Falcon Northwest is one of our favorite boutique manufacturers, and with the high-quality system it put out this year in the form of the 2019 Talon (starts at $2,432; $5,931 as tested), it's easy to see why.
Our configuration of this beautifully designed and built tower has been packed to the gills with the highest professional-grade parts, including Intel's brand-new performance beast, the Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition, and dual Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super GPUs.
Only professionals with extremely straining workloads need this much power, but the wide range of component options means gamers and those with more modest duties can build a less expensive rig to suit their needs and budget.
Any of these builds will come in a high-quality tower that's attractive and immaculately assembled, proving that you get what you pay for with the price premium compared to DIY.
The Talon's combination of looks, performance, and cutting-edge components earns it our Editors' Choice for high-end gaming and power-user PCs.
The Flashiest, Classiest Talon Yet
This is far from the first Talon desktop we've reviewed (see last year's edition here), but it may well be my favorite.
The case itself is certainly on the simpler side, a black metal tower with few design flourishes.
The front panel is angularly curved, but otherwise, the case itself is a large, well-built rectangle.
For a workstation-grade desktop, it could be a lot bigger.
At 17.5 by 9 by 15.5 inches (HWD), it takes up a modest amount of desk space, but isn't especially big or small.
It's also extremely dense, surprising us with how heavy it was when unpacking, so take note.
A lot more going on with this system than just the case shape makes it my favorite look.
The left panel is a tinted tempered-glass door, and through it you can see an immaculately assembled system with some restrained use of RGB lighting.
I'll get to the components in a bit, but visually, it's a really classy-looking desktop.
Falcon Northwest traditionally has not indulged in the RGB craze, but it has acceeded here without going over the top.
The lighting is mostly left to the system fans and RAM, with other accents on the motherboard, cooler, and GPU logos.
The fans are lit with ringed LEDs, which always look nice, while the entire top of each memory stick is lit.
The Falcon Northwest logo on the CPU cooler is also lit, as is the heatsink on this high-end motherboard.
All of the lighting is customizable, but it came to us in a system-wide sync of white lighting, so all of these colors match.
The exceptions are the glowing GeForce RTX text on each GPU and the Nvidia logo on the SLI bridge, all of which are lime green and cannot be changed.
You can mix and match whichever colors you like, or have them all sync to the same color and effect like our system, which I like a lot.
Unlike many desktops, there's even more fun on the other side panel.
Falcon Northwest wanted to show off its new UV printing capability, with which the company can put any image you'd like across the side panel in full color.
When asked which image we'd like to use, I found myself browsing old PC Magazine covers, naturally, and eventually settled on the one you see pictured.
It amused me too much to pass on when I first saw it—a true early-1980s time capsule—and was glad to see it looked just as good on the side of the Talon...
The printing is done well, and it doesn't feel or look like it will chip or peel off.
Sure, ours is not the trendiest or best-looking image choice, but I couldn't pass up on the novelty.
Most people who choose a custom image will undoubtedly pick something more modern, more colorful, and maybe a little cleaner.
It's a fun option.
Opening the left panel is incredibly easy, as it merely swings open on two rear hinges.
I'll get this out of the way early: Our system is incredibly high end and expensive, made to show off the best of what the machine and its maker can do.
There are plenty of professional use cases for systems like ours, but the average shopper will undoubtedly be looking at a much more reasonable configuration.
That model may still look nice inside, but for these purposes, I'll speak about what we were given to review.
Even just visually, you can see what the cost went toward.
Opening up the case door reveals dual Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics cards in SLI, the most immediately noticeable aspect of the build.
The GPU power cables are immaculately grouped, clipped, and routed away into the PSU shroud.
The four sticks of RGB memory are also eye-catching, as is the liquid CPU cooler.
Its short hose quickly disppears into the radiator above, and there are no loose or extra cables hanging around.
Everything is tucked away either out of sight or on as short a run as possible, which is the kind of professional assembly you pay extra for.
Configurations and Ports: Hello to the Core i9-10980XE
More specifically, our build is priced at $5,931 for the following components.
Inside are an Intel Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition processor cooled by a 280mm Asetek liquid cooler, plus the two RTX 2080 Super graphics cards, 64GB of memory, and a 1TB Samsung SSD 970 Pro M.2 boot drive.
It's all built into an Asus Prime X299 Deluxe II motherboard, and powered by a 1,000-watt EVGA SuperNova G3 power supply.
Also part of that cost is the UV side printing, the RGB lighting, and various odds and ends, including assembly.
For more on the motherboard, it hosts a LGA 2066 socket built for Core X-Series chips, supports quad channel memory (for DDR4 RAM up to 4,266MHz), and boasts M.2 slots with their own heat sinks.
There's even a fancy 2-inch OLED display for temperature and other readouts.
The system is covered under a three-year parts-and-labor warranty.
It should come as no surprise that Falcon offers this desktop in many other potential configurations.
Unlike some desktops from major manufacturers where there are a smaller set number of SKUs to make scaling production for retail easier, Falcon Northwest will build any combination to order.
You can base your Talon on the AMD X570 chipset, Intel's Z390 chipset, or the X299 chipset like we have here.
