Date:
Thursday , September 22, 2005
Author:
Chris Morley
Google +1

Velocity Micro Gamer's Edge 1500 Evaluation

Velocity Micro is back in the saddle with a mainstream gaming unit that's billed as "the perfect gaming system designed for serious gamers on a $1500 budget." We'll see if Velocity Micro took our past criticisms to heart and delivered a killer gaming rig.

Grammatical & Spelling Editor: Timothy Daniel

Introduction

Velocity Redux

Velocity Micro should be commended on being our first OEM to step up to the plate to participate in our OEM Systems Evaluations program. Their first foray with us, however, was not as commendable. Unbeknownst to us, we received a pre-production, overclocked and watercooled, dual-core Pentium D 820 Extreme Edition @ 4GHz. We were very excited to get our hands on something so ridiculously fast, but numerous stability issues culminating in a replaced motherboard, PSU, and adjusting down our overclocked video card quickly diminished our excitement.

Velocity Micro didn't run off with their collective tails between their legs, however, as Randy Copeland, President of Velocity Micro, quickly registered in our forums to answer any questions and respond to feedback on our evaluation. Because some readers were dismayed to see the President of a company get involved in the troubleshooting portion of our review, and voiced concerns that they would not receive the same treatment as we did, Randy agreed with our suggestion that HardOCP purchase a system anonymously on-line, and Velocity Micro would honor a refund after we completed the evaluation. We thought that this was a fantastic idea, and we have since changed our program to incorporate this new procedure. We think this gives us a better look at the overall experience a "normal" customer would have.

From Now On...

From now on, you will begin to see that most system evaluations will be completely from YOUR perspective. There will be some prerelease units that may not perscribe to this process, but they will be the exception to the rule.

The average consumer doesn't get to have the founder of a company send you a PC that you didn't have to pay for, so neither will we. From now on we will be purchasing the PCs anonymously, so that way our readers can be assured that the experience we are evaluating will be as close to theirs should they choose to purchase a machine from the same manufacturer.

Now we can give you complete, 360-degree visibility into the ownership experience of purchasing from any given systems integrator. We will give you insight into the ordering process, including any communications we had with the sales team, how easy it was to order through their website, and how long it took to ship to us.

And In This Corner, Weighing In At Fifteen Hundred Dollars!

Article Image

Our first two reviews were of some fairly expensive machines. Velocity Micro's ProMagix DCX came to us at around $4500, and our Gateway 9310XL weighed in at $2500 with speakers and monitor.

This time around, we decided to look at something a bit more palatable to most people's wallets. Velocity Micro has two interesting products on their website: the Gamer's Edge 1000 and the Gamer's Edge 1500, both are billed as the best value gaming configurations for $999 and $1499, respectively. Hawkeyed bargain hunters can find these systems with periodic, limited-time instant rebates, however.

We chose the Gamer's Edge 1500 because yours truly is addicted to Battlefield 2 and can barely stand having only 1GB of memory (and 512MB is unthinkable). Therefore, we ordered the 1500 instead, and we did not change one part. I think that if Velocity Micro is going to put their best foot forward in their initial configuration, and bill it as the best value gaming configuration available for $1500, then we should test it exactly as it is configured.