PC Gamer - March 2012

TEsTED
Mach V

Falcon Northwest

Falcon Northwest has built up a lot of experience in the 14 years since PC Gamer declared it the company that lit- erally “created the gaming PC.” The latest Mach V doesn’t buck that trend either. Built around the latest technology available from Intel and Nvidia, this rig is fashioned to take you from today to tomorrow without being immediately outdated and obsolete.

What does that mean? Intel ostensibly will follow a two-CPU socket platform for the foreseeable future. The first is the well-known LGA 1155 and chips such as the famously fast and cheap Core i7-2600K. To that Intel is now adding its new high-end LGA 2011 socket (which effectively kills LGA 1366) and CPUs such as the 3.2GHz Core i7-3930K.

What advantage does the Core i7-3930K bring over the cheaper Core i7-2600K? The most notable feature is its two extra cores, but there’s also double the system memory bandwidth and capacity. Not that any game will need it today, but you could easily get to 32GB of RAM for under $200 right now. You can’t do that on LGA 1155 and a Core i7-2600 for less than $1,000. Systems using LGA 2011 also give you far more PCIe slots (and they’re officially PCIe 3.0 too).

As gaming is still mostly about the GPU, Falcon chooses wisely with a pair of EVGA’s new Classified GeForce GTX 580s in SLI mode. These cards feature jumbo sized frame buffers of

3GB—that’s double a standard GeForce GTX 580—and are also clocked at 855MHz on the cores and 1,710MHz on the RAM. That’s a healthy overclock over the standard GeForce GTX speeds of

772MHz cores and 1,544MHz
on the RAM. Falcon says the extra-
large frame buffers greatly help in
games such as Battlefield 3 when
running on the Ultra settings at resolu-
tions of 1920x1200 and above.

Chip off the block

The Mach V’s case is a custom job with a beautifully laser-cut, backlit Falcon Northwest logo in the door. The aluminum chassis is easy on the eyes, but it’s hard on your deskspace. The size can be a plus though. Cramming too much hardware into a small box usually results in either overheating or unbearable fan noise. Even under heavy gaming loads, the Mach V was relatively quiet. I tried to melt the videocards and CPU with stress tests, but all I did was waste my time.

Performance with the SLI cards is out-
standing, especially when compared to the
budget box PC Gamer
reviewed last month.

The machine is capable of playing any game today without issue. The big question is whether it’s worth it. There’s a price premium for the LGA 2011 platform that’s not always going to benefit the average gamer. But with games starting to take advantage of quad-cores now, a six-core machine future-proofs you. The six-cores also come in quite handy if you edit video, use 3D modeling applications, or do similar GPU-heavy tasks on your PC.

The big question is if you

No, you haven’t been Incepted. The inverted design tilts the guts 90 degrees to aid cooling.

work on your PC or just play. Falcon’s illustrious name also adds to that cost, but as the OG in gaming PCs and a rep for superb service, it’s worth it to those who want unbeatable speed and a safety net in case any hardware fails. n

Gordon Mah Ung

$5,609 ◆ www.falcon-nw.com ◆ Category: Dream

BENCHmarks ◆ 3Dmark11/Vantage P13568/P52949 ◆ s TaLkEr: CoP 129fps/189/219 ◆ Far Cry 2: 191fps/210/215
◆ Unigine Heaven 2. 5 51fps/84/104 ◆ All games run at 2560x1600/1920x1200/1680x1050 at Ultra or Ultra High settings
If your primary appeals are an
eye toward future upgrades,
existing top tech, and using your
PC for more than just gaming,
the Mach V is your soulmate.