Digital Trends

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

More Testing

One of the reasons the system is so quiet, aside from the quiet CPU cooler, is that Systemax did not provide any cooling for the hard drives, and they were hot to the touch. Though hard drives are usually okay with a little heat, we prefer to have some air flowing over them since excessive heat can shorten their life span (and we speak from experience on this).

Heat issues aside, the system is very fast, responsive and seemingly always ready to open a program or to execute a command. With four processor cores ready and waiting, it’s difficult to actually stress a system like this, and it’ll be some time before a lot of multithreaded software hits the market, including games.

Boot times in Vista Ultimate were a scant 1:09, which is pretty normal for a “fast” desktop system. It’s about what we expect with a Vista system. The system shuts off in 18 seconds, which is decent. 

We’d love to discuss upgrading, but seriously – what are you going to upgrade? You’ve already got two optical drives, all the RAM slots are full, you shouldn’t add another hard drive due to heat issues, and the CPU and videocard are top of the line. If you did want to upgrade, some time in the distant future, it should be relatively easy since Systemax took the time to route most of the cables out of the way. The wiring is not elegant at all, but since there’s no case window it’s not that big of a deal.

The wiring isn’t the cleanest job we’ve seen, but there’s no case window to reveal this dirty secret.

Conclusion

Systemax has built a very solid mid-range gaming machine with the VX2. In fact, if you ask most hardcore PC enthusiasts what parts they would pick for a “bang for the buck” machine, we imagine most would settle on the same parts Systemax chose. The system offers tremendous power, is very quiet, and looks decent too. Systemax even backs it up with an impressive 3-year, onsite warranty, which is rare these days. We have issues with the system’s cooling, however, and Systemax really needs to address that. If the company does, this will be a system that’s hard to fault, especially for the gamer on a modest budget.

Pros:

Very powerful; surprisingly quiet
3-year onsite warranty


Cons:

Multiple cooling issues
No backup options