MaximumPC 2006 06

Y

ou 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 back-

ups. 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 imple-

mentation of the X-Fi card.

Many cases feature head-

phone and mic jacks in front, which unfortu-

nately 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 mother-

boards 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 pro-

vides 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 over-

clocked 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 bench-

marks, 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 ver-

sions, so SE was out of the question.

Velocity Micro

Gamer’s Edge DualX

Fast, but too loud for our taste

UNDER THE HOOD

CPU AMD Athlon 64 FX-60

(2.6GHz dual core)

MOBO Asus A8N32-SLI (nForce4 x16)

RAM 2GB Corsair (two 1GB sticks)

LAN Dual Gigabit LAN

HARD DRIVE Two 150GB Raptors (10,000rpm

SATA) in RAID 0 and 400GB

WD4000KD

OPTICAL Lite-On SHW-160P65

VIDEOCARD Two eVGA GeForce 7900 GTX

512MB in SLI (695MHz core,

825MHz RAM)

SOUNDCARD Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music

CASE Velocity Micro signature case

BOOT: TK sec BOOT: 46 sec. DOWN: TK sec. DOWN: 14 sec.

BRAINS

BEAUTY

The Gamer’s Edge DualX is a no-nonsense SLI-

powered gaming machine that makes mincemeat

of our benchmarks.

The 1-kilowatt power supply can prob-

ably run this rig, and the two machines

next to you at a LAN party.

reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED

68 MA XIMUMPC JUNE 2006 JUNE 2006 MA XIMUMPC 69

BENCHMARKS

SYS mark 2004 SE 275

ZERO POINT SCORES

Premiere Pro^3000 sec

Photoshop CS 295 sec

Recode 2.0 2100 sec

Fear 75 fps

Quake 4 110.5 fps

0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

WNR

2460 sec

245 sec

1023 sec (+105.28%)

122 fps

83 fps

Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine, using a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus

A8N32-SLI motherboard, two GeForce 7900 GTX videocards in SLI mode, a Western Digital 4000KD hard drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and

a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850 PSU.