Velocity Micro Raptor Z90 (Intel Core i7-3930K)

If you're in the market for a gaming rig, chances are you're either going in with a budget in mind or looking for the best, most tricked-out system money can buy. The Velocity Micro Raptor Z90 (Intel Core i7-3930K) ($4,999 direct) fits the latter category and is not a gaming desktop for the miserly; it features Intel's latest Sandy Bridge-E series processor, which alone has a market price of $555, and two Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 graphics cards. In addition to its potent internal components, the Velocity Micro throws in such wireless features as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth?rare in custom gaming rigs.

Design and Features
The Raptor Z90 isn't small, but won't leave a Jolly Green Giant-sized footprint like the Falcon Northwest Mach V (Core i7-3960X) ($6,899 direct, 4.5 stars). It's a full silver aluminum tower with a little more heft than a standard tower PC.

Looking inside the chassis through the clear side panel, the interior is lit up by several blue LEDs. It's spacious and clean, with enough room to fit two extra optical drives; two hard drives (two SATA ports for SSD caching are open on the motherboard); perhaps another graphics card in the extra PCIe x16 slot (though between the two Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 graphics cards it's a tight squeeze); and four more DIMM slots for RAM.

The unit has two 120GB solid-state drives and a 2TB spinning 7,200-rpm hard drive, built for speed and storage space. The Polywell Ignition X7900i-3960 ($4,599 street, 4 stars) comes out ahead here, boasting two 120GB SSDs plus a 3TB spinning hard drive. There's a 1,200-watt power supply installed to help power all these components.

The Raptor Z90 comes with a total of 16GB of RAM, but once again the Polywell X7900i-3960 trumps it with a total of 32GB of RAM. The Raptor Z90 does, however, come equipped with more creature comforts, like 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (via a USB receiver), and a Blu-ray burner, whereas the Ignition X7900i-3960 has only a Blu-ray player.

There's no shortage of connectivity options. Behind a swinging aluminum door is a media-card reader supporting microSD, SD/MMC, xD, M2, CF/MD, and MS formats, as well as a solitary USB 2.0 port. The back has a USB BIOS Flashback port, six USB 2.0 ports (one occupied by the Bluetooth receiver), four USB 3.0 ports, two powered eSATA ports, a Gigabit Ethernet connection, two mini HDMI and four DVI-I video outputs, and S/PDIF and a multitude of audio jacks to hook up to a surround-sound system.

Performance
The Z90's 3.2GHz Intel Core i7-3930K processor chewed through any multi-core, CPU-intensive task we threw at it. It ran through our Photoshop CS5 script in 2 minutes 22 seconds, ahead of the Polywell X7900i-3960 (2:34) and a mere second slower than the Falcon Northwest Mach V (Core i7-3960X) (2:21). The Z90 led the pack in Cinebench R11.5, scoring 13.33 points to the Polywell X7900i-3960's 12.15 and Falcon Northwest's 12.85.

When it came down to the Raptor Z90's raw power on the gaming grid, it easily produced playable frame rates on Crysis (121.3 fps and 44.6 fps) and Lost Planet 2 (155.9 fps and 80.8 fps) on 1,024 by 768 Medium and 1,920 by 1,080 Very High/High quality settings, respectively. In Crysis at Medium settings, it easily bested the Polywell X7900i-3960 (95 fps) and Falcon Northwest Mach V (Core i7-3960X) (118 fps), but lost footing to the competition when resolution, anti-aliasing, and quality settings were turned up?the Polywell Ignition X7900i-3960 (73 fps) and Falcon Northwest Mach V (Core i7-3960X) (75 fps) bested it by a significant margin.

On Lost Planet 2, the Raptor Z90 fell significantly behind the Polywell on Medium and High settings (210 fps and 122 fps, respectively) and Falcon Northwest (250 fps and 168 fps, respectively). Granted, the two competitors come with superior GPU configurations: two GeForce GTX 590 cards for the Polywell Ignition X7900i-3960 and three GTX 580 cards for the Falcon Northwest Mach V (Core i7-3960X).

The Velocity Micro Raptor Z90 (Intel Core i7-3930K) comes bundled with a lot of nice features?a Blu-ray reader/writer, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth?and is a solid performer to boot. However, the honeymoon phase ends when comparing its raw gaming power to that of other systems. The Polywell Ignition X7900i-3960 comes with more memory and two Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 graphics cards, which helped garner higher frame rates over the Raptor Z90. But if you're looking for the best Sandy Bridge-E series gaming rig on the market, it's hard to beat the off-the-chart scores of the Editors' Choice Falcon Northwest Mach V (Core i7-3960X).

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS

COMPARISON TABLE
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