From there, multiple processor options open up to you, as well as a range of Nvidia GPU options (including GeForce and Quadro cards), memory and storage capacities, and everything in between.
There are too many permutations to run through, but rest assured you can order to your needs.
Let's come back to the processor in our unit, though.
The Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition is a brand-new "Cascade Lake-X" generation processor from Intel's Core X-Series, launched at the time of this review.
This is not your average consumer chip or the next mainstream step-up for most customers, but a very high-end CPU suited for professionals and workstations.
With 18 cores and 36 threads, it's an incredible processor for multithreaded tasks.
As shown in our standalone review, there is a potentially large amount of headroom for overclocking on this unlocked CPU, letting you push the performance even further.
That said, it contributes about a thousand bucks to the cost of this system, and we are actually bigger fans of the 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 3950X, or stepping up to a Ryzen Threadripper, including the new third-gen Threadripper chips that are debuting the same day as this PC and the Core i9-10980XE.
Still, if speed is your main concern and money is no object (or at least less of one), you are getting plenty of upside with this chip.
For animators, video and photo editors, engineers, and business users who need to crunch through huge data sets, such a CPU is a soli dengine.
For general use and gaming, it will still be very effective, but certainly overkill.
You'd be spending hundreds of extra dollars on performance that not only you don't need, but that you likely wouldn't even demand enough to see.
There are plenty of other chips I'd recommend buying or choosing for your build, in those cases, than the Core i9-10980XE on a value basis, given its huge price tag, but it is still a fine performer.
Last but not least, we come to the ports on this build.
As a professional system with a robust motherboard, it has plenty to offer.
The top panel has a few upward-facing ports, including two USB 3.1 ports, a USB-C port, and a headphone jack.
Around back are four more USB 3.1 ports, two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 3 support, two DisplayPort connections, and Intel gigabit Ethernet.
Each GPU hosts three DisplayPort connections, one HDMI port, and one USB-C port.
Now Testing: A Pricey Performance Powerhouse
For performance testing comparisons, I selected a group of desktops that are similar in purpose, power, price, or some combination of the three.
Before I get into details, you can see a rundown of their names and specs in the chart below…
The Velocity Micro Raptor Z55 ($2,999 as tested) is perhaps the most similar to the Talon, as a high-end desktop that is somewhere between gaming system and professional machine, without being too flashy.
(The Talon is more of the latter than the Raptor in the case of our particular configurations.) The Alienware Aurora R10 ($3,629.99 as tested) is in a similar boat, though that config is a little mixed—the desktop itself is clearly a gaming machine, but our review unit has AMD's Ryzen 9 3950X CPU in it, a worthy workstation competitor for the 10980XE.
Meanwhile, the Corsair One Pro i180 ($4,999 as tested) and HP Z2 Tower G4 ($3,499 as tested) are full-on workstations, but they're fairly different.
The former is a super-compact cylindrical desktop with an older X-Series chip, while the Z2 is a more traditionally shaped tower with the still-powerful i9-9900K.
With that context, we move on to the results!
Productivity & Storage Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark).
The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows.
We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing.
The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the storage subsystem.
This score is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better.
The PCMark 10 test will hardly strain such a powerful CPU to its limits, but it does put it through its paces enough that some gaps emerge with competitors.
The Talon's result is incredibly high, and even then three competitors outscore it by a wide margin.
This is a potent field of processors, so even the lower scores of this group are more than capable of flying through daily home and office tasks.
The storage test demonstrates plenty of parity between these snappy SSDs, as all ensure fast load and boot times.
Media Processing & Creation Tests
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads.
Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image.
The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video-editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that's highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads.
In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file.
It's a timed test, and lower results are better.
The POV-Ray benchmark is a synthetic, highly threaded rendering test that offers a second opinion on the Cinebench results.
This is especially suited for workstations, and given the Talon's thread-loaded CPU, I also ran this test.
Note that only the other workstations ran this test and are present in the chart.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark.
Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image.
We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time.
Lower times are better here.
The Photoshop test stresses CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
Unlike with the PCMark 10 results, the Talon becomes the system to beat on the media and workstation tests.
It does include the most expensive processor in the batch, so at least there are visible returns on the investment.
The Talon was tied for the fastest Handbrake time, topped the chart in Cinebench (setting a new record among our reviewed systems in the process), handily beat all comers on the straining POV-Ray test, and posted the second-fastest Photoshop result.
If you'll be doing any of the tasks replicated by these tasks for your work, this Talon configuration will chew through them.
While the Talon and the Core i9-10980XE results on the media and workstation are very strong, the gaps with the competition may not be as big as you'd like.
You can read more about this in our standalone review of the Core i9-10980XE, but considering its $979 price point, the $749 Ryzen 9 3950X hangs very close (or even beats it on some tests, depending on the system it's installed in).
On a dollar-to-performance basis, the Ryzen 9 3950X is a better value in many cases, but you still may prefer to squeeze every drop of speed out of the 10980XE.
Falcon Northwest has the 10980XE running very well in this machine, but it's not always the clear-cut winner it should be considering its comparative price point.
Synthetic Graphics Tests
UL's 3DMark test suite measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting.
We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems.
Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff.
The results are proprietary scores.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp.
Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D...
