Review: Digital Storm's Virtue delivers superior power in a midsize tower

Digital Storm Virtue $2,199.00 Powerful components and room to grow make the Virtue a great gaming desktop if the price tag doesn't manage to scare you away.

What’s in a name? HP goes for an emotion to describe its high-end computers: Envy. Acer conjures aggressiveness for its gaming PCs: Predator. And Dell uses a spelling-challenged acronym for its best PCs: XPS (Xtreme Performance System). What concept does Digital Storm seek to conjure with its pricey ($2200) Virtue midtower gaming rig—moral superiority?

The company’s actual goal isn’t quite that lofty. “We noticed there are not many PC manufacturers designing mid-tower gaming systems with the same ardor and attention that ultra-tower PCs receive,” Digital Storm’s director of product development, Rajeev Kuruppu, said when the Virtue was announced. “As its name suggests, Virtue represents a higher standard of PC gaming, both in terms of aesthetics and performance.”

Robert Cardin"Modest" might have been a better name for this PC, given its unassuming enclosure. 

To reach that standard, Digital Storm packed an unlocked Intel Core i7-4770K CPU from Intel’s new Haswell family of processors, 16GB of DDR3-1600 memory, and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 780 discrete graphics card into a compact steel-and-brushed-aluminum case. (The Virtue also comes with Windows 8.) The result is a compact gaming rig that delivered a very respectable Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 399. It fell just short of the cheaper Micro Express MicroFlex 47B’s score of 421, though the latter is a full-size tower and has a more powerful video card. Why? While neither manufacturer elected to overclock its system, Micro Express splurged with a 512GB SSD where Digital Storm provides just a 120GB SSD. As a result, the MicroFlex performed much better on our productivity benchmarks.

The Virtue looks much more interesting on the inside.
On the gaming front, the Virtue bested the MicroFlex 47B on both our synthetic and real-world benchmarks, delivering a 3DMark Cloud Gate score of 26214 versus the MicroFlex's 24864 at a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. With real games and visual quality set to Ultra, the Virtue just missed reaching the coveted 60-frames-per-second mark with Dirt Showdown at 2560-by-1600-pixel resolution (it hit 57.3 fps, versus the MicroFlex 47B’s 41.4 fps). The same goes for BioShock Infinite at those settings: Digital Storm’s system reached an impressive 55.4 fps compared with the Micro Express tower’s frame rate of 46.9.

The Virtue can accommodate a second two-slot video card, but not more.
If you’re considering a midtower system, you probably don’t want a plus-size PC sucking up a lot of floor or desktop space. And if you want something small, you probably expect it to be quiet, too. Digital Storm accomplishes that goal in part with a Corsair H100i liquid-cooling system that consists of a CPU water block and a 240mm radiator mounted to the top of the case. This machine won’t keep you up at night or interfere with movie-watching or music-listening sessions.

Despite its smaller case dimensions (17.7 inches high by 17.7 inches long by 8.3 inches wide), the Virtue has plenty of room for expansion inside. If you want higher frame rates with games, throw in a second graphics card (you can configure the Asus Gryphon Z87 micro ATX motherboard to operate with one x16 PCIe 3.0 slot or two x8 PCIe 3.0 slots, and it supports both Nvidia’s SLI and AMD’s CrossFire multi-GPU standards). The system’s 1050-watt power supply, Corsair’s Pro Series HX1050, provides more than enough juice to support such a configuration.

Our test Virtue came with a 1TB, 7200-rpm WD Caviar Black hard drive in addition to a 120GB Corsair Neutron GTX SSD, leaving room for one additional 3.5-inch drive and three more SSDs. A Blu-ray player/DVD burner resides in one of the 5.25-inch drive bays (the second bay is mostly blocked by the radiator mounted on the top of the case).

Two USB 3.0 ports as well as microphone and headphone jacks are conveniently located on the front of the machine. Four additional USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, gigabit ethernet, S/PDIF out, and the usual analog audio ports are around back. The video card’s mounting bracket has ports (one each) for dual-link DVI, single-link DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort.

The Virtue is jam-packed with quality components that enable it to deliver the performance of machines twice its physical size. Its dimensions and motherboard won’t let you go beyond two video cards, but it delivers solid performance on today’s games with the one card it has now. Gamers will love the Virtue, even if their wallets won't.

NASA's IRIS telescope may help predict harmful solar storms

NASA's newest telescope is giving scientists their clearest pictures yet of the sun's atmosphere, and in doing so could help mitigate the potentially devastating effects an extreme solar storm could have on our power and communications networks on Earth.

Launched a month ago, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, on Thursday sent some of its first images of the sun back to Earth. The pictures should help scientists form a better understanding of the sun's weather, which is important because its influence on Earth goes well beyond providing sunlight and warmth.

(See a video version of this story on YouTube.)

