At a Glance: Velocity Micro Raptor Z55 (2019) Review

At first glance, Velocity Micro’s Raptor Z55 (starts at $1,249; $2,999 as tested) could easily be mistaken for your everyday home computer. Slap a Dell logo on the front and many people would accept it as just another office PC. But underneath its almost entirely black aluminum exterior rests some of the best gaming hardware money can buy, as our sister site PCMag.com found in its review.

Build Specs

Caged inside of these metal walls rests an Intel Core i9-9900K processor that has eight CPU cores overclocked to blistering fast 5.1GHz. Immediately noticeable after unlocking the cage and removing the side-panel is the system’s CPU closed-loop water cooler that rests near the front bottom of the case.

Benchmarks And Test Results

Kicking things off with PCMark’s Productivity test, we can see that the Velocity Micro Raptor Z55 outpaced its competitors by a small margin. The extra RAM available on some of these competing systems didn’t appear to help them in this test, and instead, the deciding factor here was likely the high 5.1GHz overclocking and water cooling present on the Velocity Micro Raptor Z55. PCMag also performed a storage test, but the performance difference was negligible.

Testing with Cinebench R15 also showed the Raptor Z55 pulling ahead of its competitors, whereas the only system to match it and slightly surpass it in PCMag’s Photoshop CC test was the Maingear Vybe.

Turning to synthetic gaming benchmarks the story changed somewhat for the Raptor Z55. It fell into second place in the 3DMark test as its stock-clocked Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti was unable to keep up with the overclocked RTX 2080 Ti inside of the Falcon Northwest FragBox. The Raptor’s performance under Unigine’s Superposition 1.0 test was also unremarkable compared with the competition.

Things didn’t get better for the Raptor Z55 in real-world gaming tests. Somewhat surprisingly in PCMag’s 1080p Far Cry 5 test, the Raptor Z55 was beaten by the Maingear Vybe, which featured a slower Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card. The Raptor Z55 fared better when tested with Rise of the Tomb Raider, but it tied with Corsair’s One i160, and both of these systems fell short of the Fragbox.

Conclusion

All things considered, while the Velocity Micro Raptor Z55 has a rather bland exterior, its performance is up there among the fastest pre-built computers that you can order. Its high CPU overclock gave it a clear edge in CPU focused tests, and it managed to keep up with the other tested RTX 2080 Ti equipped systems in our graphics tests.

If we stop to consider the price of this system as configured, it comes in at a steep $2,999. Although that sounds like a lot, it’s actually lower than all of the other competing systems that we tested except the Maingear Vybe, which comes in at a lower $2,499 price point thanks to its less expensive RTX 2080 graphics card. Some of the more expensive competing systems, however, cost over a thousand dollars more.

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