Enspire Vitesse GX

The PC, and nothing but the PC.

The Vitesse comes to us with an almost identical price-point to the TI machine, but it comes by itself – no monitor, no keyboard or mouse.

This is no bad thing, really, as what modern gamer or enthusiast doesn’t have a spare dozen of each lying about their house from previous machines? Monitors, especially, have a slow product cycle, and in the end, the money you’re saving on possibly redundant peripherals has in this case been very well spent.

The Vitesse is built around a good ASUS mobo, 2GB of Patriot RAM and a 9800GX2 graphics card. We may not be all that fond of this card as an upgrade, but if you’re getting a new machine outright, than it’s still a good choice. A single Western Digital 500GB drive leaves the machine with the least storage in this roundup, but 500GB is still impressive. The Vitesse also sports a beefier power supply than the TI machine, a Coolermaster 700W Real Power. On top of all that you get a 64bit version of Vista, too, which is handy for when you’ll inevitably want to upgrade your RAM. Now if only more people would write 64bit code...



It’s all packed into an Antec 300, and everything’s well-installed and nicely cabled. Airflow is good – as with all Antec cases – but it would have been nice to see non-stock cooling on the CPU. In our experience, the stock options are not the most efficient by a long shot.

Still, the Vitesse did have some issues; some odd, some quite annoying. On the odd hand, the display was set to an old-fashioned 1024 x 768 – hardly de rigueur. More annoying was the fact that for some reason we just couldn’t get the Crysis demo to unpack and install until the umpteenth attempt. We’ve no idea if this is just one of those wobbly hardware issues, but it only affected Crysis, not any of our other benchmarks.

Speaking of benchmarks, the inclusion of the GX2 pushed performance over the TI machine quite significantly. 3DMark03 in particular, which scales far better with multiple GPUs, saw a huge boost, and Crysis performance was similarly improved. The Vitesse could even manage the challenging 8x AA run.

Not well, to be sure, but that’s a lot of pretty pixels to push around. About the only other bugbear we can think of is that the CPU fan tends to whine rather loudly under load. It’s not going to wake anyone up, but this is another reason we prefer non-stock cooling options – they’re generally quieter.