Under The Hood: Core 2 Extreme, 4 GB RAM, Quad SLI Graphics

The $10k system is a clean looking machine from the outside, but this pales in comparison to the work Falcon Northwest did on the inside. The cables are cleanly laid out like one would see in a show car with its hood open. Airflow is maximized, so there is no interference with the inflow from the front of the case to the back. A single 120 mm fan draws air in the bottom over the dual 150 GB Western Digital Raptor-X drives (configured in RAID 0 for maximum performance) and the 500 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200-10 drive as a data repository.

Air moves past the hard drives to the two BFG GeForce 7950GX2 graphics card connected together into a Quad SLI configuration. The cards expel hot air out the case via slots in the back plate of the cards.

Air that moves up the case flows across two matching pairs of Corsair TwinX-2048-6400C4 memory modules, providing 4 GB of RAM that operates at a base frequency of 333 MHz and at a latency timing of CL4-4-4-9 (CAS, RCD, RP, RAS). That air is then expelled from the case via two 80 mm fans located on the back of the case.

To make sure there is enough positive air pressure inside the case, the Sanyo Denki San Ace MC Liquid cooling solution for the CPU pulls air in from the top of the case and drives it over the radiator and down to the back side of the Sony 16X DVD ROM and Plextor 760A double-layer DVD burner. The special cooling solution allowed Falcon technicians to crank up the CPU clock speeds from 2.93 GHz to 3.73 GHz.

The spec sheet looks good, but the performance was even better. While the world's best overclockers could have pulled out some incredible numbers, this is a configuration you could purchase with a three year warranty in case anything should go wrong. Normally, problems can be solved without the need to send the system back, but if the system does have to go back, Falcon Northwest will overnight the system back to its workshop and return it to the customer overnight. For year two and three the system will be shipped back overnight for free, but the owner would have to send the system themselves. As you can see, Falcon is serious about its systems, and provides a serious warranty.

We put the system through a quick set of tests to see what it could do. Full throttle this system pushed out the highest scores we have seen from a production system.

System Specifications

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