Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Performance is equivalent to desktops that cost twice as much, heat management is great, strong gaming performance with single card setup.

Thumbs Down:

Bandwidth is reduced with the second graphic card, low on multimedia offerings.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Falcon Northwest Talon is powered by a Intel Core i7 875-k processor. Preinstalled memory is 8GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1,333MHz. For storing data, there is one TB SATA hard drive. The computer has DVD±RW with 22x write speed. Graphic card is NVidia GeForce GTX 480. Connectivity options include DVI-output, HDMI and USB 3.0 ports. The computer has Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium OS preinstalled.

Razzle Dazzle:

We last reviewed a Falcon system in late 2009 and with regards to design, this desktop has a lot in common with its predecessor. I was disappointed to find that there are no front accessible bays for your hard disks. You will have to dig inside for swapping or putting in more hard disks. What’s worse is that the drive cages inside the cabinet face inward which makes it really difficult to access the hard disks.

Inside Dope:

We all know that Falcon is a famous name in the desktop market when it comes to high end gaming systems. This system costs $2,499 but the performance is as good as a $5000 system. Thus it provides excellent value for money. The secret behind the performance is the Core i7 chip inside which gives blazing fast speeds. It is also overclockable. On the downside, it doesn’t come with standard bells and whistles that you’d expect in a high end system like this. For instance there is no Blu-ray optical drive. But we will still recommend this machine to gamers because the price is really low and the performance is still the same as high end gaming desktops. This is the first computer to feature the new version of Intel Core i7 processor in our labs and we are interested to see how it fares against other machines having this processor.

The drive set up may not be good but we were impressed by the GeForce GTX 480, an excellent card by Nvidia for gamers. Before this, we reviewed the Velocity Micro machine, which has the two such cards set up in SLI mode. The heat generation on the Velocity machine alarmed me; gaming for a couple of hours took the temperature up to 90 degrees. Falcon Northwest Talon, as compared to this, is relatively cooler at 80 degrees. It is easier to manage heat from a single graphic card as opposed to two but your desktop will certainly won’t catch fire with the heat.

Falcon Northwest Talon has a single GeForce GTX 480 graphic card and it cannot compete with systems which have two of these graphic cards. But apart from that, there is very little that this computer cannot handle, except for the most demanding titles at highest quality. This machine is also future proof; any games in the near future can be played easily.

If you are planning to buy the Falcon Northwest Talon and then upgrade it, we would ask you to think other wise. This desktop does have a second slot for graphics card but P55 Express chipset has some limitations and hence supports only one 3D graphic card at full bandwidth of 16x. If you put in another card, you will have a two 8x card set up. The graphics will improve if you put in the second graphic card but considering the cost of the card, you’d certainly want more.

For upgrading other hardware, all of the RAM slots are occupied but you still get to put in three more hard disks, single standard PCI card and two 1x PCI Express card. If you put in a second graphic card, other expansion options will be curbed. The mother board supports SATA 3.0 interface which means data transfers will be fast. We are yet to see drastic improvements from SATA 3.0 but if you are enthusiastic about the new technology, you will appreciate its inclusion.

Falcon Northwest Talon is based on Asus P7P55D-E Pro motherboard and it gives lots of output and input options. You also have a couple of USB 3.0 jacks. Apart from that, there are FireWire and eSATA jacks, 7.1 analog audio, both optical and coaxial S/PDIF jacks, couple of USB 2.0 ports and Ethernet port. The graphic card has a mini HDMI and 2 DVI ports. We would have liked a full sized HDMI port along with a DisplayPort but these options will probably suffice most of you.

Single graphic card set up on the Falcon Northwest Talon has kept this machine from being the best in gaming performances but when it comes to power consumption(as compared to other gaming systems), this machine is among the lowest. Again, this is due to the single graphic card feature. Talon gives you a one year warranty for labor and parts for this machine. Shipping between the manufacturer’s office and your home is free, if the computer needs to be repaired.

Nitty Gritty:

Talon primarily wanted to make a powerful gaming machine at a lower price and we really like their effort. The fast Core i7 processor keeps has plenty of power and we will recommend this desktop for gaming as it can handle all recent gaming titles at decent quality settings.

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