Why You Can Trust CNET Velocity Micro Edge Z55 (Intel Core i7-930) review: Velocity Micro Edge Z55 (Intel Core i7-930)
Velocity Micro Edge Z55 (Intel Core i7-930)
The Edge Z55 is particularly noteworthy because it's the first system we've reviewed with Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 480 graphics card. Our review unit has two of them. The GeForce GTX 480, announced today after a long manufacturing delay, finally brings Nvidia's 3D chip family into the DirectX 11-era, joining AMD's Radeon HD 5000-series, which debuted last November. We found that the new cards run very hot and require an inordinate amount of power, but they're also very fast.
Velocity Micro Edge Z55 (Intel Core i7-930)
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
To Velocity Micro's credit, this system's $3,499 price tag looks very aggressive next to comparable desktops that come in around $4,999. It also posted outstanding performance for that price, in part thanks to the new GeForce cards. We're reluctant to give this system an Editors' Choice award, because we have serious questions about the amount of heat Nvidia's cards generate, both in terms of the cards' health, as well as that of the system itself. If you don't mind the risk, you'll find a great high-end gaming deal in this configuration.
To help manage the graphics cards' heat, Velocity Micro installed a custom-mounted fan that spans over the top of them, providing additional cooling help. Considering that the cards' mounting brackets become too hot to touch after even a brief gaming session, we're glad the extra fan is there. To remove it, you simply need to undo a pair of screws and disconnect the power wire. Otherwise, the Edge Z55 lives up to our expectations for a Velocity Micro system's build quality, which features clean workmanship throughout.
| Velocity Micro Edge Z55 | Origin Genesis (Intel Core i7 920) | Falcon Northwest Mach V (Intel Core i7 980X Extreme) | |
| Price | $3,499 | $4,998 | $4,999 |
| Motherboard chipset | Intel X58 | Intel X58 | Intel X58 |
| CPU | 4.0GHz Intel Core i7 930 (overclocked) | 4.0GHz Intel Core i7 920 (overclocked) | 4.183GHz Intel Core i7 980X Extreme (overclocked) |
| Memory | 6GB 1,600MHz DDR3 SDRAM | 6GB 1,600MHz DDR3 SDRAM | 12GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM |
| Graphics | (2) 1.5GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 | (2) 2GB ATI Radeon HD 5970 | 2GB ATI Radeon HD 5970 |
| Hard drives | 64GB Patriot Torqx solid state hard drive; 1TB Hitachi | (2) 80GB Intel X25-M solid state hard drive; 1.5TB Seagate 7,200rpm hard drive | 80GB Intel X25-M solid state hard drive; 1TB 7,200rpm Western Digital |
| Optical drive | Blu-ray burner | Blu-ray burner | Blu-ray burner |
| Operating system | Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) | Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) | Windows 7 Professional (64-bit) |
We thought we'd compare the Velocity Micro's features with two systems, rather than use our customary one-to-one comparison. Although both the Falcon Northwest and the Origin system are more expensive than the Edge Z55, they're both reasonable competitors for this system. All feature overclocked (and, more importantly, stable) Intel Core i7 CPUs, but their overall strengths lie in different areas.
The Origin Genesis won an Editors' Choice award, largely on the strength of its build quality and the convenient design of its front-accessible hard-drive bays. It also boasts a heavily overclocked Intel Core i7 920 CPU and a pair of dual-chip, 2GB Radeon HD 5970 graphics cards. The Velocity Micro's case isn't quite as user-friendly, and the Origin boasts a large storage advantage with two 80GB solid-state drives and a 1.5TB storage drive to the Edge Z55's single 64GB SSD and a measly 1TB drive for data. That extra storage and the drive accessibility are the Origin's major features advantages over the Velocity Micro. You get more for your $4,998 with the Origin Genesis, including more room for upgrades and lower power consumption when idle and when you're gaming, but you'd be right to ask whether those things are worth an extra $1,500.
