Velocity Micro Edge Z55: Core i7-940 with CrossFire 4870
by Matt Campbell on December 12, 2008 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Final Thoughts
It's difficult to summarize our experiences with the Edge Z55. We were certainly plagued with a number of issues, but our impression coming away is that this is the result of the early adoption of the X58 platform and Core i7, and the growing pains that come with it. In terms of fit and finish, Velocity Micro does a great job of differentiating their product from the pack with visual appeal, clean assembly, and the largest number of BIOS, program, and operating system tweaks that we've ever seen in a PC supplier. In the line item of "performance tuning", Velocity Micro promises small and delivers big. Every component choice was top quality, and their support high caliber. They do, in fact, still have what it takes to compete with the boutiques. It's difficult to put a gut feeling into words, but this felt like it was a solid offering that just kept missing the mark.
On the other hand, if we put ourselves in the seat of a consumer who had purchased this system, we would be sorely disappointed. The problems that we encountered were frustrating enough just in benchmarking; if this was an anticipated gaming machine for home use, the user would most assuredly have become disgusted regardless of the steps taken to correct it. There are also some areas we feel they fall short, such as not offering guaranteed overclocks (like their associated Overdrive PC branch) and retaining a standard Intel heatsink and fan, often as their sole offering.
When it comes to systems, different users are looking for different things. In the arena of top-notch gaming machines that set themselves apart from the crowd (and those willing to pay for it), we would have awarded Velocity Micro an Editor's Choice award if the system had followed through. As it is, we can't do that today, but came away with a good impression of Velocity Micro despite the bad taste in our mouth from the problems we had. We'd still recommend keeping them on your short list of high-end suppliers, and welcome them to submit another (more mature) product for consideration in the future. Being first out the gate with new hardware is great… but only if the hardware actually works as advertised.
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leexgx - Saturday, December 13, 2008 - link
it utterly destroys hard disk performance when it gets stuck doing an shadow copy for 1hr until it give up and stopson my d: drive it has an tendansy to read my 3dmark vantage setup file 4 times as i can see it doing it in resource monitor repeatably reading the same files
but i must admit system restore on vista does work alot better when useing it and tends to brake less things when ran
UNHchabo - Friday, December 12, 2008 - link
I looked at some of their machines, and they do offer Norton Suite pre-installed as an optional extra.One small request: jpegs make sense for posting gaming screenshots or photos, but could you please switch to .png files when posting screenshots of regular windows programs? The lack of artifacting makes it easier to read things like the System Information window.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Grap...">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Grap...
leexgx - Saturday, December 13, 2008 - link
is there any way to make MSpaint on vista allways pick PNGi can see why web sites do not use PNG still but realy users should be useing Opera (still works on win95 and up)/Firefox 3 with 2-3 plugins for exploits/ IE7 (maybe not IE with lots of 0day problems at this time but should be installed and fully up to date)
PNG should be used nowadays or very uncompressed JEPG (do not use msPant as it has no compression settings)
Voldenuit - Friday, December 12, 2008 - link
Intel stock cooler? And wait, what is this I'm hearing... *chipset fan*???Blegh.
Cuhulainn - Saturday, December 13, 2008 - link
This is just unbelievable to me.Spending that kind of scratch on a system with the latest greatest Intel processor (which is known to run hot!) and not getting an aftermarket cooling solution?!
It's like buying a fine wine and drinking it out of a dixie cup.. or something.
mmntech - Sunday, December 14, 2008 - link
It certainly is chintzy. If you're spending $2100 on something like that, I would expect at least high end air.UNHchabo - Monday, December 15, 2008 - link
At Core i7's launch there were only two LGA1366 aftermarket coolers on Newegg, and both had reviews saying that the stock cooler actually did a BETTER job of cooling the CPU.strikeback03 - Friday, December 12, 2008 - link
That is the stock Intel cooler on an Intel board, and it looks like it overhangs the first DIMM slot?Matt Campbell - Friday, December 12, 2008 - link
Good eye - yes, it does.afkrotch - Friday, December 12, 2008 - link
I read Anandtech a few times during the week and noticed this review. One thing I feel is lacking is the Customer Service portion. I like the way HardOCP deals with it. They call customer service with an issue to see how it gets resolved. They act like a regular customer with a regular problem and rate it based on their experience.