Falcon Northwest Mach V (Intel Core i7-3770K)

Falcon Northwest, the maker of heavy-duty (and just plain heavy) gaming desktops for the serious user, is taking a big gamble with the latest version of its super-powered Mach V (Intel Core i7-3770K). Unlike most gaming machines, which are outfitted with Intel's highest-end processors, this one bears the company's top mainstream CPU. It's a well-performing chip, no doubt, even when, as here, it's not overclocked. But when you're paying upwards of $5,000 for a computer, do you want "well performing" or do you want the best? Despite other superior hardware, this Mach V falls just short of competing with other desktops we've seen in recent months, making this strong choice not quite ideal for the gamer who wants the most, the strongest, and the fastest PC available.

Design
With this Mach V, like the last one we looked at back in January, Falcon Northwest has ripped a page from competitor Maingear?s playbook. This system uses the Icon2 case, which is nearly identical in overall style to what you see with the Maingear Shift, thanks to a motherboard that has been rotated 90 degrees clockwise. This lets the vents for the video cards aim out the top panel of the case rather than the back, which takes better advantage of heat?s natural tendency to rise. This change doesn't have many day-to-day usability ramifications for the average user, but it sets the system apart even among unique, enthusiast-oriented system designs.

The rest of the Mach V's interior is similarly laid out to minimize heat and maximize airflow and convenience. The hefty 1,200-watt power supply is sequestered in its own bottom chamber, and a thin metal plate placed just to the right of the expansion slots keeps the video cards' heat isolated and provides a direct path for the air from the intake fans to be drawn upward and out of the case via a separate exhaust fan. Six vertically mounted 3.5-inch drive bays are right in the path of that air, and easy to access thanks to their removable trays. With the exception of the expansion slots, which require a Phillips screwdriver to work with, the entire inside of the Mach V has tool-free construction?you even access it by opening the two side panels with switches rather than thumbscrews.

In most other ways, the Mach V screams standard gaming desktop tower, with a black brushed-aluminum finish, a front-panel door, and on it even a logo for the company that glows when the machine is powered on. Once the case is fully closed?you'll also need a screwdriver to remove the top panel?it's almost impossible to tell how it differs from any other gaming desktop.

Features
As you?d expect from a gaming computer, this Mach V packs some potent hardware. Its CPU is Intel?s top-of-the-line third-generation Core (aka ?Ivy Bridge?) model, the Core i7-3770K, at its stock clock speed of 3.5GHz; if you want to overclock it, you?ll have to do that yourself. (At least Falcon Northwest has equipped it with a closed-loop liquid cooling system, should you choose to go that route.) A comfortable 8GB of memory is on hand as well. (You can install as much as 32GB, although getting there requires replacing the two 4GB DIMMs and filling the two other available slots.) Both those elements are nice, but it?s possible to improve upon them. The graphics, on the other hand, not so much: Two Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 cards are about as good a video package as you can get, and? guarantee that you'll get spectacular frame rates with the highest detail settings at any resolution you want to play.

On the storage front, a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD) is an ultra-speedy home for the Windows 7 Professional operating system (an unusual choice?Home Premium or Ultimate, which combines the Home Premium and Professional Features, would be much more common) and a fair number of the games you'll want to install, and a 3TB drive gives you lots of additional space for storing files as well. In case you still deal with discs, a Blu-ray combo drive gives you lots of flexibility in terms of what you burn and what you watch.

Connectivity is hardly a problem, with two USB 3.0 ports joining headphone and microphone jacks on the front panel, and the Asus P8Z77-V motherboard offering four USB 3.0, two USB 2.0, DisplayPort, HDDMI, DVI, VGA, Ethernet, and eight-channel audio ports on the rear panel. (You'll also find three DVI ports and one Mini DisplayPort jack on the back of each video card.)

Like every other gaming PC worth its salt, this Mach V arrives at your door entirely free of annoying bloatware. But it does have some additional expansion space: Four 3.5-inch and two 5.25-inch drive bays are still available, and one PCI Express (PCIe) x1 slot, a third PCIe x16 slot, and one standard PCI slot free for adding more cards.

The Mach V is covered by a three-year parts-and-labor warranty, which includes one year of overnight service.

Performance
Given its hardware, you naturally don?t have to worry too much about this Mach V?s performance from any perspective. With productivity times like 53 seconds (for Handbrake) and 2 minutes 21 seconds for our Photoshop CS5 test and 1,920-by-1,200, high-detail frame rates of 84.4 frames per second (fps) in Crysis and 202fps in Lost Planet 2, there?s never any serious question that it won?t be able to handle whatever you throw at it.

But is it the absolute best you can find given its price? With the exception of its top-ranking Futuremark 3DMark 11 score of 10,523, no. The latest versions of both the Maingear Shift Super Stock and the Origin Genesis alternated beating it out on both performance and gaming tests for one reason: They?re equipped with more powerful?and overclocked?Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge?Extreme CPUs. It?s tough to do too much better in terms of graphics than the Mach V's pair of GTX 690s, but top gaming results come from all of a system?s components working in concert, and the Core i7-3930K's larger amount of cache (12MB versus 8MB) and higher number of cores (six versus eight, or 12 versus eight when you factor in Hyper-Threading) simply let it deliver more punch.

There?s not a thing wrong with this Falcon Northwest Mach V, except that to get it you?ll be paying more than $5,000 for a system driven by what is, ultimately, a top-end midrange chip. For this reason, we're sticking with the Maingear Shift Super Stock as our Editors' Choice: Both it and this Mach V are comparable in many ways, but Maingear's system benefits from its top-tier CPU that gives you every benefit it has to bestow, and thus helps you out both when you're gaming and when you're not.

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