Reviews / previews
Man, I love this machine! Of course, it's pretty
much a no-brainer call that a $5,800 PC from
Falcon Northwest is gonna be a badass gaming
computer. But it's one thing seeing all the stats
on paper, and it's a hefty 'nother thing to actually
fire one up and play around with it.
Not to say the stats aren't impressive in and of
themselves. This Mach V has a 450MHz PII,
128MB RAM, a 9.1GB hard drive, a Quantum3D
Obsidian2 card with twin 12MB Voodoo II's, a
16MB STB Velocity TNT video card, an Acoustic
Research six-speaker Dolby sound system (with
remote control), and a 21-inch Optiquest monitor.
It's also got a dual-fan CPU cooler, which'll keep
that monster processor chilly even overclocked to
500MHz or higher, as well as a CH game card
(with two game ports) and a CH F-16
Combatstick.
The thing is, you could put a system almost as
good as this one together for a lot less dinero by
skimping on a few of the ultimate extras or doing
it yourself-but then you have to know what you're
doing, and you'll miss out on the free tech support
(from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. PST). By letting Falcon
streamline the system, you know it's going to
perform at peak levels. It definitely helped me
bestow an even more serious beat down on the
hapless souls who were unfortunately logged onto
our Quake II and SiN servers.
I'm not going to say it functioned perfectly. It's a
PC and it's running Windows 98, so of course
there were some problems-starting with not being
able to boot it up after it was all set up and
connected. It turned out that the hard-drive cable
had jarred loose during shipping. There were also
some graphics problems in Quake II, but these
fixed themselves after a reboot.
These were minor problems. For the most part,
the Mach V has been stunning. There are few
things in this life more enjoyable than a fully
immersive gaming experience-and the Mach V
provides one at the speed of sound and graphics.
Just don't turn up the volume too high on this
system. You'll have a great time until your
neighbors come around to lynch you.-- Joel Strauch / GamePro
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