The Raptor is usually portrayed as a predator, whether it is a bird of prey, dinosaur, or military jet. The Velocity Micro Raptor DCX ($5,834 direct, $6,283 with 20-inch widescreen LCD monitor) works well with the analogy: It's a powerful all-around system, with specialized hardware that makes it particularly adept on the gaming grid. Evolving out of past Raptor systems from Velocity Micro, the DCX now has the new Intel Core 2 Extreme processor and dual ATI CrossFire graphics. It is a member of the $5G club, which means it's a system for the highly demanding user who intends to play games and run computation-intensive multimedia projects.

The Raptor DCX comes in an updated version of Velocity Micro's signature case, with a window on the side offering a peek at the liquid cooling system and the dual graphics solution. Thankfully, the techs at Velocity Micro managed to neatly route the cables in the case so that they don't obstruct the view of the hardware. The Raptor uses an improved liquid cooling system, necessary to help release the heat from the overclocked 3.4-GHz (up from 2.93 GHz) Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor. Overall, the solution is relatively compact, with the cooling tubes and radiator taking up about as much space as a large air-cooling heat sink. This cooling system clearly does the job: As you'll see later, the Raptor DCX's benchmark-test numbers are nothing to sneeze at. The Raptor's fans are consequently subdued, though you will still be able to hear them in a quiet room. One thing that is annoying (though not necessarily the fault of Velocity Micro) is the ATI CrossFire dongle: It connects the two graphics cards so they can work together on 3D rendering, but it sticks out the back of the case like a sore thumb (though it does ensure that your monitor cable is connected to the "correct" DVI port). nVidia's internal SLI interconnect is more elegant. (It could be argued, however, that ATI's solution is currently more effective on 3D benchmark tests).

High-end components in the Raptor DCX include the pair of 512MB ATI Radeon X1900 graphics cards in the aforementioned CrossFire configuration, the dual core processor, dual optical drives, and a speedy pair of 150 gigabytes, 10,000-rpm hard drives in a RAID 0 array. These drives (called Western Digital Raptors, by the way) are responsible for some of the system's multimedia performance, particularly its Windows Media Encoder test results. The Raptor also has a 400GB data drive so you don't have to put all of your files on the RAID array. This gives the system a total of 700GB of drive space. There's also a lot of extra space in the case, as well as a bunch of free SATA ports for upgrades, such as additional drives if you think that 700GB just isn't enough.