Velocity Micro ProMagix Pro

Velocity Micro

4 stars out of 5
Velocity Micro is the third of the three new vendors that sent systems for review. The Velocity ProMagix Plus system is housed in a heavy-gauge aluminum case with a high-gloss black finish. Not only attractive, the case is ruggedly built and offers both a swing-away door to cover the drive bays and a transparent panel on the easily removable side panel. This side panel shows the system fans, which are illuminated with red and blue lights. This is a solid and attractive system.

Beneath the attractive exterior, the ProMagix Plus incorporates an Intel motherboard with dual 3.06GHz Xeon microprocessors supported by the Intel E7505 chipset used in many of the systems in this roundup. A total of 2GB of Corsair DDR2700 registered ECC RAM was installed on the tested system (8GB possible). The AGP 8X slot on the motherboard was filled with a speedy PNY NVIDIA Quadro FX 3000 graphics card with 256MB of integrated and unified RAM. Performance scores were very good.

The system comes with a variety of extra-cost, high-quality components, such as an APC PowerStrip. The total system cost of $6,983 is near the top end of the price range for this roundup. This price tag lowered that grade to a C, but keep in mind that this system offers enough positives to still put it near the top of our ratings. The grades for the warranty was an A-, primarily reflecting the less-than-average coverage. The system earned high marks for its expandability options—a total of 10 drive bays and a 550W power supply. The latter serves to provide expandability as well as support the included Sony and Plextor CD-R/W and DVD drives. The Velocity ProMagix Plus scored near the top on our tests, no mean feat considering the fierce competition it faced here. Our only significant complaint has to do with pricing.