It’s hard to believe that in just a few months, we’ll be celebrating 30 years of building ultra-performance custom PCs. How the time does fly. And in that time, we’ve seen the industry change in ways that we could never have predicted when the company was officially founded way back in 1997. Things like the rise of GPU computing and evolution of machine learning into a form of Artificial Intelligence that everyone has daily access to. Our gaming graphics card partner NVIDIA leading that charge and eventually becoming the most valuable company in the world. The proliferation of smart phones and tablets and the ways they have changed our lives. And so many more.
But along that way, Velocity Micro has lead innovation in the custom PC business as well, in ways that you may not even know. Here are five PC innovations that Velocity Micro helped pioneer.
1: CAD Specific Hardware
When our founder Randy Copeland began building desktop PCs for friends and family back in 1992, hardware choices were pretty lean. But as a kitchen cabinet designer, Randy knew that there were large portions of the market in need of specialized hardware to run those power-hungry programs. He began designing his PCs with CPU speed and airflow in mind and would later begin to integrate NVIDIA Quadro graphics after they were introduced in 2000. The result was some of the earliest custom PCs built specifically for CAD software, effectively accelerating these workloads and making designers more productive.
2: Glass Side Panels
It’s hard to imagine a gaming PC without clear side panel, but they weren’t always as ubiquitous as they are today. In the late 90s, OEM PC builders like Dell and HP hid their components and wiring inside a solid steel box. But Velocity Micro (and yes, a few other OG builders of the time) knew that PC internals had visual appeal, especially when so much time and effort was dedicated to a meticulous hand wiring process. We worked directly with our case partners to begin including plexiglass and later tempered glass side panels as options in our gaming builds in the early 2000s in the effort to show off that craftsmanship. Competitors followed suit and soon the clear side panel was everywhere.
3: Liquid Cooling
When we first started building PCs, it was air cooling or nothing. But as we began to develop more advanced CPU overclocking techniques, we quickly realized that dissipating heat from those processors was the key to long term stable operation at those speeds. We began experimenting with custom liquid cooling kits with soft tubing in open loops in our lab to manage those increasing thermals. We were able to achieve some incredible benchmarks for the time, but the challenge of shipping an extremely fragile cooling system to a customer across the country was not a small one. We worked independently on our own liquicool solution but then in mid 2000, Asetek brought the first closed loop AIO liquid cooler to market. We quickly tested, validated, and began shipping those coolers on our high-end CPU and overclocked systems that year, finally bringing safe liquid cooling to the masses.
4: Smaller form factors
Does bigger mean better? We don’t always think so. But in our early days, those massive, heavy cases were the only way to fit full ATX boards, coolers, and all of the fans necessary to manage those thermals. Then as motherboards began to shrink in size, we too innovated with the market, developing smaller mATX cases like our MX line in 2008 and a true small form factor Smallblock chassis in 2015. But it wasn’t just reducing the size of our PCs that was so innovative, but rather our ability to maintain the extreme level of performance in those pocket sized builds without sacrifice. We continued to win Editors’ Choice awards, even as our PCs got smaller and smaller and haven’t looked back since. Today, our 6th Generation MX6 chassis continues to impress, helping us to bring home PC Magazine’s Best Gaming PC of the Year award for 2025.
5: Multicore processors
Where does the largest processor company in the world go to test one of their most groundbreaking architectures…maybe ever? To Velocity Micro. Back in 2006, Intel’s engineers were hard at work finalizing their first multicore consumer processor, code named Conroe, later renamed Core 2 Duo. But they needed to validate the new CPUs in real world situations and workloads, and that’s where we came in. Intel first sent those early samples to our engineering team for validation, then worked closely with our marketing team to place a launch day review of the new chips with CNET, a huge honor at the time. Since, Velocity Micro has been launch partners on every major new generation of Intel Core processors though Core 2 to the i series to Core Ultra, making new chips available to our customers on launch day.
So there you have it, five major innovations we’ve been in midst of over the course of our 30-year history. What will the next 30 years bring? I can’t wait to find out.
Josh has been with Velocity Micro since 2007 in various Marketing, PR, and Sales related roles. As the Director of Sales & Marketing, he is responsible for all Direct and Retail sales as well as Marketing activities. He enjoys Seinfeld reruns, the Atlanta Braves, and Beatles songs written by John, Paul, or George. Sorry, Ringo.
