MaximumPC 2006 10

T

here’s an annual event here at the

magazine: We set performance

records every September with the

Dream Machine and before we can fin-

ish guzzling the celebratory beer, Falcon

Northwest shows up to pee on our parade.

And we’re getting pretty sick of it. This time,

the company gave our Dream Machine a

good hosing with its new Mach V, which is

( sigh ) the fast-

est PC we’ve

ever seen—

again. Damn it!

But what

else would you

expect of a

machine featur-

ing Intel’s must-

have Core 2

Extreme X6800

CPU? We know

the chip over-

clocks like nuts,

but leave it to

the O.G. performance crew at Falcon to take

this chip to the very heights of its perfor-

mance. The stock X6800 clocks at 2.93GHz

and in our Dream Machine, we hit 3.3GHz

using air cooling. Falcon’s Mach V makes it

to a stable 3.73GHz using water. By stable,

we mean the machine never

hiccupped during two days of

benchmarking.

The build-out itself is top-

notch. The Core 2 Extreme

slots into an Asus P5N32-SLI

mobo with 2GB of Corsair

DDR2 RAM. We said no one

would have the nForce 500-

series chipset for Intel and we

were right. There are appar-

ently enough kinks in the new

nForce that Falcon had to

rely on its older nForce4 Intel

Edition boards. Two slightly

overclocked GeForce 7900

GTX cards in SLI handle

graphics duties, and Falcon

includes an Aegia PhysX

accelerator instead of a Sound

Blaster X-Fi card. Falcon says it normally

leaves it up to the customer to choose com-

ponents, but because we don’t recommend

configurations for review, the company

chose the physics over sound. Our Falcon

rep said that they’ll be shipping systems

holding both X-Fi and a PhysX cards soon,

but they couldn’t meet our deadline. That’s

too bad, because the price of the PhysX

card is pretty hard to justify given the mea-

ger selection of titles available that support

it. Does Falcon really think that someone

spending $8,400 on a rig will be playing Bet

on Soldier? And the inclusion of the extra-

neous PhysX card really rankles us when

we see the budget cuts made in crucial

areas—like storage. The Mach V features

two 150GB Raptor drives spinning at 10K,

for a total of 300GB of lightning-fast storage,

but you have nowhere to back up your files.

In the optical drive department, Falcon

puts both drives on the same IDE chain. We

dinged Monarch’s Nemesis in August for

doing something similar, so we thought we

had a gotcha on Falcon, too. In Monarch’s

case, having the two PX-760A drives on

the same chain pushed DVD burn times

over the three-hour mark when burning to

both drives simultaneously. In the Mach V,

Falcon doesn’t use two burners but a single

Plextor PX-760A and a Sony DVD-ROM.

Does it suffer the same problem? To test

the optical chain, we copied an 8x DVD+R

disc from the reader to the writer using the

reviews Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized

78 MAXIMUMPC october 2006

Falcon Northwest

Mach V

This Core 2 Extreme machine takes a +5 Vorpal sword to the benchmarks

The $1,500 paint job will appeal most to the Society for

Creative Anachronism folks who enjoy shouting “fire-

ball” at each other.

under the hood

VIDEOCARD GeForce 7900 GTX in SLI

(670MHz core, 820MHz RAM)

SOUNDCARD Onboard HD Audio

CASE Silverstone ICON

OthER BFG Aegia Physix card,

Sanyo-Denke water-cooling

BOOt: 51 sec. DOWN: 8 sec.

brAin S

bEAUTY

CPU Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800

([email protected])

MOBO Asus P5N32-SLI (nForce

4 SLI Intel Edition)

RAM 2GB Corsair (two 1GB sticks)

LAN Dual Gigabit LAN

hARD DRIVES Two 150GB Raptors

in RAID 0

OPtICAL Plextor PX-760A and Sony

DDU-1615

benchmArkS

SYSmark2004 SE 275

zERO POINt SCORES

Premiere Pro^3000 sec

Photoshop CS 2 295 sec

recode 2.0 2100 sec

fEAr 75 fps

Quake 4 110.5 fps

0       10%  20%        30%     40%     50%     60%     70%     80%     90%     100%

482

1,610 sec

150 sec

645 sec (+225.58%)

140.0 fps

92.0 fps

Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine, using a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus

A8N32-SLI motherboard, two GeForce 7900 GTX videocards in SLI mode, a Western Digital 4000KD hard drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and

a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850 PSU.

falcon apparently thought
this review PC was headed for
Maxim , not Maximum PC.