Velocity Micro puts out a competitive back-to-school desktop pretty much every year, and this year's Vector Campus Edition is no exception. Despite its traditional, arguably bland midtower case, this system boasts some of the best performance at its price. Alienware's X51 makes a smaller, faster pure-gaming PC at this price, and you can find other PCs with better all-around features, but if you need a PC with strong CPU performance and decent expandability, the Velocity Micro Vector Campus Edition is perhaps the best option under $1,000.
I'm not sure any other vendor out there has stuck to the same basic chassis design as long as Velocity Micro. If it's not particularly exciting, at least the company's squared-off, aluminum case is inoffensive. Velocity Micro also still knows how to build a PC properly, and it continues to set itself apart from mainstream vendors with clean, organized case interiors, with all of the cables neatly routed and cut to fit.
| Velocity Micro Vector Campus Edition | Asus CM6870 | HP Pavilion Elite Phoenix h9z | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $999 | $999 | $1,049 |
| Motherboard chipset | Intel Z77 | Intel H77 | AMD 970X |
| CPU | 4.3GHz Intel Core i5-3570K (overclocked) | 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-3770 | 2.8GHZ AMD FX-8100 |
| Memory | 8GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM | 8GB 1,600MHz DDR3 SDRAM | 8GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM |
| Graphics | 1GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 SE | 3GB Nvidia GT545M | 1GB Nvidia GeForce 550 Ti |
| Hard drives | 1TB 7,200rpm | 2TB 7,200rpm | 1TB 7,200rpm |
| Optical drive | Dual-layer DVD burner | Blu-ray/DVD burner combo | Blu-ray/DVD burner combo |
| Operating system | Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) | Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) | Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) |
With so much focus on all-in-one desktops, mainstream desktops like the Vector Campus Edition have become an unheralded category lately. I've seen two other PCs in this category this year, namely from Hewlett-Packard and Asus. Of these three desktops, the Vector Campus Edition offers the best pure computing experience thanks to its overclocked CPU.
That doesn't mean it's the best mainstream desktop overall. The Asus CM6870 has a strong Core i7 CPU, and also offers twice the hard-drive space and a Blu-ray drive for the same price. HP's AMD-based Phoenix is a noncontender because of slow performance and a higher price, but you might reasonably prefer the Asus' more well-rounded feature set to the Velocity Micro's performance play. On the other hand, math, science, or finance majors who need to crunch large sets of numbers, or maybe an art major who needs to render lots of photos, might make use of the Velocity Micro's faster CPU performance.
You can customize the configuration for the Vector Campus Edition if you'd like to make changes. You can add a Blu-ray drive for $55, a 2TB hard drive for $60, or a faster graphics card for an extra $100 or so. You might wish Velocity Micro had veered from its gaming roots and swapped out the lackluster Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 SE graphics card (does Nvidia's "GTX" moniker mean anything anymore, by the way?) for a more universally useful feature like a larger hard drive. But even if you don't like the specifics of this configuration, Velocity Micro at least appears to charge a fair price for what you get here.
