FALCON NORTHWEST MACH V

Daring to dream, with a rig of top-tier components

YOU MIGHT HAVE noticed that we didn’t have a Dream Machine in 2018. The realities of that monstrosity of work are harsh, and trying to get new parts that clearly outperformed 2017’s model wasn’t going to happen. As an alternative, allow us to present Falcon Northwest’s Mach V. If we were to spec out a Dream Machine for 2019 right now, the components would look uncannily similar to this.

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 it’s one-third of the price, if you’re keeping score. Outside of professional GPUs like the Quadro, there’s 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 required, as CPUintensive tasks can cause system power draw to peak at more than 650W, 400W of which comes from the overclocked processor. And if you load up the GPUs as well, you can hit 900–950W at the outlet.

The rest of the specs are similarly impressive, with top-of-the-line memory, motherboard, storage, and power. Wrap it all up in a very large custom chassis designed by Falcon Northwest, and you’re ready to rock. For good measure, add an Exotix paint job, a $1,100 add-on that can be customized further if you see fit. Rigs like this are truly a sight to behold.

If you’re looking at the spec list and thinking you could build a similar system for less, you’re absolutely right. But the fact is, you wouldn’t save that much money (about $2,000), and anyone considering this level of hardware supremacy is probably part of the “time is money” crowd. Having a reputable vendor like Falcon Northwest put it all together, including an extensive 48hour burn-in test suite, with system overclocking if you’re interested, plus a three-year warranty (and free overnight shipping provided during the first year), and there’s actually a value proposition of sorts on offer. MONEY MATTERS All of that naturally depends on your being able to put the hardware to good use. This is absolutely workstationclass hardware, with components and features that can give Nvidia’s DGX Station a run for its 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 Nvidia’s workstation, you’ll 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. While the Mach V is absolutely capable of playing games—just look at the benchmarks, where even 4K ultra plugs along at frame rates well in excess of 60, often more than double the performance of our zero-point 1080 Ti rig—it’s really the content creators and AI researchers looking for highperformance alternatives to Nvidia’s DGX Station who will find plenty to love with the Mach V. And you can always customize any aspect of the build, with the base models starting at a far more palatable $3,100, albeit with less impressive specs.

You don’t need rig like this for pure gaming purposes, or plenty of other tasks, to be honest. It’s complete overkill, and an increasingly large number of games don’t even have working multi-GPU support, so one of the Titan RTX cards often sits idle. But if you’re into cuttingedge research or you want to work on creating ray-traced games? 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. Now, we just need to figure out how to top it with our own Dream Machine. –JARRED WALTON