We've always been impressed with the build quality, top-shelf components, and superb customer support offered by Virginia PC builder Velocity Micro, hanging an Editors' Choice award on the company's half-gaming-tower, half-creative-workstation Raptor Z55 a year ago. Velocity Micro's new Raptor Signature Edition (starts at $5,069; $5,799 as tested) is as clean as it is powerful, equipped with a fresh AMD Ryzen 9 7950X processor and a potent Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU. The Raptor Signature Edition can handle any game you throw at it (or any other app, for that matter), mixing raw power with understated style. However, it's priced more than $1,000 higher than last year's Z55, while coming across as too conservative compared to our cost-no-object gaming desktop pick, the Falcon Northwest Talon.
New Components in Last Year's Clothes
When you're spending almost six grand on a gaming rig, you expect some kind of "wow" factor to seal the deal. Velocity Micro has been building boutique PCs since 1997, and its expertise shows in the Signature Edition. While there aren't any components you can't find at your nearest PC parts retailer, the company's customizations and elegant build add value.
The chassis is a custom-made aluminum enclosure measuring 20.3 by 8.3 by 20.5 inches (HWD), with a glass side panel laser-etched with the Velocity name and logo. A laser-cut logo on the front panel shines a bright blue, though you can choose to omit that insignia at no extra cost. Velocity Micro's tradition of creating "sleeper" gaming rigs, bling-free systems that fit just as well in an office as a game room, even extends to removing its branding.
The case is unchanged from the Raptor Z55 we reviewed last year, even down to the fan placements. Two fans at the top of the case by the motherboard join three side-mounted fans as intakes, while a single rear fan acts as an exhaust. Each of these fans glows with Velocity's trademark bright blue light, though addressable RGB (ARGB) lighting lets you change the color of these and other components.
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The back of the tower holds eight USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, two USB4 Type-C ports, and a single Type-C USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port, all courtesy of the Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Hero motherboard. Buttons on the back panel provide BIOS flashback and clearing CMOS. The motherboard also features a 2.5Gbps Ethernet port for high-speed networking.
The front panel is bare, but there are several ports on top of the case: two USB-A ports, one USB-C port, headphone and mic jacks for your audio devices, and the power button. There's a grille near the back for the top-mounted intake fans.
The Raptor Signature Edition's top-of-the-line Ryzen 9 7950X CPU is strong enough for the most arduous applications. Our review unit came with 32GB of RAM expandable to 64GB. With Nvidia's 40 Series graphics cards not publicly available when our system was built, Velocity installed a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, though the company has since added the GeForce RTX 4090 to its options list.
As for storage, our rig came with a 2TB NVMe solid-state drive, but there are plenty of other options available. Users with massive storage needs will be happy to hear there's a hard drive cage on the floor of the build large enough to hold two 3.5-inch drives.
As I said, all these components are readily available at local retailers, and building a comparable tower yourself would be considerably cheaper. What you get for Velocity Micro's price is a carefully crafted, handmade system with exemplary cable management, a year-long parts and labor warranty, and a lifetime upgrade plan for maintenance and tuning.
Testing the Velocity Micro Raptor Signature: A Sleeper PC With Plenty of Power
Choosing benchmark comparison systems for this review was tricky, as there aren't many high-end desktops of this caliber. Rarer still are PCs in our database with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X processor, simply because it's so new. That said, we chose four desktops that should give the Raptor Signature Edition a run for its money.
The Corsair One i300 pairs the same GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU as the Signature with double the memory, though its Intel Core i9-12900K CPU is slightly less powerful. The HP Omen 45L is another Core i9 rig that steps up to a GeForce RTX 3090. The Maingear Turbo splits the difference with an RTX 3090 and Ryzen 9 5950X CPU buried beneath reams of RGB. Finally, we included the Velocity Micro Raptor Z55, another Core i9-12900K and Nvidia 3080 Ti machine with a modest (for this crowd) 16GB of RAM.
The Raptor Signature Edition tops the price list in this group, with the HP and Corsair following at about $5,000 each. The Raptor Z55 ($4,599 as tested) is next, with the Maingear a relative bargain at under $2,500.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
The Signature ran our other benchmarks without a hitch but balked at our main productivity test, UL's office-suite simulator PCMark 10, though it ran that program's storage speed and throughput measurement. Three further tests focus on the CPU: Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that firm's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, Geekbench Pro simulates popular tasks such as PDF rendering and speech recogntion, and the open-source HandBrake 1.4 converts a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). Finally, Puget Systems' PugetBench is an automated extension for Photoshop that performs a variety of tasks in Adobe's popular image editor, rating a PC's aptitude for content creation jobs.
The Raptor Signature Edition's AMD Ryzen 9 dominated our processor tests, outpacing the 12th Generation Intel Core i9 chips. The Corsair One i300 managed a near-tie in the Photoshop benchmark, but the Signature managed to be first of a very fast crowd.
Graphics and Gaming Performance Tests
Any of these PCs is overkill for everyday office productivity; what you want to see are gaming frame rates. Our graphics benchmarks include two DirectX 12 game simulations from the UL 3DMark suite: Night Raid, and the more demanding Time Spy. Plus, we run two offscreen-rendered runs from GFXBench. We also run the built-in benchmarks of three popular games, F1 2021, Rainbow Six Siege, and Assassin's Creed Valhalla, at varying resolutions and image quality presets. Note that when we reviewed the Raptor Z55, the then-new 12th Gen Intel processors were having difficulty (since resolved) running some games, including Valhalla, so our numbers for that system are from Assassin's Creed Odyssey instead. So they are not a perfect 1:1 comparison.
Since all five test systems have either a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti or an RTX 3090, they posted closely grouped scores in our synthetic and real-world game tests. The Raptor Signature Edition led the pack in Valhalla and Siege, and it was close to the top in F1, so it clearly gives you plenty of graphical power to play (or work) with when it comes to pushing polygons.
Verdict: A Slick Performer in an Unassuming Package
The Raptor Signature Edition does a lot of things well, though considering its steep price, it had better. It's hard to overstate the reward of the company's build-quality craftsmanship, though we can't deny you could buy the same components and assemble a somewhat less elegant rig for thousands less. If you want a top-notch bespoke gaming rig with premium long-term support, Velocity Micro is ready to oblige with a tower that can carry your PC gaming for years to come, albeit one that's almost too modest in terms of visual glamour.
While its mighty price puts it out of reach of most gamers, Velocity Micro's latest Raptor desktop tower offers admirable quality and performance.
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