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The $1499 (as of January 17, 2006) Micro Vision GX is neither the fastest nor the slowest PC we've seen, but for anyone interested in a practical balance of price, performance, and features, the well-designed Micro Vision GX could be just right.
The system's WorldBench 5 score of 100 puts it on a par with other PCs carrying a 2.2-GHz Athlon 64 3700+ CPU and 1GB of RAM--a little faster than the middle of the pack. The Vision GX should easily handle any computing task you throw at it, including most games.
An eVGA e-GeForce 6600 graphics card with 256MB of RAM produced respectable frame-rate scores on our Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Unreal Tournament gaming tests. Actual game play on Return to Castle Wolfenstein was very smooth at a resolution of 1280 by 1024 but looked a bit too dark, even with the Philips 170S 17-inch flat-panel display set to maximum brightness. Colors, on the other hand, looked sharp and real, and small (6.8-point) text was comfortably legible.
I liked the sturdy feel and clean lines of the simple, all-black, midsize tower case. The front of the case houses a dual-layer 8X DVD+/-RW drive and a 16X DVD-ROM drive, as well as a combo eight-in-one media card reader and floppy drive. Two USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, and a headphone and microphone jack lie behind a small door at the bottom of the case. Four more USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, an ethernet port, and analog audio jacks that support 5.1 surround sound occupy the back. The graphics card offers both VGA and DVI connectors.
The interior of the Vision GX's case is very well laid out for upgrades; nicely bundled cables and power lines present no obstacle to the two open RAM slots, one open PCI Express X1 slot, and the one open PCI slot. A basic but well-placed hard drive chassis simplifies adding a hard drive to one of the two open hard drive bays. The only sour note: A metal panel running across the top of the case makes accessing the upper external drive bays a bit more difficult.
The optical mouse felt a bit too light for my taste, but the keyboard was first-rate: Well-positioned multimedia control buttons and lots of programmable buttons run across the keyboard's top edge. Documentation is geared toward experienced users; it includes a motherboard manual, but the brief user guide offers minimal guidance in use and setup.
Upshot: A nice-looking case, easy upgrades, and a fast CPU make the Velocity Micro Vision GX a smart pick as a reasonably priced, general-purpose PC.
Kirk Steers
