V3 Traverse: The march of small machines continues The enthusiast PC market seems to be experiencing a bit of bipolar disorder these days. It’s either represented by massively huge systems so big they blot out the sun, or teeny, tiny boxes that you could slip under your arm and then skateboard to a LAN party. The V3 Traverse falls into the latter category. Built in BitFenix’s cool little Prodigy case, the Traverse is a kissing cousin to our popular "Small Gaming PC." Well, except that the Traverse is a full-on freedom-kiss in the graphics department. We’ve seen snaps of the BitFenix Prodigy with a dual-GPU card in it, but we were skeptical until now. The V3 Traverse sports none other than the fastest card in town: a GeForce GTX 690. Cracking open the Traverse, we were literally shocked to see the entire box running on a Corsair CX600 PSU. Why the amazement? We’re just so used to dual cards sucking up power by the megawatts that a “mere†600 watt PSU seemed surprising. Measuring 16x10x14 inches, the V3 is the smallest box we’ve tested with a GeForce GTX 690. With the GeForce GTX 690 rated to consume 300 watts of juice, that doesn’t leave much for the rest of the system. V3 gets away with the smaller PSU because the Mini-ITX board and case don’t allow you to build out to, say, five hard drives and a crapload of other accessories. Still, it’s probably a bit less headroom than you'd like, especially on sweltering days when the temperature in your roo
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