Falcon Northwest Mach V

The good: This latest Falcon Northwest Mach V options Intel's new six-core CPU, a replacement motherboard chipset, and also the usual assortment of high-end elements.

The bad: Gamers will not see abundant have the benefit of Intel's new chip compared with the previous flagship Core i7, and also the imposing Mach V case is not for everybody.

The bottom line: Anyway-heeled gamers with professional level application performance desires ought to verify this statement-making Falcon Northwest Mach V, however you'll be able to pay way less and still fancy top-notch gaming with an older CPU.



Like most boutique laptop vendors, Falcon Northwest includes a mandate to supply its customers the most recent laptop hardware. which means the corporate has an inclination to showcase Intel's latest CPUs, even when those chips are not the foremost obvious work for Falcon's hard-core gaming clientele. Well-heeled gamers who additionally have interaction in skilled content creation or different CPU-intensive tasks ought to take into account this $4,995 Falcon Northwest of Mach V and the a new six-core, 12-thread Intel Core i7-3930K processor. Pure gamers will get the same gaming expertise from PCs with older Intel chips that value [*fr1] the maximum amount.

The 3.2GHz Core i7-3930K within the Mach V could be a new, high-end variant of Intel's second-generation Core design. Code-named Sandy Bridge-E, the new chip is joined by 2 different new models, the higher-end three.3GHz Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition, and, returning in early 2012, the quad-core, 3.6GHz Core i7-3820.

Like earlier second-generation Core i7 CPUs, the newer models all features Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology and Turbo Boost two.0 technologies. Hyper-Threading emulates a second full set of processing cores, effectively doubling the amount of threads. therefore these six-core variants will behave as if they need twelve processing threads, and also the quad-core model becomes 8-threaded.

Turbo Boost works in conjunction with Hyper-Threading, ratcheting the clock speed per core up in accordance with the software workload and also the chip's thermal restrictions. due to Turbo Boost, the Core i7-3930K within the Mach V will probably hit three.8GHz, a minimum of on one core, before any tweaking.

The tweaking issue is vital. The "K" designation of the chip implies that its core multiplier is unlocked, and may therefore be overclocked. Falcon Northwest has pushed the bottom frequency of the Core i7-3930K to four.4GHz. A competing system with an equivalent chip from Velocity Micro hit four.7GHz.

That overclocking suggests that important added performance from Intel's K-designated chips. Older CPUs like last year's Core i7-2600K frequently showed up within the CNET lab clocked to four.8GHz from their three.6GHz customary clock speed. Notice how that vary of speed overlaps that of Intel's new chips? keep in mind that.

Along with the additional cores within the new Sandy Bridge-E CPUs comes a replacement motherboard chipset, the Intel X79. most vital of the new chipset's options is that in tandem with the new CPUs' integrated memory controller, it currently natively supports four-channel one,600MHz DDR3 memory, up from last year's two-channel, 1,333MHz customary.

The X79 chipset has another new options. It's one among the primary comparatively mainstream motherboards to supply eight memory slots, that ought to interest content creators. It additionally offers new PCI specific three.0 graphics card slots, a maybe too forward-looking feature, because it can solely profit future graphics cards with a lot of bandwidth.

source : cnet reviews