Falcon Northwest Mach V Review
When NVIDIA introduced its 3-way SLI technology last month, the announcement was met with both excitement and skepticism. On one hand, three GPUs had the potential to run some of the PC gaming industry's most taxing titles at respectable - and acceptable - settings with impressive frame rates. Indeed, NVIDIA boasted that a 3-way SLI setup could deliver "up to a 2.8x performance increase over a single GPU system" and also muster "60 frames per second at resolutions as high as 2560x1600 and with 8x anti-aliasing." In addition, the graphics technology company stated that a 3-way SLI could allow Crysis to be played at high resolutions such as 1920x1200 with all the advanced DirectX 10 effects such as motion blur, ambient occlusion, and soft shadows turned on.
In essence, 3-way SLI is expected to do what Quad SLI could not. When NVIDIA introduced Quad SLI in 2006, expectations were high - after all, the technology united four graphics cores from the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 series. And while initial impressions of Quad SLI were impressive for certain games, the overall performance of the technology fell woefully short (of course, DirectX 9 and Windows XP limitations were factors). As a result, NVIDIA scaled back to a three-GPU system (though it is planning another shot at SLI on one card this year). And as we discovered, sometimes less is more.
Falcon Northwest's new Mach V model with 3-way SLI.
Falcon Northwest, meanwhile, wasted no time embracing the triple GPU era with its newest edition of the long-running Mach V series. The PC maker sent us a 3-way SLI version of the gaming desktop; along with an Intel Core 2 QX9650 platform overclocked to 4.16 GHz, the Mach V features three GeForce 8800 Ultra cards with 768 MB of memory each. The rest of the system is nearly as impressive as the triple shot of 8800 Ultra. The Mach V's case is an Icon chassis with Falcon Northwest's custom "Blue Rain" style paint job (which looks more like "Purple Rain," actually - no pun intended). The exterior of the case has two hinged panels; the top door, which boasts a slick LED-lit Falcon Northwest logo, conceals the six disc drive bays (our Mach V came with a single Blu-ray/HD DVD/DVD-RW combo drive from LG). The bottom door opens up to a large SilverStone fan pointed directly at the system's Hitachi terabyte hard drive (the power buttons and four USB ports are accessible through openings in the bottom door).
A front view of the Mach V with its panel open.
Unscrew the side panel of the Mach V and the first thing you'll notice is the stack of 8800 Ultras at the bottom of the case. The 3-way SLI is connected to an EVGA 780i motherboard and woven around the Mach V's insides is a Sanyo-Denki SanAce H20 CPU cooler. A SilverStone 1 KW power supply is bolted to the top of the case, next to the SanAce's fan. The Mach 5 also carries 2 GB of Corsair Dominator memory and runs Windows Vista Ultimate. Check out the full system specs on the next page.
An inside look at the Mach V and its three GeForce 8800 Ultras.
A closer look at the Mach V's three 8800 Ultras.
The top half of the Mach V, including the Asus 780i motherboard and Sayno-Denki H20 CPU cooler.
Join our discussion on this topic
