WHEN WE ASKED industry veteran Falcon Northwest to provide us with a desktop that could crush benchmarks and had a long-haired dude on the side, it delivered—no questions asked. Joking aside, the latest iteration of the company’s popular Talon gaming PC is testament to FNW’s excellence and experience in building awesome PCs. Falcon’s towers are built for gamers and power users, and while you might want a slightly different configuration for video editing, our 20th Anniversary Talon was made to crush any gaming benchmark into a fine powder.
Falcon Northwest’s Talon has base model configurations ranging from $3,000 to $4,000, and that’s without checking any optional boxes. Our build came with all the trimmings for the tidy sum of $5,316, and included a pair of RTX 2080 Supers, powered by a Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, with 32GB of G.Skill Trident Z 3,200MHz RAM. To top it all off, an AIO cooler emblazoned with the FNW logo kept the CPU temperature hovering around a steady 60 C, even under load.
This story is from the Holiday 2019 edition of Maximum PC.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the Holiday 2019 edition of Maximum PC.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
NZXT C1500 Platinum
Top-tier performance and efficiency
Nvidia DLSS vs AMD FSR
Which AI upscaling technique has the edge?
World of Goo 2
Goo-d enough for two
BenQ X300G 4K Short Throw Projector
Priced high, yet punchy
Hyte Thicc Q60
Almost more mobile phone than CPU cooler
Remove stalkerware from your PC
ACCORDING TO KASPERSKY’S LATEST ‘State of Stalkerware’ report, over 40 percent of those surveyed worldwide said they’d experienced stalking or suspected that they were being stalked.
BUILD AN IT SUPPORT HUB
Discover how to use RustDesk to provide remote assistance and control your own devices remotely with Nick Peers
AMD's turn to drop the ball?
WITH INTEL'S RAPTOR LAKE CPUs falling over, the company firing around 15,000 employees, and cancelling its 2024 innovation event, AMD must have been enjoying the view - until its new Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs rolled out. So, is AMD's CPU a minor stumble or game-changing fumble?
Intel issues fix for Raptor Lake degradation
EARLIER THIS YEAR, I wrote about difficulties I was having with a Core 19-13900K processor (see MPC230 Tech Talk). Little did we realize that we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg. While most complaints have involved the unlocked Core i9 Raptor Lake CPUs, it appears the instability problems build up and potentially impact many Raptor Lake-13th and 14th Gen Core CPUs, with Intel identifying 22 different desktop parts.
AMD Ryzen 7 9700X
The new Zen 5 CPUs are here—time to benchmark!