Digital Trends

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

Features and Design

Anyone can build a $5K gaming machine. Just grab the top-of-the-line parts in every category, wedge them into a chassis, paint some flames or dragons (or flaming dragons, for added affect) on it, and ship it. Building a mid-range system, however, where bang-for-the-buck is the primary purpose, is much more difficult. If you made a line graph of several components’ prices and their respective performance, there’s always a sweet spot in between the high-end and low-end where the best performance for dollar exists, and it’s always a moving target. Systemax is attempting to hit this target with its Venture VX2, and on paper it looks darn good.

Under the hood

We love our dual-core processors, but we love quad-core processors even more. Systemax is aware of this situation, and is shipping the VX2 with the currently reigning champion of price and performance in the CPU world – the Core 2 Quad Q6600. It’s a 2.4GHz quad-core CPU with 8MB of L2 cache (2MB per core), and it delivers truly mind-bending performance in multithreaded applications, of which there are few. The truth is, most people will never use all those cores, today. But some day, perhaps in a year or two, as multi-core becomes the norm, this processor and others like it will become increasingly effective, so it never hurts to have more cores than you might need currently. The only downside to this processor is that it runs hotter than Texas asphalt in July, and exotic cooling is often not only a good idea, but required to keep it chilly. 

Video Power

Any serious gaming machine these days is going to be running an NVIDIA 8800 card, and Systemax has gone with the 320MB GTS version which in our opinion is the best, sorry to say it again, bang-for-the-buck card a gamer can buy. The card is fully DirectX 10 ready, even though most games aren’t. But hey, someday they will be; or at least that’s what Microsoft keeps telling us. Regardless of the DX10 situation, the card offers smoldering performance in DX9 games and is a stunningly powerful piece of hardware, especially for its relatively low price. 

RAM Situation

Ever since Battlefield 2 came out, it’s been fashionable to have 2GB of system memory, since that game sucked up 1GB or more. Now that Windows Vista is out in the wild, it’s more important than ever to be running 2GB of RAM, because Vista alone will gulp down 1GB or more. The VX2 takes it to the next level with 4GB of PC2-6400 (aka PC2 800), which is more than sufficient for BF2, Vista, and anything else you might want to run. Astute readers will point out that since Vista is a 32-bit OS, it cannot address all of that RAM because some is reserved for PCI Express devices, and they are right. But still, 3.32 gigabytes of RAM is more than sufficient for anything you’ll be doing this year, and next year, and probably the year after that. 

OS Scenario

Almost every gaming system shipping these days comes with Windows Vista, and this is either a blessing or a curse depending on how you feel about the operating system. We’re warming up to the OS, and hear that a lot of the initial bugs that plagued gamers have been resolved. The VX2 ships with the top-of-the-line version, dubbed Vista Ultimate. It offers every single feature Microsoft could think of when designing the OS, and also the promise of future goodies that will be free to Ultimate users. So far the company has release several of these, and plans to release many more over the next few years, including the much-anticipated Windows DreamScene animated desktop thingamabob.