact you about an installation problem I’m having. I’ve got two machines with internal OCUR cards, and I can’t get either of them to work.

Microsoft Guy No. 2: It’s probably your CableCards. Those can be flakey.

CT: Yeah, I know that. That’s why I tested them before I went out on this call. The cards worked back at my office, but they won’t work here. These PCs have internal OCUR cards, by the way.

MSG2: Oh really? We don’t have any of those here. You say you have two of ‘em? Which brands are they?

CT: One’s a Velocity Micro and the other’s a Voodoo.

MSG2: And they’re in the same house? That’s a lot of money in PCs!

CT: Yeah, the customer is an editor at Maximum PC. He’s reviewing them.

MSG2: Oh. Uh, I didn’t realize that. Come to think of it, I don’t think Voodoo has even qualified with us to sell internal OCUR cards.

CT: Well, I’ve got one here, and it has two OCURs in it.

MSG2: Hmm. Well, let’s see if we can get the Velocity Micro system to work. I know they’ve qualified.

After running through all the same tests and diagnostics the tech had previously performed on his own, and then again with the first Microsoft guy, the second Microsoft guy comes up with an idea.

MSG2: You need Administrator rights to do this. Are you logged on as the Administrator?

CT: Yeah, I’m using the customer’s login, and he’s logged in as an Administrator.

MSG2: Okay, good. Click the Start menu and then click on Computer. Now, point the mouse to Local Disk C, but hold the shift key down when you left-click with the mouse. When the menu pops up, click on Open Command Window here. Now, type this command in, but you have to type it in exactly right or it won’t work. Type c colon, backslash, ehome, backslash, ehribjob.exe forward slash all caps OCURN lower-case register.

After the tech fails twice to type in the command exactly right—and to be fair, he was listening over a speakerphone—Microsoft Guy Number 2 gets a little exasperated. But why in the heck is a Microsoft product manager having a cable tech executing command-line instructions on a Vista PC anyway?

MSG2: Look, how ‘bout I send you the command in an email. You can copy it from the email into the command window. Do you have email access?

Just for fun, I tell the tech to give him my personal hotmail address. When he does, Microsoft Guy No. 2 nearly has a fit.

MSG2: [repeating the cable tech] *** at hotmail.com. Wait a minute. Hotmail? Whose account is this?!

CT: It’s the customer’s.

MSG2: I can’t send this to the customer! This is Microsoft-proprietary information. Don’t you have an email account?

CT: Yeah, it’s *** at gmail.com.

MSG2: No! I mean don’t you have a business email account--through Comcast?

CT: No, they never set me up with one.

MSG2: [Sigh] Okay, your personal account will have to work, then.

DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO

So Microsoft Guy No. 2 sends an email to the cable tech’s personal email account that reads, in part:

Type this into the command window EXACTLY as I have typed it below:

c:/windows/ehome/ehribjob.exe \OCURNregister

Now anyone who’s ever typed a DOS command will immediately realize that this command isn’t going to work—the cable tech certainly did—because Microsoft Guy Number 2 has used forward slashes (URL style) where he should have used backward slashes (DOS style). In any event, the cable tech typed the command in—using backslashes—but the OCCUR cards still couldn’t tune in any TV programs.

By this time, more than four hours have elapsed since the cable tech’s arrival, and his shift has long since ended. He bids adieu to Microsoft Guy No. 2 and tells me he’ll come back the next day to try and solve the problem.

True to his word, he comes back first-thing the next morning and we contact a product manager at Velocity Micro to see if they have any suggestions. Upon hearing that Microsoft Guy Number 2 had the cable tech executing CLI commands on his machine, the product manager wails “What have they done to my computer?!”

The product manager then asks permission to take remote control of the machine to see if he can diagnose the problem. I tell him to go ahead and he proceeds to troubleshoot the machine from his location. As far as he can tell, everything looks normal, but he has no more luck at getting a TV signal than the cable tech did.

At this point, I decide to punt. I thank the Velocity Micro product manager and the cable tech—promising to send the latter a bunch of Maximum PC issues for his library—and proceed to write the rest of the home-theater PC feature story. We’ve since sent all the PCs back to their manufacturers, but asked Velocity Micro to send theirs back for another try at hooking up to our Comcast cable service.

I’ll report on those results in a future blog. But for now, I wouldn’t recommend buying a PC with an OCUR card until Microsoft, AMD (ATI), and the cable companies get their collective acts together.