An ever-changing pattern of instability on the sun's surface causes particles to be thrown outward, sometimes directly toward the Earth. These eruptions can take the form of solar flares, which cause the awe-inspiring northern lights, but can also cause the Earth's atmosphere to expand and increase the amount of drag on low-Earth-orbit satellites, such as those used for spying and GPS navigation, shortening their lifespan.

The most violent eruptions can have a much larger impact, including potentially knocking power grids offline and leaving millions without electricity. Such an eruption occurred in 1859, frying parts of the international telegraph system, which at the time was the main medium for long-distance communications.

If such an event occurred today, with electricity and Internet communications such a fundamental part of daily life, it's hard to even fully imagine the potential impact. A recent report from Lloyds of London suggested the damage from a violent eruption could leave 20 million people without power for as long as two years.

All solar weather travels through the lower solar atmosphere, and IRIS contains a powerful spectrograph that will focus on this region of the sun. Thus, scientists hope IRIS will give them a better understanding of these solar events and perhaps help them find a way to predict them.

"These beautiful images from IRIS are going to help us understand how the sun's lower atmosphere might power a host of events around the sun," Adrian Daw, mission scientist for IRIS at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. "Any time you look at something in more detail than has ever been seen before, it opens up new doors to understanding. There's always that potential element of surprise."

The Earth is prone to the impact of solar weather because the particles hitting Earth from the sun are magnetized.

"When that magnetic field hits the Earth's magnetic field, we have two magnetic fields interacting and you create electrical currents," said Karel Schrijver, a senior fellow at Lockheed Martin Space Systems' advanced technology center in Palo Alto, California. Lockheed Martin built the spectrograph that lies at the heart of IRIS' observations of the sun.

The electrical currents will run through any conductor on Earth, Schrijver said, and have their greatest effect on high-voltage power lines that sit at the heart of the electric grid. The lines are like inter-city freeways for electricity, carrying power across vast distances at voltages as high as 765,000 volts. Large transformers are used to "step down" the voltage where the lines connect with regional distribution systems, and it is those transformers that are at risk. If the geomagnetic storm is large enough, the induced currents can melt the transformers.

One of the strongest major storms in recent memory occurred in March 1989. Over a period of several minutes, the Hydro Quebec power grid in eastern Canada collapsed and 6 million customers lost power. The blackout lasted almost nine hours and caused an estimated C$2 billion in economic losses -- and it could have been worse. The effects almost cascaded to regional power grids, which could have blacked out the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions of the U.S.

Scientists and power grid operators worry about the prospect of something much larger, and such an event would not be without precedent.

Over the final days of August and first days of September 1859, an extreme solar storm occurred that ranks as the strongest ever recorded. It enabled amateur astronomers to make the first-ever observations of solar flares, and such giant storms are now named after one of those astronomers, Richard Carrington.

The Carrington event was so strong that aurorae, usually confined to the far north, could be seen in the night sky as far south as the Caribbean. Electricity still wasn't widely in use, but the storm shut down parts of the international telegraph network. In some places, telegraph lines were reported to be sparking, and The New York Times reported from Montreal that the Canadian Telegraph Co. took five hours to send a 400-word report because of the bad conditions.

"So completely were the wires under the influence of the Aurora Borealis, it was found utterly impossible to communicate between the telegraph stations, and the line was closed for the night," the newspaper reported on Aug. 30, 1859.

Historical records suggest Carrington-level events occur every 50 to 250 years, so Earth is now at the 150-year sweetspot for a repeat.

A recent report by Lloyd's of London predicted that another Carrington-level event is "almost inevitable in the near future" and paints a concerning picture of its potential effects. Should the U.S. be hit head on by such a storm, the report says, 20 million to 40 million people could be left without power for anything between 16 days and two years. The recovery time is so long because high-voltage transformers are such specialty items. Power utilities don't keep spare ones lying around, and they take up to 16 months to build.

The economic impact of such an event could be as high as US$2.6 trillion, the Lloyds report said.

The power industry isn't ignoring the threat. An April 2011 workshop between electricity grid operators from the U.S. and Canada resulted in the creation of a space weather alert system for the industry, and plans for coordination should a major geomagnetic storm be detected. Grid operators would have between 15 hours and two days to prepare for the storm by increasing reserves, reducing power transfers and lightening the load on susceptible equipment.

But any reduction in the availability of power could itself have an economic impact, so it's a situation to be avoided unless the likelihood of serious damage to the power grid is high.

Learning more about the sun's weather can only help scientists to provide warnings for such events.

"What we don't know is how it works, what in detail it will damage, or how likely it is that that damage will spread," Schrijver said. "And the difficulty with it is that these things happen only rarely. Once a century is when a really big solar event occurs, and our technological infrastructure has changed so much, we've never been exposed to it."