Velocity Micro Raptor Z40 review: It’s a lean, clean small-profile gaming machine - burrmearies

At a Glimpse

Expert's Military rating

Pros

• Unstained, minimalist design
• Smallish form factor takes little elbow room

Cons

• Limited to a single graphics poster

Our Verdict

Opening at a little ended a grand in a minimal configuration, this smallish and modestly adorned gaming PC caters to the bling-averse substance abuser. Our $1899 test unit was imposingly fast, quiet, and fountainhead-assembled.

In that location are hoi polloi who want their gaming PC to embody the fantasy: super-dog-sized case, neon backlighting, strobe lights. Others just neediness to play and keep the means as far removed from their consciousness As possible. If you fall into the latter category, then Velocity Little's Raptorial bird Z40 should get on your short list.

Design

At only about 13 inches high and deep, and 8 inches ample, the Raptor Z40 will fit places that can't house a massive tower. That's its first trick for staying out of the way. The second is minimalist styling—the box and frame are constructed entirely from black aluminum, and the brushed exterior lends an air of course of instruction.

Speed Micro

Plumb, minimalist design lets you concentrate on the task at paw—non the means.

About the lonesome thinkable distractions on the Z40's outside are the power button, a lowercase logo, the visual drive (an Asus 24X DVD burner), and two USB 3.0 ports on the turn down right hand side of the faceplate. I'd rather they were at the top American Samoa I mostly place my desktops on the take aback, but that's a small fry charge.

The upcountry is real clean, with no cable clutter. Although there's enough space to admit the largest graphics cards, the interior is snug otherwise. The CPU cooler on our system was a low-profile Phanteks PH-TC12LS that barely whispers. All the fans were quiet, sol the white-noise factor for the Z40 is mild indeed.

Monica Lee

Components

The $1,899 mid-range configuration we tested contains a Effect i7-6700 CPU, 16GB of DDR-2400 memory, plus the capable but somewhat infamous GTX 970 GPU (512MB of the card's 4GB of VRAM are well slower than the rest). Storage consisted of two 250GB All important BX100 SSDs combined in RAID 0 for run the Bone and apps, plus a 7,200rpm, 2TB Seagate hard drive for storing your strange stuff. On that point are lesser configurations available, starting at $1,089. You can jak up the toll to nearly $4,000 if you opt for a GTX Titan, larger SSDs, etc.

This is a Skylake system, so power usage is fairly parsimonious, but nonetheless, our configuration had a slight uptick from stock in the phase of a EVGA 600W Bronze 80+ power supply. It's modular, which is handy given the tight living quarters.

The motherboard is an Asus Z170I, which features Intel's Z170 chipset. It's a very nice board, with a bicoloured and easily passable BIOS. If Asus is active to advertise the ability to portion applications an Internet pathway (gigabit ethernet or 802.11ac Wi-Fi), however, it would be gracious to undergo dual ethernet connectors on the motherboard. Just sayin'.

Having recently reviewed Samsung's new 950 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD, I'd also rather have seen a 256GB version of that product in the Z170I's M.2 port than the RAID setup. It's a trifle more expensive, and you only set out half the content, but you're talk twice the sustained read speed, and faster everything else.

Well, at least that was the way I was thinking ahead Speed Micro informed me that it was named in a Samsung had brought against Nvidia, simply because it bundles Nvidia graphics boards—Eastern Samoa all other PC vendor in the world does. Thus maybe a Kingston HyperZ Predator M.2 drive and so.

Regardless, the M.2 slot is there as an upgrade path, and Velocity will honor any asking to configure the Raptor Z40 with an M.2 SSD, justified though there's no selection for cardinal on the Z40 constellation Page.

Monica Lee

Ports

On the back of the Z170I are eight USB ports: two type 3.1 courtesy of ASMedia, four type 3.0 from the Intel chipset, plus two type 2.0. At that place are cardinal more USB 2.0 types available via a motherboard header (the USB 3.0 motherboard header provides the aforementioned faceplate ports). The Z40 also has big DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4 ports, a single gigabit ethernet left, dual Wisconsin-Fi antenna jackstones, and the accustomed 7.1 analog and optical surround audio outputs.

That's a all-around selection, but what truly made my day was the PS/2 port on the back. As the proud owner of three IBM Selectric-style model M keyboards from the 80s, this was a cherry on top.

The GTX 970 in this Raptorial bird Z40 had two DVI ports, DisplayPort 1.2, and one HDMI 2.0 port. This finicky compounding of ports wasn't able of driving the Dell 2715K display I used for testing at its full native resolution (5120×2880), but it'll handle 4096×2160 at 60Hz or 4K Ultra HD (3840×2160) only fine.

This configuration of the Z40 as wel offers no HDCP 2.2 support—non through the integrated Intel HD 530 graphics, nor the GTX 970. In the future, you may have issues with copy-weatherproof UHD or 4K content if you order a system with the GTX 970. The GTX 960 and 950 do support HDCP 2.2, so if UHD media is more than your thing than 2500×1600 gaming, you could bow out a nick on your elect video card and save a couple of bucks.

Performance

Our Raptor Z40 racked up a fairly impressive system public presentation, scoring 3,694 in PCMark 8's Solve Conventional bench mark and attractive about 46 transactions to convert a 30GB 1080p MKV file in to a 720p tab-friendly MP4. That's a sufficient step up in performance from our reference system of rules with its Core i7-4770K.

The tandem SSDs interpret data sequentially at 1,044MBps and wrote it at 724MBps. Non M.2/NVMe-like performance, but nevertheless much better than a single SSD. Even the hard drive was properly fast, reading at about 200MB/s.

The Z40's gaming tons were about what you'd expect from a Skylake system with a GTX 970 push pixels: 5,364 on in 3DMark's FireStrike Extreme, 58.5fps in Grave Raider on Extremist settings at 2500×1600, and 70.03fps in BioShock Infinite on Extremist settings. Keen.

Conclusion

I like this box. It girdle unconscious of the way of life, and there's plenty of power and room for a more powerful single-one-armed bandit GPU should you feel the need. Then there's that M.2 expansion slot just now waiting to threefold your data throughput. To boot, at $1,899 Velocity isn't charging you an arm and a wooden leg for professionally wrapping these components in a nice refined package. It even includes a annual warranty on the build, in addition to the various component warranties.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/418581/velocity-micro-raptor-z40-review-its-a-lean-clean-small-profile-gaming-machine.html

Posted by: burrmearies.blogspot.com

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