Packed with every top-tier component currently available, this Falcon Northwest Mach V is meant for serious work, but that didn't stop me from playing games.



Every time a UPS or FedEx delivery comes it sounds like Cujo is in my house. This happens on regular basis, but today I'm nearly as excited as my dog.

When I open the door I'm greeted by a very large box—well, I'm actually greeted by the FedEx person, but I only have eyes for the box. It's not quite as extreme as the wooden crates used by Origin, but after signing for the delivery I ask for help dragging the beast into the front room.

It's not every day you get to test a gaming PC that costs as much as a decent used vehicle—even if it's not exactly meant for gaming.


I asked Falcon Northwest to send me a no-holds-barred rig, and that's exactly what I got.

Inside the box is a custom painted Falcon Northwest Mach V PC, literally packed to the gills with every piece of extreme hardware imaginable. It's easy to scoff at the price, but when you start to break things down, it's really not much worse than the typical 15 percent markup on most PCs. Just the parts alone would set you back about $12,000. Add in the extensive burn-in testing, 'free' overnight shipping for repairs during the first year, a 3-year parts and labor warranty, and just the overall feeling of panache, it's not too hard to see where the price comes from.

Its ludicrously expensive price tag is why I'm choosing not to score this review (though we did give it a 9 in Maximum PC magazine). For PC Gamer, think of this as a look at what does—and, more importantly, what doesn't—pay off when building the absolute gnarliest PC currently possible.

But this isn't a PC built for gamers. It has the potential to be the fastest gaming PC around—when the stars align—but the price for that potential, not to mention the actual gaming experience, cannot possibly justify it.

Even if you have money to throw around, you're far better off dropping down to a Core i9-9900K, dual RTX 2080 Ti cards, and 64GB of total memory. Falcon Northwest can do that for you as well, if you want, and the price is only $8,119. Or you can trim down the storage setup and go with a single GPU and land closer to $5,000. But where's the fun in that?


Let's start at the top, with the pair of Nvidia's beastly Titan RTX cards, running in tandem with an NVLink bridge. Each has a whopping 24GB of GDDR5, and together these represent one-third of the price if you're keeping score. Outside of professional GPUs like the Quadro RTX 8000, there's simply nothing faster.

The same goes for Intel's Core i9-9980XE, which Falcon overclocked to 4.2-4.9GHz depending on how many cores are in use. A good liquid cooler is absolutely necessary, as CPU-intensive tasks can cause system power draw to peak at more than 650W, 400W of which comes from the overclocked processor. Load up the GPUs and this PC can peak at 950W at the outlet. Yeah, that 1200W Platinum PSU is actually required!

The rest of the specifications are similarly impressive, with top-of-the-line memory, motherboard, and storage. There's 8TB total of solid-state storage, half of which comes in a pair of RAID 0 Samsung 970 Evo M.2 SSDs. RAM is also maxed out with eight G.Skill 16GB DDR4-3000 DIMMs.


Wrap it up in a very large custom EATX chassis designed by Falcon Northwest and you're ready to rock. The chassis orients the graphics cards vertically, and there are stabilizers connected to keep the cards in place. It's a smart design, since running multiple GPUs can put a lot of weight on the PCIe slots normally. For good measure, Falcon added in an Exotix paint job, a $1,300 extra that can be customized as you see fit. Rigs like this are truly a sight to behold.

You could build a similar system for less, but anyone considering this level of hardware supremacy is probably part of the "time is money" crowd. Most likely, it's not even intended for gaming use—though it can certainly play any game you might want to run on it.

This X299 Mach V build features workstation class hardware, with components and features that give Nvidia's DGX Station a run for the money. Yes, it has two fewer GPUs than the DGX Station, but let's be clear: you can buy three of these Mach V systems for the price of a single DGX Station—and still have several thousand dollars to spare. And while you won't get the Tesla V100 32GB cards found in the DGX Station, you will get the enhanced ray tracing features and gaming performance of the newer Turing RTX cards. That's precisely the sort of use case that's popular with Falcon's customers, or so I'm told.


But you're probably here for the games, a peek into what sort of performance you can expect from the most bodacious hardware currently available. Diminishing returns and SLI woes be damned, let's see the benchmarks!

No, I don't mean Crysis. Can it run Crysis? Hell yeah, but then that hasn't really been a problem for a while. 4k, maxed out settings, 4xAA, and the Mach V still averages 122fps in Crysis, with minimums of 75fps. No sweat. But what about newer games—games that can put the ray tracing hardware to good use?

For reference, I put one of the Mach V Titan RTX GPUs into my standard graphics testbed as a reference point. That's a Core i7-8700K overclocked to 5.0GHz—one third the cores, higher clocks, and better latency for some tasks, particularly games. As we'll see in a moment, such a PC still generally wins out on gaming performance—X299 and Skylake-X processors end up with some compromises that don't usually benefit games.

I'm only including the 4k ultra results here, but at 1440p and below, Titan RTX SLI doesn't do so well. I've also included several other high-end to extreme GPU configurations by way of comparison.