Digital Trends

Systemax Venture VX2 September 24th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

Setup and Use

Pulling the chassis out of the box we were surprised that it was relatively light. Newbies should be able to get up and running fairly quickly due to the included fold-out set up guide, which shows all the ports and what goes into them. Our only complaint about the setup guide is it’s awfully dense, and packed with text and pictures, making it a bit difficult to read.

Also in the box is a System Resource Kit that includes the Vista Ultimate disc and a restore DVD, which is appreciated in case things go sideways at some point.

Once we were up and running the system hummed right along, as we expected it to given its pedigree. We ran the Vista performance index and the VX2 scored 5.9 (the highest score possible) in every single category, except RAM, where it scored 5.5. For some reason, this brought the system’s final score down to 5.5 as well, which seems goofy to us. We’re not math majors, but one would think that on average it would be like a 5.8.

The installation of Windows was very sparse and clean, which is just the way we like it. There were only two icons on the desktop (one for Viiv and another warning you not to install an anti-virus program without uninstalling the bundled CA Internet Security Suite) and no extra icons in the system tray, which is perfect.

Since this is a gaming machine, and Bioshock had just been released, we were curious to see if it could handle the gorgeous underwater world of Rapture. Since we were using a 24” widescreen display for testing, we figured why not crank it all the way up? We set it to run at 1920x1200, with DirectX 10 detail enabled, and it ran surprisingly well. Framerates hovered in the 30s, and when there were a lot of fire and explosions on screen it got a bit choppy. We ended up disabling post processing, and framerates jumped to the high 40s and low 50s, which is just fine for a slow-paced game like Bioshock. We also installed Doom 3, and naturally it ran like melted buttah.

One problem we did encounter in testing was the CPU ran very hot. Now, this is somewhat common with quad-core processors, as they run hotter than any other CPU on the market due to their design. However, this processor, which is cooled by a very quiet heatsink/fan from Foxconn, is bordering on nuclear. We saw idle temps of around 68C, and load temps of 92C.

Quad-core CPUs run hot, but the VX2’s CPU ran a bit too hot for our tastes

That is way, way too hot, and if this were our PC we’d invest in an aftermarket cooler, or maybe even water-cooling to bring the temps down to where they should be. We also removed the cooler, re-applied some thermal paste and looked at the temps again, just to make sure it was properly installed, and saw no change in temperatures. We even looked up the thermal info on Intel’s website and according to the site the max temp for this processor is 71C, but we ran it beyond 90C and never saw any signs of throttling at all.

We have to wonder why Systemax would ship the unit with such a sub-standard cooler, and our only guess is that it does the job and most users would never look at the temps. To the company’s credit, the system was rock-solid throughout testing, and despite the high temps it never crashed or showed any signs of trouble. We even ran four instances of Prime95 overnight, and the system never shut off or displayed any weirdness.