Vanquish 4 lvl 2 review

I thought I should leave a post of my thoughts on my recent purchase of a Vanquish 4 lvl 2. I have had it a week now, I wanted to wait a bit until I had a chance to wring it out and the new had worn off.

1. Purchase experience. When I decided to order it, the website was experiencing issues (par for the course for me). I called and got a young lady on the phone (I did not get her name as I should have), she was unaware of the website problems and she had the same issue when trying to place the order. She asked for my phone number and promised to call me back after she called her IT folks and got the website fixed. I figured, a call back, I've heard that before..........She called me back about 20 minutes later and said OK, it's fixed, let's complete the order. She was very helpful and we got the order placed in just a few minutes.

Did I mention that she spoke perfect American English? I have been buying my computers from ---- for many years, and in fact, had placed an order for an --------- gaming computer, as ---- had just purchased them a while back. Later, I looked at their website again, and found that with the specials they were running, I could upgrade my video card for $0. I called their customer service number, and after 45 minutes, was able to speak to a person who was speaking what I will assume was English, but was very hard to communicate with. I found that I was unable to reconfigure for the upgraded card, but was able to (FINALLY) get him to understand to cancel the order. Most frustrating customer service experience EVER. Needless to say, I am DONE with ----. That's when I remembered Digital Storm.

Did I mention that the CS rep at Digital Storm spoke perfect English and was helpful? The only place I can see that she could have done better was in her estimation of time for the build/shipping. Better to under promise and over deliver than the other way around.

The wait was kind of agonizing. The CS rep did tell me that for a preconfigured (i.e. not custom) system, there would be no updates until the system shipped. I'm not sure of the reason for this, but guys, you may want to rethink that. Take a page out of the Amazon book, keep your customer informed. Order something from Amazon and you get informed anytime ANYTHING happens with your order, and it really does make for a good buying experience.
Moving on, DELIVERY DAY, a couple of days later than promised. I was happy to see they chose UPS over FEDEX, as FEDEX is crappy to deal with, at least in my area.

HUGE BOX!!!!! Computer was well packed and the expanding foam packet to keep the video card from moving is a nice touch, probably not that necessary, but a good idea. I got everything unpacked and looked over, read what needed to be read, and took the side off of the case and removed the foam insert surrounding the video card. NICE! The inside of this thing looks better than any computer I have ever seen. Very professional job of routing/securing the wiring. You can tell that somebody has pride in their work. My only complaint, and it is not really a complaint, is that the hard drive was installed into its mount a little kitty-wampus. I thought, no problem, I will just remove and reinstall, but it was well wedged, and I thought to myself just my luck I will break something, so I just left it alone. No big deal, it can't be seen with the side cover on, and it works just fine.

OK, everything set up and plugged in and hit the power button. Up comes a screen asking me if I want to restore a disk image. ?????? I think about it for a moment and realize that I had plugged in a USB hard drive that I use for back up storage. I unplugged the drive and rebooted and all was well. This thing comes up FAST with the SSD!!!!! I tried entering the BIOS and disabling the boot from the external drive and was unable to do so. I called tech support on this and had to leave a number for a call back. They called me back in less than 10 minutes and I discussed this issue with the tech (I'm really bad about getting names), and he told me this is a common issue with gaming motherboards, and they are not really sure how to fix it. OK, no big deal, I can leave it unplugged until I need it. Ends up I didn't have to do that. The manufacturer of the drive,Toshiba, had designed it as an imaging drive and had some sort of imaging software preinstalled. Once I remove everything on the drive except for my backups, no problem, I can now leave it plugged in.

On to performance. My needs as far as gaming performance are not that great, hence the level 2 instead of level 3. I play Diablo 3, StarCraft, Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4. This rig plays all of them maxxed out and in the past week, I have never even heard the video card fans kick on (has the ASUS Strix version of the 960, which if I am not mistaken keeps the fans off if not needed). I can barely hear the case fans at all.

Sorry to be so long winded, but, in a nutshell, would I buy from DS again, YES. Would I recommend them to a friend, YES.

Lon

Congrats on your system and experience. Thank you for posting.

Nice and Congrats.