Velocity Micro Gamers Edge DuelX

By taking the latest AMD processor and Nvidia graphics cards and overclocking them for enhanced performance, Velocity Micro has put together one of the fastest systems we've seen. The $4,380 Velocity Micro Gamer's Edge DualX is not as fast as the Overdrive PC Torque SLI we just reviewed, but it's also $600 cheaper. If you're spending more than $4,000 on a PC, you might not be as cost-conscious as other buyers, but the Velocity Micro Gamer's Edge DualX is one of the best deals at the top tier for outstanding performance in its price category.

Our Gamer's Edge DualX test system came housed in Velocity Micro's signature black-and-silver LX-W case, which we've seen before, complete with optional aluminum casters we still think are silly. You can also choose from nine other case designs on Velocity Micro's Web site.

A glance through the side-panel window of the case we received reveals a well-organized interior with neatly tied and tucked cabling throughout. Behind a front-panel door you'll find a double-layer DVD burner, a DVD-ROM drive, and a media-card reader/floppy drive combo. There's also room for two more optical drives and another 3.5-inch drive. Two USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, and two audio jacks adorn the lower-front bezel, and you'll find four additional USB 2.0 ports and two more FireWire ports around back. With two vacant PCI slots (plus two x1 PCI Express slots), room for two more memory modules (the system supports up to 4GB of DDR RAM), and two available hard drive bays, there's plenty of room for future expansion.

The Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard has audio connections for eight-channel sound, including two S/PDIF connections and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. The onboard audio is disabled because the Gamer's DualX ships with a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS card, but it'll cost you more to make good use of it; speakers are not included in the price. Likewise, the package lacks a monitor, which means you're looking at spending about $5,000 (comparable to the price of the Dell XPS 600, for example) for a complete system. A serviceable Microsoft multimedia keyboard and a Microsoft optical scroll mouse are included in the box.

Normally, an Athlon 64 FX-57, AMD's fastest single-core chip, and dual Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX video cards would provide a formidable enough one-two 3D punch; but by increasing the processor's clock from 2.8GHz to 2.87GHz and upping the video card's core clock and memory speeds to 480MHz (from 430MHz) and 1.3GHz (from 1.2GHz), respectively, Velocity Micro significantly ups the ante. Throw in 1GB of PC3700 DDR SDRAM and a pair of 74GB 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptor drives configured for RAID 0, and you have a machine that's built for speed. An additional 250GB, 7,200rpm drive provides ample storage for digital files. With no fewer than nine fans cooling the interior, you'd think the system would be quite noisy, but in fact, it is fairly quiet.

With such an impressive mix of fine-tuned components, it's no wonder the Velocity Micro Gamer's Edge DualX turned in elite-level scores on CNET Labs' benchmark tests. Systems with dual-core chips, such as the Alienware Aurora 7500, fared better on our SysMark 2004 tests, especially on the Internet-content-creation portion, where it beat the Gamer's Edge DualX by a whopping 22 percent. Still, the Velocity surpasses the Dell XPS 600 and its single-core Intel chip by a marginal amount. Any of these systems will handle standard applications with ease, although you might consider a PC with a dual-core CPU if you need a PC for digital media creation.