Artwork: Rick Rizner, John Goddard

The Vector PCX has a black matte case and a simple, understated design. The system we tested is well priced at $1377, though it came with a CRT monitor.

The machine has a reasonable selection of expandability options, with four externally accessible drive bays and one internal drive bay available. Having just one internal drive bay open is a bit of a pity, though, because the motherboard has four SATA connectors. Adding more than one internal drive means getting adapters to mount a 3.5-inch hard drive in a 5.25-inch bay--which would take up an externally accessible drive bay. There is also just one PCI Express x1 slot, plus two regular PCI slots, with one of those very close to the EVGA E-GeForce 6600 GT graphics card in the PCI Express x16 slot. The motherboard is also fairly high up in the case, so the bottom three blanking plates are useless--there are no PCI slots behind them.

Like all the other Velocity Micro systems we've seen, the cables inside the case are tied back and routed out of the way. This care not only keeps the inside tidy and makes it easier to add more memory or additional hard drives, but it also ensures that the air can flow through the case without obstructions to keep everything cool. The Vector PCX we looked at is built around a 3.2-GHz Pentium 4 and 512MB of DDR400 RAM, and it achieved a WorldBench 5 score of 89, in line with the performance we've seen from similarly equipped systems.

The CTX EX701F CRT monitor included with our test system was disappointing: Colors looked flat and unimpressive, and text appeared fuzzy and difficult to read at small font sizes. Velocity Micro does offer several LCD monitors as options; for example, you can upgrade to a 19-inch CTX LCD display, but that adds $210 to the cost of the system. Bundled software included the WordPerfect Office 11 suite and the Ulead Digital Creation Suite for video and graphics editing.

Upshot: The Vector PCX is a well-priced value system, though you should consider spending a little extra to get an LCD display.

Richard Baguley