Velocity Micro Gamer's Edge DualX

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 13:52:18 -0500

You were supposed to be staring at a production PC sporting nVidia’s quad-SLI this month, but you’re not.
Truth be told, we actually had a Velocity Micro with quad SLI up and running in glorious ultra high-resolution until a last-minute critical bug caused nVidia to delay the launch of quad SLI just long enough to make our review of the machine impossible in this issue. Drat.

Fortunately, Velocity Micro did a quick one-two and replaced the quad setup with the next-best thing: a pair o’ eVGA GeForce 7900 GTX cards running in standard SLI mode. While we’re withholding judgment on quad SLI until we can formally review it, we will say that a dual-SLI config probably makes more sense for the majority of gamers who play at a 1600x1200 or lower resolution.

Dropping down to two cards by no means renders the Gamer’s Edge DualX chopped liver. And next to the Voodoo PC we reviewed last month, it’s almost affordable. The pair of GeForce 7900 GTX cards are coupled with an Athlon 64 FX-60 overclocked from the stock 2.6GHz to 2.9GHz. Also aboard are 2GB of Corsair DDR400, a pair of Lite-On dual-layer DVD burners, two Western Digital 150GB Raptor drives, and a 400-gigger drive for backups. Velocity Micro doesn’t pull punches in the power supply category either, shoehorning a PC Power and Cooling 1-kilowatt beast into the rig. That’s enough power to run a small home. Nestled between the two burly 7900 GTX cards is a Creative Lab’s X-Fi soundcard.

We’re especially jazzed about Velocity’s snazzy implementation of the X-Fi card. Many cases feature headphone and mic jacks in front, which unfortunately don’t work with the X-Fi. Velocity Micro gets around this with a custom harness that’s so cool it should be sold independently.

In the cooling department, Velocity Micro uses a Cooler Master AquaGate Mini R120 to keep the OC’d FX-60 from melting down. The company is also mindful of the potential overheating issues on motherboards that use passive heat, so it mounted a Zalman fan over the chipset heat pipe. While it’s a good idea, the fan and bracket look a little slap-dash to us.

We dig Velocity Micro’s custom Lian Li case, which is easy on the eyes and provides plenty of space. But we don’t dig the system’s noise factor. For a water-cooled PC, the Gamer’s Edge DualX is awfully loud. Sure, the chassis was originally configured for quad SLI, but someone’s going to have to come up with a quieter solution; the noise is unacceptable.

We were curious to see how the DualX would perform against our new zero-point, running our new benchmarks—after all the two rigs are kissin’ cousins in configuration. Of course, our zero-point rig lacks 10K RAIDed Raptors, an overclocked processor, and overclocked videocards—so maybe they’re more like hand-shakin’ cousins. Unfortunately, we ran into a snafu with our SYSmark2004 SE run. Amid the transition to our new benchmarks, we initially installed and tried to run SYSmark2004 on the Gamer’s Edge DualX; and once you’ve installed any previous version of SYSmark, you can no longer run newer versions, so SE was out of the question.

Our other benchmarks ran fine, however. In our Premiere Pro 2.0 benchmark, where we make a small movie starting with HD video and outputting it to WMV9 at 720p, we finally saw a difference between the FX-60 and Intel’s Pentium Extreme Edition 955. Previously, the 955 system delivered almost exactly the same time as our Athlon 64 FX-60. The overclocked DualX changed that. Even though the Gamer’s Edge has only a 12 percent clock bump over our stock FX-60, it finished our Premiere Pro 2.0 test about 22 percent faster. The machine was also an impressive 20 percent faster than our zero-point in the Photoshop CS2 script.

The most unusual score came in our new Nero Recode 2 test, where we encode VOB files from a DVD to an MPEG-4 format to play on a Sony PSP. We saw the DualX finish the test in an astounding 17 minutes (about 100 percent faster than our test rig). That doesn’t jibe with our tests during the benchmark build-out process, so we’ve contacted the developer to root out any possible bugs. In our two gaming benchmarks, the DualX’s overclocked CPU and videocards helped the rig achieve scores about 10 percent faster than our zero-point in both FEAR and Quake 4.

The DualX’s performance deserves applause, but its noise level doesn’t. We also have to ding the machine for its untidiness. While we don’t expect every system’s wiring to look Voodoo-clean, the DualX’s interior could be tighter. Still, these aren’t horrible faults, and when it comes to the benchmark numbers, this rig delivers.

Month Reviewed: May 2006

+ MICHAEL KEATON: Full-tilt SLI for almost two grand less than the competition.

- MICHAEL CHRICHTON: A Hoover-vacuum impression mars an otherwise nice PC.

VERDICT: 8

URL: www.velocitymicro.com