DIGITAL STORM VELOX
White-hot performance
ABOUT SIX MONTHS AGO, we put the giant blue box that was Digital Storm’s Aventum 3 desktop to the test. It was a beastly gaming machine, but heavy as hell, and just as expensive. We’re thinking of the Velox as the Aventum’s little brother, and for a little more than half the cost, it performs nearly as well as its elder sibling.
A big part of the Aventum’s $8,500 price tag was due to its Hyper-Threaded Core i76950X, which checks in at $1,700. The Velox makes up for skipping on the enthusiastclass CPU route thanks to Intel’s new Kaby Lake processors. Our unit was outfitted with a Core i7-7700K, overclocked to 4.9GHz, one of the highest desktop core clocks we’ve seen on a prebuilt system. While it doesn’t quite keep up with the 6950X in Cinebench R15 or x264, which really take advantage of Hyper-Threading, the 7700K was hot on the Aventum’s heels in PCMark 8 Creative, with a score of 9,404.
To complement the Kaby Lake CPU, the Velox features an Asus Maximus IX Hero Z270 motherboard. Slotted in there is 32GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, and a 512GB Samsung 960 Pro SSD, connected via NVMe. For additional storage, the 960 Pro is backed up by a 3TB Toshiba HDD. A Corsair H115i liquid cooler keeps CPU temperatures down, while the case is outfitted with Thermaltake Riing fans for everything else. Finally, graphics are handled by a pair of GeForce GTX 1080s, outfitted with EVGA’s ACX 3.0 cooling solution.
Size-wise, the Velox’s all-metal chassis is exactly what we like to see from a topend gaming desktop: big (22 x 19.5 x 10 inches) but not excessive, with a large side panel through which to see its glorious innards. Even better, the side panels attach via metal pegs fitted into rubber sockets, in lieu of thumb screws. The panels attach and detach with a snap, making it exceptionally easy to access the mobo and hard drive cages. There’s a lot of empty space, giving things a minimalist aesthetic, but it also means the case can only accommodate one additional HDD in the main cage, and two SSDs behind the motherboard. That’s not a lot of expandability for this level of system, but it should be enough for most users. Either way, Digital Storm uses customcolor sleeved PSU extension cables and cable combs to keep things tidy, combined with remote-controlled LEDs, making it all very pretty to look at.
BEAUTY AND BEAST
Aesthetics are one thing, but they don’t count for much without performance to match. Luckily, the Velox plays games as good as it looks. The pair of EVGA GeForce GTX 1080s handled all the difficult tasks we threw at them with aplomb, but sometimes faltered at the seemingly easier tasks: rendering games at the paltry resolution of 1080p. We measured an average of 113fps across Riseof the TombRaider’s threepart benchmark in 1080p at max settings, while TheDivision registered 150fps at the same settings. FarCryPrimal, on the other hand, pulled in only 82fps at 1080p—a low score for what should be an easy task.
This can largely be accounted for by SLI not playing nice with lower resolutions, and all of our tests fared much better at higher resolutions. FarCryPrimal, for instance, actually scored the same in 4K as it did in 1080p, with its best frame rate showing up in 1440p (95fps). RotTR and The Division scored 104 and 114fps in 1440p; 76 and 70fps in 4K, respectively, all at max settings. This is thoroughly impressive, because even big brother Aventum sometimes struggled to keep 4K frame rates consistently above 60fps.
Even at half the Aventum’s price, the Velox is still an expensive machine. Like most custom-built systems, you could probably shave $1,000 or more off the price by building it yourself, but Digital Storm brings a lot to the table here. Between build quality and all the benefits of having a warranty and customer service, the Velox delivers on the promise of a top-end gaming machine.