[ Background music ] >> Rich Brown: Hi I'm Rich Brown Senior Editor for CNET.com. Today we're gonna take a look at the Velocity Micro Edge Z55. So this is a high end gaming desktop. It costs about 3500 bucks in this configuration. The highlight of this system is that it has two Nividia GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards. It's Nividia's latest gaming chip and that makes the system a very very high end gaming PC. It'll play pretty much any PC title on the market at very high detail settings and resolutions. We've seen a lot of Velocity micro PCs over the years and this one holds to Velocity's reputation for building clean, sturdy looking PCs that just look great inside and out. Now the Edge Z55 is not as big as some of the larger high end gaming PCs we've seen lately. It means there's a little less expansion room. You can see in the front you have a few optical drive bay's. There's a Blu-Ray burner behind this one right here. There's also a media card reader and a few other ports along the right side edge. Now the back of the system you can see all the various ports. Each graphics card has 2 DVI ports and a mini HDMI port. You'll need a special adaptor for that. Now with these 2 cards the system can support up to 3 displays at one time. So the video looks a little bit out of date by support only 3 monitors with 2 cards. ATIs most recent Ifinity version of its Radeon 5870 card can do up to 6 displays. For the rest of the system though it's pretty straight forward. You get a bunch of USB ports; you have ESATA for fast external data. There's fire wire, digital audio as well as 7.1 analog audio. So inside the case you can see it's a little bit crowded and there's a lot going on. There's two hard drives over here you get a standard drive for storage as well as a SSD up here. Velocity Micro does offer all kinds of storage and other component options for this system so you can definitely get online and customize this if you like the case but don't want all the same components you see here. For the rest of this particular build though there's 6 gigs of memory over here. You actually get a little bit of room to upgrade, there's 3 free slots, there's an Intel Core 7 chip here that's over clocked and that's a quad core version. It's a Core i7930 so it goes up to 4 gigahertz thanks to the over clocking and makes this very fast for application performance but it is not the 6 core chip that Intel just came out with so it's not quite at the cutting edge as far as general day to day productivity. Now down to the graphics cards though this is really the main feature of this PC. They really are the top of the line right now. The single card GeForce GTX480 we found is pretty much the fastest graphics card on the market and two of them will let you play any game you want on a 30 inch LCD or probably even higher. Very high resolutions, all the detail settings turned on and this is pretty much all the PC that a PC gamer would want at least for right now, as long as you can live with 3 monitors of course. The two caveats of these cards are that they run very hot and they consume a lot of energy. In our power testing for example we found this system will run about $13 extra just by itself on your power bill. You'll also notice that there's a separate fan here that Velocity Micro installed on top of the cards themselves, both of which also have a fan. Air comes out the back and it is very very hot so you'll definitely want to put this system in a highly ventilated area that doesn't get too hot, or else you really could run the risk of damaging your PC. So this PC is definitely fast and it's definitely great for gaming thanks to its 2 new Nividia video cards. That said it chews up a lot of heat and it'll run your power bill significantly higher than any other PC. [ Background music ] So I'm Rich Brown this is the Velocity Micro Edge Z55.
