Falcon Northwest Mach V

[ Music ] ^M00:00:03 >> Rich: Hi, I'm Rich Brown, Senior Editor for CNET.com. Today we're gonna take a look at the Falcon Northwest Mach V; this is a super, super high-end gaming system it costs about 8 grand so we're really looking at a used car here more or less. This system is an Editor's Choice winner mostly because it broke every performance benchmark record that we have. Now, the reason is because the system has the fastest CPU on the market right now and it comes with Intel's Core I7965 Extreme edition. Falcon Northwest being who it is, of course, they over-clocked it but in general the system has some of the best parts around. Behind the front door here we have 2 optical drives one of which is a Blu-ray burner, obviously that's great you probably wouldn't want to bring this into your living room but if you want to watch Blu-ray movies on your desk you can absolutely do it with this PC. Down here you've got a set of USB ports as well as a couple audio jacks and a Firewire port. Now, on the backside you can see a full array of ports and inputs, there are 2 graphics cards down here neither of which has an HDMI output built-in but Falcon Northwest did include a DVI to HDMI adapter so if you want to go out to HDMI you certainly can. Up here you can see all the other ports you've got 6 USB ports, Firewire input, digital audio and Analog audio as well as 1 eSATA drive connector. One thing we like in particular is you can see on the side panel, the of the case and here on the back there's sound dampening phone that makes the system nice and quiet so despite all this power it's not like you have a jet engine in your office. Now, the graphic cards in this system are a pair of ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards, between the fast CPU and the 4 3D chips you can play pretty much any game you want on this system at the highest detail setting so if you have a 30 inch LCD plug it in jack up all the settings and you'll be good to go. Now, to achieve the over-clocked CPU Falcon had to go with a liquid cooling system and you can see that connected to the CPU here and it winds kind of up here behind the system fan, I mean it keeps it nice and cool and also relatively quiet 'cause that means it's one less fan spinning inside the case. Here you can see 6 memory slots, that's gonna become more and more common with Core I7 especially on the high-end mother boards. There's 12G of RAM inside this PC, that's probably the upper limit of what we're gonna see for at least a little while, ya know, never say never, of course. Digital media editors, anyone who needs to move large chunks of data at a time very quickly will be very happy with the hardware inside this case. Finally, over here you can see the drive [inaudible] we wish it faced out but what can you do? There's a standard 2 Terabyte here and tucked back here is an Intel solid-state hard drive. Now, we've tested the Intel drive by itself, it is super fast so launching applications, hopefully, loading levels and games, really you'll see a difference between this system with a solid-state in another system that has same hardware but only traditional hard drives. Now, we should also point out that you do get a little bit of expandability here there's room for a couple more hard drives there's one XPI express slot and one standard PCI slot buried down in here. So overall this system really delivers on the promise of being one of the fastest desktops around. So, I'm Rich Brown and this is the Falcon Northwest Mach V. ^E00:03:11