Falcon Northwest Upgrades the Mach V With AM2

Black & White 2

Black & White 2 is a different animal that can cripple many systems. The vast landscapes and micromanaged towns, armies, and creatures add to the dynamics that hurt most systems. The Hornet stays ahead of the Falcon here with its overclocked graphics cards. Games like Black & White 2 will do best with more graphics throughput regardless of the system speed. The rendered scenes are limited by the graphics card and the excess system speeds are wasted as the graphics subsystem is the bottleneck.

F.E.A.R

F.E.A.R. is another known killer of systems. Here we were surprised to see that F.E.A.R. is CPU-bound to an extent. The Falcon Northwest Mach V beats the Monarch Hornet Pro in resolutions of 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200. Only when the resolutions are played above that - which applies to less than 2% of all gamers - was the higher GPU clock speed recognized. It was only at 2560x1600 that the Falcon Mach V was beaten by the Monarch.