Kelt Reeves has been creating customized gaming PCs since 1992. Earlier than he obtained out of faculty, Reeves began Falcon Northwest in Medford, Oregon, and it’s cranking out gaming PCs with the polish of a small firm.
I’ve interviewed Reeves through the years and used quite a lot of his machines. I noticed him once more on a tragic event on the memorial service for Gordon Mah Ung, one of many unique and best gaming {hardware} reviewers.
I attempted out a Falcon Northwest machine again in 2019, and I used the Falcon Northwest PC to strive the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 when it got here out in 2022. And so it seems like dwelling to check out the most recent Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics processing unit (GPU) on a Falcon Northwest Tiki gaming PC. This machine is superior.
Tiki is lower than half the dimensions of a predecessor machine.
However the factor I’d wish to level out on this overview is the distinction between 2022 and 2025. Falcon Northwest has taken the Nvidia 50 Sequence graphics card and put it in a machine that’s lower than half the amount of the case from the 2019 machine, and there was no method a 4090 system from 2022 was going to suit into the identical dimension chassis as this 12 months’s Tiki machine, which has a double flow-through design that eliminates warmth. The Tiki machine weighs about 20 kilos.
I’ve performed some pretty intense video games on the machine, together with Name of Obligation: Black Ops 6, Name of Obligation: Warzone and Doom: The Darkish Ages.
The small print
The machine is just about a beast, nevertheless it all lives inside a reasonably compact Falcon Northwest LED-lighted Tiki 1.5 chassis, with an aluminum black base, air cooling, and an Asus ROG Strix X870-i motherboard. It has an Superior Micro Gadgets CPU, the AMD 9800X3D Ryzen 7 processor with eight cores and as much as 5.2GHz operation at 120 watts. It additionally has a 1,200 watt Silverstone energy provide and a giant Noctua NH-L9A-AM5 CPU cooler. That’s extra wattage than a 4090 machine, nevertheless it runs cooler.
For the GPU, it has an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Version with 32GB of video reminiscence. For reminiscence, it has Kingston Fury Beast RGB 64GB (2X32GB) at 6000 MHz DDR5. It has on-board sound and networking, and 4TB Kingston Fury Renegage SSD storage. And it’s operating the Home windows 11 PRO 64-bit working system.
The efficiency
The Falcon Northwest Tiki manages warmth effectively.
I’ve been operating the system and leaving it on. And in distinction to the very noise 4090 machine that I’ve, this machine runs quiet. You’ll be able to barely hear the noise, whereas I’ve had frequent feedback that individuals can hear my previous machine on Zoom calls or throughout recorded Warzone matches. I favor quiet.
And once I’m enjoying, I just like the machine to fade into the background. I’ve performed the sport on my 65-inch Samsung TV and it hasn’t stuttered but. It’s additionally fairly competent at productiveness software program however you haven’t come right here to examine that.
What this implies is that you simply don’t have to fret about outrageous fan noise throughout on-line video games that may have your teammates making enjoyable of you. And you may as well put it on the desk and use it to your on a regular basis productiveness functions. It doesn’t take an insane quantity of area below your desk or on high of your desk, and that makes it a machine you possibly can even take with you to LAN events as an alternative of a laptop computer.
I performed Doom: The Darkish Ages on the Tiki.
It’s additionally obtained spectacular AI efficiency on machine for many who need to run a variety of AI purposes. It’s obtained 3,352 AI TOPS, 318 RT TFLOPs and 105 Shader TFLOPs of efficiency, with 4K 240Hz path tracing. It has 32GB of video reminiscence, which is essential for AI.
I performed Doom: The Darkish Ages on the machine and it didn’t crash on me. It was spectacular to see the sport on a giant display and present me the entire explosions and fires as I battled the demons of hell.
It’s additionally utilizing AI contained in the graphics card, the place the AI can predict the following pixel and preemptively draw it, leading to an eight instances enchancment in efficiency due to what Nvidia calls DLSS4 acceleration, the place AI does the body technology. Sure, Nvidia’s AI options are serving to this technology of graphics playing cards get an enormous enhance in efficiency than you don’t see from one technology to the following. It smooths the pictures and makes every element in any given graphics scene higher. And body technology makes use of much less energy. In fact, my eyes couldn’t inform any distinction between natively generated frames from the graphics card and the AI body technology.
With numerous sliders that present DLSS4 on or off, you possibly can see it seems so significantly better with the AI turned on. You’ll discover loads of video games like Cyberpunk 2077, Marvel Rivals, Star Wars: Outlaws, Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Alan Wake 2 making use of those applied sciences.
The RTX neural shaders and RTX neural faces reduces the load on the graphics card and produces human faces which might be extremely practical. For streamers, among the graphics enchancment means they’ll stream their video games at a high-quality degree and never fear a lot concerning the streaming affecting the efficiency.
Do you have to purchase it?
Falcon Northwest’s Tiki weighs about 20 kilos.
I like how Tiki matches into your own home workplace life in addition to your gaming life.
I’ve watched the graphics market in latest weeks and also you gained’t get higher efficiency from AMD-based graphics playing cards, that are way more reasonably priced however fall effectively wanting 5090 efficiency. The tariffs within the commerce warfare between the U.S., China and different nations don’t appear to have affected costs. And these vehicles are well-liked so it’s going to be a while earlier than you see a worth reduce. The cardboard costs are as excessive as a number of thousand for a Nvidia 5090 card, which is greater than what most individuals spend on the entire machine.
However if you happen to’re a graphics fan who thinks Roblox is the worst factor ever and also you need Cyberpunk 2077 (particularly the scene capturing the lighting and shadows round Night time Metropolis’s neon lighting in a bazaar) to look even higher than it does, then that is your form of machine.
