Falcon Northwest's Core 2 Extreme Mach V reviewed

Intel fanboys will be delighted -- and AMD should be a little worried -- to know that the fine folks at PC Mag have nothing but positive things to say about Falcon Northwest's new Core 2 Extreme (formerly named "Conroe") toting Mach V. The specs are impressive all around, including two 10,000RPM 150GB SATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration, 2GB RAM and two ATI X1900 3D cards, but the real news here is how much of an improvement they saw over the older, AMD-based systems. Many of PC Mag's old benchmark records were crushed, with the Mach V suffering its only defeat at the hands of one of Polywell's quad SLI machines in the Doom 3 test. If that wasn't impressive enough, the addition of a liquid-cooling system also helps this gaming rig run cooler and much quieter than previous versions. As you probably could have guessed, all that performance doesn't come cheap, so you'll have to decide for yourself whether or not a fancy paintjob and the ability to run your favorite PC games at 2,560 x 1,600 is worth the $7,000 price. But hey, at least it's not $10,000.

[Kevin @ Jul 15th 2006 6:38PM]

Wow.. and Apple charges a premium.

[CitrusC @ Jul 15th 2006 6:43PM]

$7,000?! I think not! I could build the same specification for a couple of thousand dollars less, the premium you pay for a few pretty stickers these days is pretty insane, almost as bad as the Alienware units!
[/rant]

Will be getting my hands on one of those new chips ASAP though, they are rather yummy.

[Spyvie @ Jul 15th 2006 7:06PM]

I’d choose this over the “Boutique” Dell XPS any day, Falcon NW is of by and for Enthusiasts.

I’d still much rather build it myself though...

[slackerman @ Jul 15th 2006 8:51PM]

Until Intel moves away from the use of a front side bus, they'll be at a competitive disadvantage...one which silicon can help to win, but only briefly.

[Spyvie @ Jul 15th 2006 10:30PM]

Slakerman, Intel will be at a disadvantage with memory latency until they move to an on-die controller in a couple of years. That said the performance figures speak for themselves, Conroe is faster, way faster, and will be faster than AMD for at least 18mos or so.

Posted from my home built badass A64...

[tekdemon @ Jul 16th 2006 1:17AM]

Wow...I had seen the previous engineering sample benches but I'd never seen photoshop benchmarks before...

And damn...it beat the Athlon 64 silly in that one...almost a 2x performance advantage (depending on which A64 system it was up against)...
Guess it's a good thing (for Apple anyway) that Apple went with Intel Core 2's since Photoshop has been such an important app for the Mac historically.

I can't wait to finally build an unbelievable new rig...

[Einhanderkiller @ Jul 16th 2006 2:16AM]

They should've done quad-SLI 7950 GX2s instead of X1900 CFs. :)

[Keaton @ Jul 16th 2006 2:52AM]

Man these guys must be making quite a large profit margin... I thought the new Intel Core 2 chips were supposed to be cheap... I guess they are if you can find them :-) Still it amazes me that Intel has produced a processor better than AMD. Who thought this day would ever come? I hope in 18 months or whatever, AMD comes out with something even more badass... Man don't you love competition...

http://thesoggycow.phpnet.us

[Greg @ Jul 16th 2006 8:32AM]

a RAID 0 system? so if 1 hard drive ever dies, they are both useless...and with 10k rpm, this computer will problably last maybe a year or two before you have to completly rebuild it.

[Hap @ Jul 16th 2006 10:58AM]

Pretty nice specs...but Intel...and ATi...eewwww

AMD: 256 -1
Intel: -9 +1

[sdsdv10 @ Jul 16th 2006 12:12PM]

"a RAID 0 system? so if 1 hard drive ever dies, they are both useless...and with 10k rpm, this computer will probably last maybe a year or two before you have to completely rebuild it."

Greg, although not specifically mentioned, I would assume the 10K hard drives are WD Raptors. There are WD enterprise class drives with a 5 year warranty. My own experience and that which can be found on the web, rates very highly for these drives. I believe one can safely say, they will probably last more than one or two years.

Now, as for the argument about using RAID 0. That is another discussion entirely. Every benchmark I have every read on review sites state that RAID 0 makes little or no difference in the desktop environment. Yet, I see it time and time again on enthusiast forums/sites. Not sure why, as it certainly does increase ones vulnerability to system crashes. To each his/her own I guess.

[Shaun @ Jul 16th 2006 2:53PM]

"They should've done quad-SLI 7950 GX2s instead of X1900 CFs"

Don't know if you realized (or relised if you aren't from a country that spells it this way) Einhanderkiller but the motherboard is a Intel D975XBX. That motherboard is based off of the 975X chipset which only supports ATI's dual GPU configuation Crossfire. NVidia dosen't allow two 7950 GX2 in Quad SLI. Not in retail nor for OEM's. Maunufacturers like Alienware use 7900 GX2's for their Quad SLI solutions. As for SLI for Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors, you have to wait until NVidia releases the NForce 590 Intel Edition Chipset. The only place to get one of those is from Dell who already has it in the XPS 700. Those should be available retail from motherboard manufacturers like ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA, Albatron sometime in the early fall to go together with the launch of GeForce and GeForce Go 8 series GPUs. Those will have DirectX 10 support.

[the dude @ Jul 27th 2006 4:10AM]

At Shaun :
"NVidia dosen't allow two 7950 GX2 in Quad SLI. Not in retail nor for OEM's. Maunufacturers like Alienware use 7900 GX2's for their Quad SLI solutions. As for SLI for Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors, you have to wait until NVidia releases the NForce 590 Intel Edition Chipset."
I can't but disagree with you . Polywell/ibuypower and OTHERS have these 7950's in QUAD-sli already , and its been like that for more than months .
go here :
http://www.polywell.com/us/onlinestore/590SLi4.asp
:) .