Cryo Velox gaming PC

When the Velox arrived in the PCW labs in a 30kg padded freight case, it was clear this was no ordinary PC.

And for a touch under £4,000, you should expect something extraordinary ­ the Velox has smashed all our previous gaming and desktop performance benchmark records by a mile.

Almost every component in the Velox is top of the range. Star of the show is an Intel Core i7 965 processor, overclocked to a mighty 4.2GHz, and 6GB of Corsair PC3-14400 1,866MHz DDR3 memory sits in an Intel X58 Asus Rampage II Extreme motherboard, with 64-bit Windows Vista installed on an OCZ 120GB SSD.

For additional storage, Cryo has fitted a pair of half-height 500GB hard disks in Raid 0 configuration. Cryo has used an Zotac Geforce GTX 295 graphics card, which is the equivalent of two Geforce GTX 260s in SLI.

The elaborate water-cooling setup is what makes the difference between the Velox and a standard PC assembled from these components. A single water-cooling loop is used for both the processor and video card.

A reservoir mounted in one of the 5.25in bays is connected to a loop that cools both the processor and graphics cards, then to a radiator mounted at the top of the spacious Lian Li A70 case. The front of the radiator has an LCD that shows information on fan speeds and system temperatures.

Cooling both a processor and dual-GPU graphics card with a single water-cooling loop is a good achievement. If Cryo were to add another Geforce GTX 295 (for quad-SLI), we doubt a single loop could manage the extreme thermal output from such a massive amount of silicon. With this configuration it manages fine though, with temperatures remaining stable, even during our gaming benchmarks.

Not only is the multiplier-unlocked Core i7 965 processor overclocked to 4.2GHz, but the Geforce GTX 295 has also been overclocked, to push performance in 3D games as high as possible.

The benchmark results were spectacular. A 3Dmark06 score of 26,741 and an average of 118 frames per second in World In Conflict (at 1,024x768) make mincemeat out of our previous performance champion. Although the SSD caused problems for PCmark05’s hard disk test, preventing us from getting an overall score, these didn’t occur with its CPU or memory tests, which scored 13,345 and 13,749 respectively.

Despite these impressive results, we found it outrageous a standard DVD writer came in our review unit rather than a Blu-ray drive. Some may argue at this price, 1TB of additional hard disk-based storage is on the small side. All these can of course be added later, but this adds expense to an already pricey computer.

The biggest question is whether or not the Velox is worth buying. It’s a certainty that at some point in the future, the Velox will be ousted from the top spot in our benchmark tables by a new generation of graphics cards and processors.

There’s also the issue of whether this performance is necessary. Only a handful of games are demanding enough to really put it through its paces. The practical differences between the Velox and a PC costing a quarter of the price are a few extra anti-aliasing levels, being able to raise the detail settings by a notch and faster video encoding. For most, this won’t be enough of a benefit to warrant the cost.

That’s missing the point though, as the Velox is the fastest desktop PC on the planet. If you want the best-performing computer possible, without regard to its price, this is what you should buy.