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It's been a busy quarter for shakeups in some of the industry's top channel companies. Here we look at several channel executives who have come and gone in the last few months.
Review: Velocity Raptor Slices Into Gamer PC Market
9:00 AM EST Wed. Feb. 20, 2008
From the February 25, 2008 issue of CRN
Velocity Micro Inc., Richmond, Va., sent its newest gaming PC to CMP Channel Test Center -- this is not a system a college student would tuck into a tiny dorm room. The Velocity Raptor Signature Edition is a heavy, 8 x 23 x 18-inch system encased in an aluminum chassis.
Priced at $5,995 and available starting in late February 2008, the Velocity Raptor is for users with no utility bill worries and who absolutely must have the best graphics and processors at hand.
Solution providers working in the gaming market have to balance the low-budget systems that can handle most mainstream games with the high-end units that can handle the handful of newer resource-hungry games. The Velocity Raptor falls firmly in that high-end range. It comes with the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor with quad 3.0GHz cores at 4.0GHz, 12 Mbytes of shared Level 2 cache and 1333MHz front bus. The motherboard has the EVGA 780i SLI chipset and three GeForce 8800 Series GPUs from Nvidia Corp. Sound is delivered via Realtek Semiconductor Corp. High Definition Audio. The system comes with 2 Gbytes of memory but can easily be upgraded to 4 Gbytes.
The sleek aluminum case has a futuristic look and allows for heat dissipation. The fans blow out heat from the back, the sides and through the bottom front panel. The main front panel opens to reveal the three hard-drive slots and two optical drives. The system comes with a 2x Blu-ray burner and a 20x DVD-RW drive from Lite-On Technology Corp. The unit has eight USB 2.0 ports and two FireWire ports. Two USB ports, a sound and microphone port, and a FireWire port are available on the front of the unit. As for storage, the Raptor has two 150 Gbyte 10,000-rpm hard drives configured in RAID 0 and a 1-Tbyte Hitachi Global Storage Technologies 7,200-rpm drive for backing up essential data.
The Raptor comes with a 1,200-watt power supply. The sound levels ranged from about 67dB to 85dB. Despite having so many fans, the system was much quieter than most servers in the Test Center.
Maintenance and expansion are a snap with the chassis' modular design for components. During assembly, the interior cables were routed and tied down to ensure optimal airflow inside the case. In addition, the CPU is kept cool with a CoolIT Systems Boreas custom-designed liquid cooling unit.
The unit ranges in temperature. The back of the unit, after about two hours of operation, recorded about 98.6 degrees F and the front measured a cool 83.6 degrees F. At times, the temperature jumped to about 100 degrees F.
It's expected that a gaming PC would draw a lot of power, and the Velocity Raptor didn't disappoint. Once up and running, the system drew a constant of 595 watts. It fluctuated between 576 and 590 watts, based on activity.
Because this is a gaming PC, the standard PC benchmarks from Primate Labs' Geekbench benchmarking software was not enough. Futuremark's 3DMark supplemented the Geekbench results. The Velocity Raptor scored 6,196 on Geekbench. The 3DMark test ran three times at the 1,280 x 1,024 resolution with default image and video options. The Raptor scored 20,085.
Velocity Micro ships the Raptor with a stripped-down version of Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit. The OS comes with integrated backup software and has optimized the drivers specifically for gaming.
Velocity Micro combined the overclocked quad-core processor, the powerful graphics cards and generous storage space to produce a remarkably fast PC suited for any kind of heavy lifting. The price, while high, is still lower than competitors and worth every penny.
