Falcon Northwest Mach V

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

- Jarred Walton

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 CPU-intensive 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.