WE REVIEWED a Velocity Micro PC in our June 2022 issue–the Raptor Z55, which at the time was a performance powerhouse with a Core i9-12900K CPU and RTX 3080Ti GPU. Six months later, the cutting edge has advanced, thanks to the arrival of Intel’s Raptor Lake processors and Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace graphics cards. Velocity Micro has issued a new Raptor, and the Z95 is the first pre-built system we’ve reviewed using this latest generation of components. The eagleeyed among you will spot it has a similar spec to the machine we built last month (Holiday 2022 issue), incorporating an Intel Core i9-13900K, RTX 4090, and 32GB DDR5 RAM. Given that was a machine we loved for 4K gaming and creativity, is this pre-built the way to go for those who don’t want to go about making their own?
Velocity Micro’s Raptor line specializes in offering high-end components encased in a roomy chassis with overclocks preapplied. In our case, that’s a boost up to 6GHz on the Intel Core i9 processor, which resulted in a small performance gain on the single-core test (see below) but a 12 percent boost to the multi-core result. As you’d expect from a pre-built, Velocity Micro also does a good job of syncing the RGB lighting across components and keeping things quiet (although the GPU fans do sometimes ramp up under load).