Velocity Micro Raptor Z55

Scary performance from this overclocked beast

- GUY COCKER

WITH INTEL’S Alder Lake CPUs now firmly entrenched in the PC hardware market, we’ve been keen to see how far custom PC manufacturers can push them. Enter Velocity Micro, which has taken the already fearsome Intel Core i9 12900K, overclocked the eight Performance cores to 5.1GHz, and taken the eight Efficient cores to 4GHz. That maxes out the performance of this already impressive chip while pairing it with other bleeding-edge components, including a PCIe 4.0 SSD, DDR5 RAM, and a 3080Ti GPU.

If you’re reading those specs and struggling to imagine what the price could be, let us put you out of your misery—the Raptor Z55 costs $4,999. That’s a healthy chunk of change, but it’s in the same ballpark as the similarly-specced HP Omen 45L ($4,700) and Corsair One i300 ($4,999), neither of which are supplied with the CPU overclocked. We loved the i300 when we reviewed it in our April 2022 issue, especially its svelte form factor, but the Raptor Z55’s overclocked CPU delivered a 5 percent better Cinebench score than the Corsair.