文章基本信息

标题：Falcon Northwest Mach V FX-51
作者：William O’Neal
期刊名称：Games for Windows
印刷版ISSN：1933-6160
出版年度：2004
卷号：January 2004
出版社：Ziff Davis Media Inc.

Falcon Northwest Mach V FX-51

William O’Neal

Price: $4,995 Rating: 4.4

While Alienware and Voodoo built machines around Asus�� SK8N nForce3 motherboard, Falcon��s AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 showed up with MSI��s K8T Master2 VIA K8T800 motherboard. Many people agree that the VIA motherboard is faster than the nForce3, but Asus�� reputation for stability often wins out. Falcon��s Mach V initially had some stability issues that Falcon remedied within one day��s time (after that, the machine ran like a dream). Because of this, I had to lower Falcon��s stability score, but it was good to see the company live up to its legendary reputation for support. Like the Alienware and Voodoo machines, the Mach V has 1GB of PC3200 DDR 400, a 256MB GeForce FX 5950 graphics card, an Audigy 2 soundcard, and the ubiquitous NEC MultiSync monitor and Klipsch Promedia 5.1 Ultra speakers. It also ships with two 120GB Seagate hard drives in a 240GB RAID-0 configuration.

Once Falcon solved the stability issues, the machine ran like a dream, screaming through the various games and benchmarks. The Mach V even scored the fastest Dungeon Siege marks at 1280x960 with 4x AA and 8x AF turned on.

The MSI VIA motherboard gives the Mach V a bit of a turbo charge.