The Falcon Northwest Mach V is a different sort of high-end animal than either the Velocity or the Origin. With an overclocked six-core Intel Core i7 980X and only a single dual-chip Radeon HD 5970, the Falcon is geared more toward top-of-the-line application performance, and only demigod-level gaming power. Velocity Micro offers that chip as well, and it will add an extra $1,000 to the Edge Z55's price tag. Factor in 12GB of RAM in the Falcon versus the Edge Z55's 6GB sticks and the price gap becomes a lot closer. If such a configuration were possible with the Edge Z55, it would enjoy application performance on par with the Mach V, on top of the Velocity Micro's faster gaming speeds highlighted below. Given the thermal and power management required by the pair of GeForce GTX 480's in the Edge Z55, we're not positive Velocity Micro's already cramped chassis could take an overclocked Core i7 980X as well.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
 | Rendering multiple CPUs | | Rendering single CPU |
For the most part, all of the high-end PCs we've reviewed recently live in the same application performance neighborhood. It seems hitting around 4GHz in CPU clock speed is enough for any system to make a quick job of our consumer-oriented workloads. The primary differences occur on Photoshop and more prominently on our multicore Cinebench test. There you can see how the six-core CPU in the Falcon Northwest Mach V provides a measurable benefit over the quad-core crowd. All of the vendors on this chart offer the six-core Core i7 980X, so Falcon doesn't have a monopoly on fast application performance. For design pros and those for whom a few extra seconds in certain kinds of processing is a big deal, more cores matter. For most of us, the Edge Z55 or any of the other systems like it should be more than adequate for day-to-day performance or even more demanding digital-media editing.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
| 1,600x1,200 (high, 4x aa) | | 1,280x1,024 (medium, 4x aa) |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
| 1,920x1,200 (DirectX 10, 4x aa, very high) | | 1,440x900 (DirectX 10, 4x aa, very high) |
With Nvidia's new graphics cards comes new capabilities. In addition to DirectX 11 support, which PC game developers are slowly adopting, Nvidia boasts that the GeForce GTX 480 is particularly adept at tessellation. Tessellation, of course, is a treatment to the textures laid on top of 3D models that can make for more realistic--or simply more detailed--surfaces in games.
In addition to tessellation, the GeForce features a new 32x antialiasing mode, as well as a few other antialiasing tweaks. Nvidia continues to promote its GPUs 3D Vision capabilities, CUDA GPU computing, PhysX, and other proprietary technologies that have usefulness only on certain games and programs, or with extra hardware, or that compete with more-established standards. Multimonitor support is also becoming a differentiator between Nvidia and AMD. You need two GeForce GTX 480 cards to output to three monitors. AMD and its single forthcoming Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 card can display up to six.
The GeForce GTX 480 was also subject to a large amount of speculation leading up to its launch, given that it was supposed to come out at the end of 2009. It has been suggested that the card is hot (true), a power hog (true), too large/heavy (not true), slow (not true that we've seen), and overpriced (not in this system). A few limits to its specs from the core design literature suggest that Nvidia did indeed scale back the design of the GeForce GTX 480. The chip's design documents suggest that it has 512 processing pipelines (alternately called: streaming processors or "CUDA cores," if you work for Nvidia), but the shipping card only has 480 of them. Nvidia conceded that this reduction came about because of thermal and power management needs of the new card. Based on our testing we find that the GeForce GTX 480 is fast enough.
We're particularly interested in the Edge Z55 compared with the Origin Genesis on our gaming charts, because the Origin system has two dual-chip Radeon HD 5970 cards, making it the fastest possible 3D card configuration available from AMD. As you can see on our Crysis and Far Cry 2 tests, the Origin enjoys a win on our lower-resolution Far Cry 2 benchmark, but otherwise the two systems are basically identical. Considering the Origin's edge over the single Radeon HD 5970 in the Falcon Northwest Mach V, you can't argue that Far Cry 2 doesn't scale well across the four Radeon cores. At the higher resolution Far Cry 2 test, where customers of these systems are most likely to play, the two-GPU Edge Z55 and the four-GPU Genesis are basically equals.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
| 2,560x1,600 (8x AA, 16x AF) | | 1,920x1,080 (8x AA, 16x AF) |
In the interest of looking deeper, we also juggled the card configurations in both the Velocity Micro Edge Z55 and the Origin Genesis and ran them through some higher-resolution tests in the demo version of Just Cause 2. Most comparisons for the retail versions of these cards will measure the GeForce GTX 480 against the Radeon HD 5870, since the two will be similar in price and the Radeon HD 5870 is more widely available than the hard-to-find Radeon HD 5970. This test is of the quick-and-dirty variety (a necessity, given that we received the Velocity Micro system only yesterday), but since the Origin and the Velocity system are so similar the comparison is a decent rough guide.
As you can see, the Velocity Micro and the GeForce GTX 480 posted wins on almost every configuration. The only edge for AMD on this test at least appears to be when you pit a single dual-chip Radeon HD 5970 against a single mono-chip GeForce GTX 480. The real-world price-performance measurement is hard to predict before launch, given that graphics card prices fluctuate based on supply and demand. The Radeon HD 5870 goes for about $400 right now, and although the rumor mill has questioned whether Nvidia will be able to supply the market with the GeForce GTX 480 in sufficient quantities, the starting price at least is $499. A Radeon HD 5970, if you can find one, goes for around $675. The relative value for a card by itself will depend on your system, your monitor, your interest in 3D, and your interest in the HVAC training necessary to keep the GeForce GTX 480 running. Based on the information we have today, the GeForce GTX 480 looks like the new single-chip card to beat, as long as you don't care about power efficiency and can manage the heat output.
 Juice box | |
| Velocity Micro Edge Z55 | Average watts per hour |
| Off | 1.05 |
| Sleep | 4.06 |
| Idle | 326.18 |
| Load | 630.91 |