Desktop Gaming Computer

Best Desktop Gaming Computer Falcon Northwest Mach V = $8,500

Best Desktop Gaming Computer Falcon Northwest Mach V. While some other gaming computers might deliver more bang for the buck, experts concur that the Falcon Northwest Mach V is the fastest gaming computer ever made — but only when it’s optioned with the very latest…

The latest gaming- and multimedia-oriented Mach V from Falcon Northwest belongs in the category of "if you have to ask, you can’t afford it." (It costs $8,395 as tested, if you must ask). The purple automotive paint job contributes to the Mach V’s price, as does the liquid-cooled 3.73-GHz Pentium 4 EE processor (overclocked to 4.25 GHz). But the pièce de résistance—and the reason we’re even looking at an $8,000 system—is the twin 512MB nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra cards in an SLI configuration.

The wizards at Falcon Northwest cooked us up a system with the first 512MB nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics cards. (These cards cost around $1,000 each—as much as many people spend on their entire system—and that’s if you can even find them.) We acknowledge that the price is exorbitant, but this system allows us to do something we’ve been waiting to do for the past six months: test Doom 3 at its vaunted Ultra quality level. This level requires 512MB cards to run all textures and other graphics uncompressed, so you see all the beauty and darkness the developers intended.

We were hard-pressed, however, to find parts of the game that showed significant improvements between High and Ultra quality. A few more lighting and shadow effects are visible, but not enough to blow us away. The overclocked 4.25-GHz P4EE processor, usually clocked at 3.73 GHz, runs blazingly fast and searingly hot, but is sufficiently cooled by the necessary liquid-cooling system. We attempted to clock the processor to 4.33 or even 4.5 GHz, but the system became unstable.

The system also runs the new nForce4 for Intel chipset, which is SLI-capable and is the first Intel motherboard chipset from nVidia. The nForce4 will support dual-core Pentium D and Pentium EE 840 processors, though that capability was not available from Falcon at testing time. The rest of the system, while high-end, is stuff we’ve seen before: Klipsch 5.1 surround speakers, a 16x dual-layer DVD burner, and a fast 8-ms 19-inch LCD monitor.

It’s no surprise that the Mach V’s performance on the SYSmark tests was blazingly fast too. Its scores of 242 for Office Productivity (OP) and 292 on Internet Content Creation surpass the latest from Dell and Overdrive PC. The single-threaded nature of the OP workload ensures that a highly clocked single-core system will outperform the dual-core Dell XPS Gen 5 on this test. On gaming, the Mach V handily beat the XPS, which is powered by a single graphics card. But the Overdrive Torque.SLI, tweaked to an ever-so-slightly higher level, beat the Mach V on the gaming tests. Running at the same quality levels and resolutions, the Torque.SLI outperformed the Mach V across the board on the 3D tests. For now, the appeal of 512MB graphics cards seems more about future-proofing than current real-world performance improvements. We didn’t have the Torque.SLI around to test at Ultra quality for comparison with the Mach V, but as of now, the Mach V didn’t show a particularly compelling advantage to raising the quality up to Ultra. It handily displays an average 70 frames per second at the 1,600-by-1,200 Ultra quality time demo, which surpasses the 60 fps that we consider the benchmark.

The Falcon Northwest Mach V is an outstanding performer, with cutting-edge technology. But even if you have ten G’s burning a hole in your wallet, pants pocket, and the ostrich leather seat of your Bentley, you might want to wait on the Mach V. You can gain higher gaming performance with a less expensive—yet still tricked-out and overclocked—Athlon 64 FX-55 SLI system.