Gadgetory

hi I'm rich brown senior editor for CNET today we're gonna take a look at the Falcon Northwest T key so this is a high-end slim tower gaming PC you might remember the Alienware x51 from earlier this year that system cost about $9.99 this one goes for 2,800 bucks in this configuration it starts at 1800 this is a higher end version has an overclocked core i7 chip as well as a geforce 6800 gtx graphics card so in addition to being a very fast computer you can see that there's a granite base here in the bottom designed to sort of keep the system stable because it's a very slim system and kind of tall it tends to be top-heavy so it's easy to knock over to solve that problem Falco Northwest has gone for a polished granite base it comes in a couple different options aesthetically I'm not really sure about it you might like it I kind of think it looks like an Employee of the Month award but overall it does kind of do its job here but for the system itself Falcon was actually doing some pretty cool stuff at this the only question is if you really want to pay that much for the relatively limited slim tower case so the front of the system is nice and clean it's got this sort of sleek black look to it overall appear at the top there's a slot loading blu-ray drive as well as a couple of USB 3 jacks as well as power reset in a couple audio jacks as well up here in the back you'll see an upside down version of a standard PC layout there's a couple USB ports down here digital audio output wireless antenna Jack's USB 3/8 Ornette eSATA and up here you've got analog audio ones here in the graphics card you've got two DVI Jack's HDMI and DisplayPort outputs so even though this is a slim tower PC there's actually a remarkable amount of hardware in here you can see there's a liquid cooling rig connected here to the side panel goes here to the overclocked CPU that's a core i7 3770k chip or o'clock to four point three gigahertz there's a standard 2 terabyte hard drive here as well as a solid-state drive in room for another solid-state one if you wanted to of course that would jack the price up down here you've got 8 gigs of memory and up here there's a graphics card and it's dual wide board connected via daughter card so design wise that really sets the system apart from the Alienware it's not only the water cooling rig but also the fact that the power supply is built into the system the Alienware x51 had an external power supply and it was kind of giant brick and only gave you 330 watts of power Falcons managed to cram 450 watt power supply in here so you really don't need to worry about overclocking or the high-end graphics card maxing out the system of course due to the specialized nature of the system aside from the solid-state drive there really is no room for upgrading so Falcon has taken the slim tower game PC concept well beyond what Alienware I came up with of course it charges more for that privilege but you also seem to get a lot more power the question though is how much do you want to pay for this when you can pay say 200 hours more for a system that's actually pretty small but let's use two graphics cards and is otherwise relatively equal in terms of its performance you can find such a PC from main gear which makes us wonder how good a value this system really is overall I can recommend this someone who has their mind specifically set on a slim tower gaming PC otherwise you could probably get better deal for your money and even still have a pretty small chassis sorry much Brown this is the Falcon Northwest TV