As we recently learned, a factory-standard Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840 is not as fast as AMD's new dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU. That said, Velocity Micro did everything right in the ProMagix DCX in terms of getting the most out of Intel's chip. By bumping the clock speed up to 4.0GHz per core, the Velocity is the only system that beat AMD's white box PC and its early sample of the X2 4800+ on almost all of our dual-core benchmarks. What's interesting, though, is what Velocity had to do to get there.
The AMD white box came with its CPU running at its default clock speed with no special cooling mechanism other than its default heat sink and cooling-fan layout. The Velocity ProMagix DCX needed a restrictive $440 Vader-esque liquid-cooling contraption to stabilize its heavily overclocked CPU. The ProMagix DCX beat the AMD white box handily in our multitasking and Photoshop tests, by 17 percent and 13 percent, respectively. But the Velocity barely edged the AMD system on our Sorensen video-encoding test with a 5 percent performance differential, and the two were virtually tied on our iTunes MP3 encoding test. As a brute application performer, the ProMagix DCX seems like a clear choice, but we're wary of recommending it on its multimedia encoding performance, given that its CPU requires extreme overclocking measures for relatively little gain over a system using an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ chip. Be sure to take your workload into careful consideration before making a purchase. It's also worth noting that we still need to run SysMark 2004 on the AMD dual-core white box. It would be very interesting if that crown again changed hands so quickly.
(Lower times are better)
(Lower times are better)
Find out more about how we test desktop systems.
System configurations:3.2GHz Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 840 Intel white box
3.2GHz Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 840; Intel 955X Express chipset; 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 256MB Sapphire Radeon X850XT PCIe; 160GB Seagate ST3160827AS Serial ATA hard drive; Windows XP Professional SP2
3.73GHz Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 840 Intel white box
3.73GHz Intel Pentium 4 Processor Extreme Edition; Intel 955X Express chipset; 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 256MB Sapphire Radeon X850XT PCIe; 160GB Seagate ST3160827AS Serial ATA hard drive; Windows XP Professional SP2
ABS Ultimate M6
2.6GHz AMD Athlon 64 FX-55; Nvidia Nforce 4 Ultra SLI chipset; 1,024MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 256MB (2) Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT (PCIe, SLI); two Seagate ST3200822AS 200GB 7,200rpm, Serial ATA; integrated Silicon SiI 3114 SoftRAID 5 controller; Windows XP Professional SP2
Dell Dimension XPS Gen 5
3.2GHz Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 840; Intel 955X Express chipset; 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 256MB ATI Radeon X850XT PE PCIe; two 250GB Western Digital Serial ATA hard drives in a RAID 0 array; Windows XP Professional Media Center Edition 2005 SP2
Overdrive PC Torque SLI
AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 overclocked to 2.8GHz; Nvidia Nforce 4 Ultra SLI chipset; 1,024MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 256MB two overclocked Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra PCI Express graphics cards using SLI; two 74GB Western Digital Serial ATA hard drives in a RAID 0 array; Windows XP Professional SP2
Velocity Micro ProMagix DCX
3.2GHz Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 840 overclocked to 4.0GHz; Intel 955X Express chipset; 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 256MB ATI Radeon X850 XT PE PCIe; two 74GB Western Digital Serial ATA hard drives in a RAID 0 array; one 400GB Hitachi HDS724040KLSA80 Serial ATA hard drive; Windows XP Professional SP2
Voodoo Omen
2.6GHz AMD Athlon 64 FX-55; Nvidia Nforce 4 Ultra SLI chipset; 2,048MB DDR SDRAM 500MHz; 256MB (2) Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra (PCIe, SLI); two Seagate ST3160827AS 160GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA; integrated Nvidia Nforce RAID class controller; Windows XP Professional SP2Velocity Micro provides the ProMagix DCX with a generous three-year parts and labor warranty, along with one year of onsite service. Although toll-free telephone support is available Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. ET and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays, the company promises a return call within 15 minutes during off-hours and holidays. You can extend onsite service to two years for an additional $169, while $329 gets you three years. The ProMagix DCX comes with an owner's portfolio containing user manuals and driver disks, and the Velocity Micro Web site provides driver and software updates, utilities for tweaking your components, and a guide to help keep your system running at peak performance.
