First, the good news: The Mach V with Titan RTX SLI wins out in the overall performance metric. It's not a big win—11 percent faster—but it's a win. The bad news: Out of 13 games tested, half (seven) show no performance improvement or even a negative delta compared to a single Titan RTX. It's also worth pointing out the Titan RTX performance relative to a 2080 Ti, where it's only six percent faster for more than double the price.

I knew this outcome was likely, and it's why I haven't recommended SLI or CrossFire as a reasonable gaming solution for several years. There are games where it works great—Strange Brigade being the poster child for multi-GPU scaling—but they're becoming increasingly rare. In contrast, benchmarks that take advantage of multiple GPUs look much better. 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra scored 16,847 and 3DMark Port Royal scored 16,861.

Also of note, while I didn't include graphs showing DirectX Raytracing (DXR) performance in any of the games that support the technology (Battlefield 5, Metro Exodus, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider), I did test those games. BF5 averaged 79fps at 1440p ultra, and 52fps at 4k ultra. Metro Exodus is even more demanding, getting just 67fps at 1440p high (not ultra!) and 39fps at 4k high. Shadow of the Tomb Raider ends up in the middle of those two, averaging 85fps at 1440p ultra and 46fps at 4k ultra. That's without DLSS, however, which boosts performance by about 30 percent at 4k.

The problem with all of those games is that the DXR implementations being used do not currently utilize multi-GPU setups. That's a shame, because if ever there was a category of games where multi-GPU could make sense, it's DXR.

So gaming on the X299-based Mach V is mostly a bust—or at least, not particularly impressive, considering the price and specs. But what about workstation use? The Titan RTX cards do have one notable advantage compared to a regular GeForce RTX card, namely, driver optimizations for certain professional applications. SPECviewperf 13 is a standard industry benchmark that measures performance in exactly those types of workloads—Maya, SolidWorks, and more.

Comparing my GPU testbed with an RTX 2080 Ti to the Falcon Northwest Mach V, a few of the SPECviewperf tests really put the extra CPU cores and professional GPU drivers to good use. Showcase is slightly faster, Solidworks performance is 25 percent higher, Energy is nearly 60 percent faster, Catia is close to 70 percent faster—and then there's Siemens NX (SNX), where the Titan RTX is 19 times as fast. That's the best-case sort of workload.

Of course, there are other professional applications where the 2080 Ti rig is basically tied with the Mach V. The 3ds Max, Creo, Maya, and Medical tests all slightly favor my standard GPU testbed, a bit like in games.

Still, depending on what software you're running, the semi-pro Titan RTX can be a worthwhile upgrade. Basically, Titan RTX has many of the same driver benefits as a Quadro RTX 6000 card, but it costs $2,499 compared to $4,000.

Interestingly, none of the SPECviewperf 13 tests benefit from the second GPU. That's not to say there are no professional applications that will use multi-GPU, but support tends to be limited. Software developers and AI researchers who want to explicitly work with multiple GPUs can obviously use both graphics cards.

Other benchmarks outside of games show similarly impressive performance. The Mach V scores 4,099 in Cinebench, and the RAID 0 OS drive manages 3260MB/s read and 3161MB/s write performance. It appears to be running the M.2 SSDs through the PCH, which means throughput is limited to the DMI 3.0 connection. Still, you're not likely to get any faster from storage performance for a while, not without an interface upgrade.

You don't need this sort of rig for pure gaming purposes, or plenty of other tasks to be frank. It's complete overkill, and an increasingly large number of games (and other applications) don't even have working multi-GPU support, meaning one of the Titan RTX cards is often sitting idle.

As impressive as this Mach V is, it's not something we recommend for dedicated gamers, no matter how deep the pockets. You'd be better served building your own high-end PC, or even an extreme gaming PC, for a fraction of the cost. Very few gamers have a need for more than 2TB of SSD storage, or a Titan RTX, or an X299 motherboard and CPU. Z370/Z390 is a much better value and is faster in games.

If you're looking for something a bit less extreme, it's easy to trim down the specs to get a far more reasonable—though still exotic—build from Falcon Northwest. But if you're into cutting edge research or you want to work on creating ray traced games or machine learning? The only way you're going to significantly improve on the Mach V is to wait for the next round of GPU and CPU updates, which could be a year or more away.