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DinoPC has built the Velociraptor 3450 within a rather attractive Xigmatek Asgard Pro case. It’s one of few budget cases with a USB3 port on its front I/O panel, so it means you don’t have to struggle round the back of the case to connect super-fast storage. Its Ivy Bridge Core i5-3450 and an SSD boot disk mean it’s as nippy as a raptor, too.
Like a lot of midi tower cases, the Velociraptor 3450 has one external 3.5in drive bay and three 5.25in bays. Only one 5.25in bay is fitted with an optical drive, so there’s room for further expansion. The front panel is almost entirely made of wire mesh to increase airflow through the case, with the I/O ports located on the roof. As well as the single USB3 port, you also get two regular USBs and the standard pair of 3.5mm audio I/O ports.
On the back panel, there are a further two USB3 ports and four standard USBs, as well as two PS/2 ports for legacy peripherals and Gigabit Ethernet. Audio is restricted to three 3.5mm audio jacks, with no digital connection. There are also VGA, DVI and HDMI video connections, in case you want to use the onboard graphics.
Removing the side panel is as simple as unwinding the two thumbscrews. Once inside, the microATX Asus P8B75-M LE motherboard barely takes up half of the motherboard tray, leaving ample room for cable management. Three pre-drilled holes make taming unruly wires even easier, and DinoPC has done a good job hiding the 400W PSU’s cables.
Expansion options aren’t quite as impressive as the similarly priced competition because of the smaller motherboard. You still get three spare SATA ports plus one PCI slot and a second PCI-Express x16 port, but the dual-slot graphics card obstructs the second PCI slot. Both memory slots are filled with RAM, 8GB in total, so you must remove them to upgrade. This limited upgrade path is disappointing, as the case has room for a further six 3.5in hard disks.
Cooling is covered by a single 120mm front intake fan and 120mm rear exhaust fan, helping the stock Intel CPU cooler dissipate excess heat. Because the i5-3450 isn’t overclocked, this is more than sufficient, but if you add a second graphics card or lots of hard disks, you may want to install one or two extra fans. There’s a spare 120mm mount in the floor, two in the case roof and a further two on the side panel.
Performance was commensurate with our Ivy Bridge i5-3540 experience. Running at 3.1GHz, but using Turbo Boost to reach 3.5GHz in certain applications, it scored 103 overall in our multimedia benchmarks. This makes it marginally faster than a previous generation I5-2500K, our current reference processor. Its four cores mean it can easily handle multithreaded applications.
The AMD Radeon HD 7770 was able to handle Dirt3 rather well, managing an average 41fps in our benchmark test. Crysis 2 was a tougher challenge, and it could only manage 20.9fps. If you want to play the latest games in DirectX 11 mode, you may need to lower the resolution to keep frame rates looking smooth.
The AOC i2352Vh monitor that DinoPC includes with the system uses a superb 23in IPS panel with fantastic viewing angles. It has a matt finish that helps eliminate light reflections, as well as VGA, DVI and HDMI inputs. A headphone socket lets you listen to HDMI audio. It’s an excellent budget Full HD monitor. The Logitech keyboard and mouse are very basic, however.
As it uses a microATX motherboard and a multiplier-locked processor, there isn’t huge potential for future upgrades. Even with its excellent monitor and SSD boot disk, we would still recommend the overclocked Palicomp Alpha Excite over the the Velociraptor 3450, but there’s no doubting it’s great package.
