MaximumPC 2005 05

Reviews

68 MA XIMUMPC MAY 2005

Falcon Northwest

Mach V

OC’d SLI P4 stomps our new

benchmarks into the ground

Y

eah, we’re hardware junkies.

And we’re always chasing that

next high. But as with any other

addiction, the highs are harder and

harder to come by. Gear that had us

drifting on a heavenly cloud of bliss

three months ago might fail to raise

our pulse today.

So when vendors wave “amazing”

new hardware under our noses—say,

an Athlon 64 FX-55 box with SLI—do

we get the shakes? FX-55? SLI? Bah!

We use those parts for our zero-points,

man. We need a score— a score!

Anticipation ran high when we

uncrated Falcon Northwest’s Mach

V, even though this wasn’t the dual-

core box we’d been hoping for (Intel

just wasn’t game

this early).

But the water-

cooled Mach

V packs Intel’s

new 3.73GHz

Pentium 4

Extreme Edition,

overclocked to

4.25GHz. And

truth be told,

with few apps

taking advantage

of the multiple

threads a DC

offers, the higher-

clocked, larger-

cached Extreme Edition might be

preferable. Until now, even an over-

clocked P4 would get its butt kicked

by a Sempron with SLI, so Falcon

chose nVidia’s new nForce4 SLI Intel

Edition to power its rig.

Besides supporting SLI, the new

chipset also runs DDR2/667, which

might help DDR2 shed its reputa-

tion for poor performance. Falcon

didn’t settle for just DDR2/667,

though. The company actually

slipped two DDR2/800 modules

into the Mach V. We certainly didn’t

expect DDR2/800 this early, but

Falcon assured us its vendor, Corsair,

would have no problems supplying

the higher-clocked memory.

Topping things off are two new

GeForce 6800 Ultra cards, each of

which is outfitted with a 512MB

frame buffer: That’s as much in each

card as some poor saps run in main

memory. The new cards sport Dual

Link DVI transceivers, which let them

work with Apple’s 30-inch Cinema

Display. Previously, the only way to

get Apple’s uber monitor to work with

a PC was to drop in a workstation

graphics card. Unfortunately, a driver

bug made the monitor unable to run

at its native 2560x1600 in SLI mode.

Falcon and nVidia tell us they’re

aware of the bug and promise to have

it fixed before the rig is available to

the public.

The Mach V’s performance was

disheartening—for us, that is. We

established new benchmarks just this

April in hopes of raising the bar and

keeping it there for at least 12 to 18

months. The Mach V walked in and

wiped the floor with our benchmarks.

It was faster by almost 25 percent in

SYSmark2004, which tests real-world

app performance. In Premiere Pro, the

Mach V finished 55 percent faster;

and in Game 3 of 3DMark 2005, it

was a phenomenal 74 percent faster.

The Mach V now holds the record

for every benchmark we use to gauge

a PC’s performance. The only disap-

pointing number we saw was in Doom

3 ; there, the Mach V managed to just

barely squeeze past the ABS Ultimate

M6 we reviewed last month. On the

other hand, we cranked up Doom 3 to

Ultra quality on the Mach V, and saw

absolutely no performance hit.

Falcon tells us there are two games

that can take advantage of the dual

512MB frame buffers: Doom 3 and

Sony’s EverQuest II. In EQII, textures

feature more details than they would

on a card with a mere 256MB frame

buffer; and as we just mentioned, you

can enable Ultra quality in Doom 3

with nary a performance hit.

Does all this leave us with any-

thing to complain about? We do have

a couple of quibbles. First, there’s the

Mach V’s use of engineering-sample

parts. We do occasionally get ES

parts—usually processors or video-

cards—but the Mach V is composed

of an ES mobo and two videocards.

Falcon says it’s close to finalizing its

UNDER THE HOOD

BUNDLE

Windows XP Professional, Nero 6 OEM, CyberLink

PowerDVD

AUDIO

Soundcard Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

FINE DETAILS

BOOT: 45 sec. DOWN: 10 sec.

And we’re always chasing that

Packing nForce SLI for P4 and 512MB 6800 Ultras, this box is an

overdose of new technology.

DISPLAY

Videocard Two GeForce 6800 Ultras 512MB in

SLI (400MHz core, 500MHz DDR)

Monitor 30-inch Apple Cinema Display LCD

STORAGE

Hard drives Two 300GB Maxtor DiamondMax

10 (7,200rpm SATA, 16MB cache) in

RAID 0 on nForce4

Optical Lite-On SOHW 1673S (16x

DVD-/+R, 4x DVD+DL, 48x CD-R),

Lite-On SOHd-167T (16x DVD-ROM)

Case Silverstone Nimiz with ICON

lighting in front door and 600 watt

Silverstone PSU

Fans/extras Water-cooled CPU, 120mm fan, and

two 80mm fans

0 20% 40% 60% 80%

PERCENT FASTER

ZERO

POINT

SCORES

SYSmark2004

Premiere Pro

Photoshop CS

Divx Encode

3DMark 05

Doom 3

201

620 sec

286 sec

1812 sec

29.3 fps

77.1 fps

100%

247

398 sec

256 sec

1423 sec

80 fps

50.9 fps

MACH V SCORES

Our zero-point reference systems uses a 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-55, 2GB of DDR400 Crucial

Ballistix RAM, two nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra cards in SLI, a Maxtor 250GB DiamondMax10,

a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, a PC Power and Cooling TurboCool 510 Deluxe Express, and

Windows XP Pro with SP2.

THE BRAINS

CPU Intel 3.73GHz Pentium 4

Mobo Reference nForce4 SLI Intel Addition

RAM 1GB Corsair Micro DDR2/800

I/O ports Six USB 2.0 High Speed, six-pin Fire

Wire, serial port, PS/2 parallel port

LAN Gigabit Ethernet