14 DAY TRIAL // When you're building a PC around the most expensive central processing unit and motherboard on the market, there is no point in holding back in other areas, and Oregon-based custom PC builder Falcon Northwest definitely shares this view.
The company, like so many other Intel PC OEMs, has introduced a series of desktop computers powered by the Haswell-E central processing unit line.
You know, the Core i7-5000X Extreme Edition CPUs that Intel released just a few days ago? The ones that don't actually need to be relegated to the LGA 2011-3 socket because of what ASUS did to the socket.
It appears that Falcon Northwest didn't want to leave any of the CPUs out, so it allows you to choose between the 8-core Core i7-5960X, the 6-core i7-5930K and the (also 6-core) i7-5820K central processing units.
The chips can't do much on their own, however, and since all mainboards based on the X99 chipset (the only one compatible with them) have eight DIMM slots, the PC OEM decided to fill them all.
And it didn't hold back. It installed eight modules of 8 GB DDR4 RAM each, leading to a total of 64 GB for the computer.
In 2015, when RAM makers finally get around to producing 16 GB DIMM slots, that capacity will probably grow to 128 GB, but for now no dice. Not that it's necessary to have that much. Even 64 GB are beyond overkill as it is.
You're not forced to buy so much RAM of course. You can decide to only get one kit of four 4 GB modules if you really want. It might even beat 16 GB of DDR3 memory actually. It will also allow you to stretch the acquisition across several months, in a manner of speaking. Ergo, buy the system over the course of several pay checks.
That said, there is also room for up to six storage drives, one of which will preferably be a solid state drive (for quick boot).
Moving on, you get the choice between one, two and three video cards from NVIDIA or Advanced Micro Devices (SLI and CrossFire multi-GPU technologies, respectively).
The names of the three computers you can choose from are Mach V, the Talon and the FragBox, with prices (starting prices anyway) of $3,021 / €2,301, $2,330 / €1,774 and $2,313 / €1,761, respectively. Not that exchange rates are likely to be reflected in reality, but man has the right to dream.