Velocity Micro Vector Holiday Edition (2011)

Velocity Micro has upped its game with the 2011 iteration of its Vector Holiday Edition gaming desktop (which we first reviewed last year). With a powerful second-generation Intel Core i5 CPU and two discrete Nvidia video cards that act as an efficient tag team, this PC can handle any game or productivity application that comes its way. Features like a Blu-ray player, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi only sweeten the deal.

Design & Features
The Vector Holiday Edition ($1,199 direct) uses Velocity Micro's Classic aluminum chassis, with a windowed side panel that shows off the system's clean wiring and blue internal lighting. The front face of the case is fairly Spartan, sporting only a tray-loading Blu-ray combo drive and a multiformat card reader (MS/DUO/PRO, Magic/Ult, XDC/H/M, SD/MMC/RS-MMC/Plus Mini SD, and CF I/II/III/MD/MStore). On the computer's rear panel are a number of connection options, including seven USB 2.0 ports (three of which you'll need for the included Bluetooth receiver and the wired keyboard and mouse), two USB 3.0 ports, an eSATA port, a Gigabit Ethernet jack for connecting to the Internet, and S/PDIF and eight-channel analog audio outputs. On the brackets of the two installed Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti video cards you'll find lots of display outputs: three HDMI, three VGA, two DVI-I, and one DVI-D.

Inside the system, two of the motherboard's four memory slots are filled with 8GB of RAM. The PCI Express (PCIe) x1 slot houses a Wi-Fi card, and one PCI and one PCIe x16 slot are available, but the two double-width video cards will make it difficult to install anything in either. There are five hard drive bays, one of which contains a 1TB 7,200rpm drive; a second optical drive bay is also open. The four leftover SATA ports, out of six total on the motherboard (two 6Gbps and four 3Gbps), should be enough for most future hard drive and optical drive additions.

As the Vector Holiday Edition is a custom rig, there's no bloatware or trial software loaded on it. Unnecessary software usually plagues systems from mainstream vendors like HP and Dell, forcing users to clean it off the hard drive. Velocity Micro bundles in a one-year limited parts-and-labor warranty and a lifetime customer support line to help you deal with any speed bumps you might run into; for more money you can increase the duration of the warranty.

Performance
In addition to the aforementioned video cards and RAM, the Vector Holiday Edition comes equipped with a 3.3GHz Intel Core i5-2500K processor. This combination makes it a fine performer. In Crysis (DirectX 10, 1,280-by-720 resolution, and Medium quality settings), the Velocity Micro bettered the Editors' Choice HP Pavilion Elite h8-1050 ($1,299.99 direct, 4 stars), scoring 112 frames per second (fps) to the HP's 98fps. In the DirectX 11 Lost Planet 2 (1,280-by-720 resolution and Medium quality settings), however, the Vector Holiday Edition fell short of the Pavilion (69fps versus 77fps). When the resolution and detail settings on both games were cranked up (to 1,920-by-1,080 resolution, with High-quality details and 4x anti-aliasing), both units yielded unplayable results. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti video card in the Velocity Micro Edge Z40's ($1,199 direct, 4 stars) helped that system garner playable results in both Crysis (33fps) and Lost Planet 2 (49fps) at these higher settings.

The Vector Holiday Edition ran through our Photoshop CS5 test in a quick 2 minutes 34 seconds, ahead of the Pavilion Elite h8-1050 (2:57) and Edge Z40 (2:45). In CineBench R11.5, an image-rendering benchmark, the Vector Holiday Edition scored 6.83?nearly the same as the Pavilion (6.82) and slightly ahead of the Edge Z40 (6.41). These scores indicate that on top of being able to play games, you'll be able to record and edit videos of your epic victories, and upload them to either YouTube or the "Let's Play" forums on the Something Awful website.

The Velocity Micro Vector Holiday Edition is a well-rounded media and gaming machine that can do almost everything at a fair price. But if you're looking for a desktop with a little more media-oriented focus you can get the Editors' Choice HP Pavilion Elite h8-1050, which has the same features but adds a TV tuner, IR remote, and 500GB more space on the hard drive. If you're looking for better gaming performance, the Editors' Choice Velocity Micro Edge Z40 will provides it for the same price.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Velocity Micro Vector Holiday Edition (2011) with several other desktops side by side.

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