Falcon Northwest Talon AMD Ryzen 9 7950X Workstation Internal Hardware Overview
Inside the system, we see something laid out similar to a consumer desktop but just more neatly done.
Also, the internals can be lit via RGB (colors are customizable) or turned off if you would prefer. If you have the translucent side panel, then the RGB looks cool. If using a solid panel, you may prefer shutting this off.
Falcon Northwest has a custom logo AIO liquid cooler. Instead of using top venting, the radiator is mounted to the front of the system.
The processor in this system is an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X. That is the Zen 4-based AMD Ryzen 7000 series processor that is the current top-of-the-line with 16 cores and 32 threads. Next to that, we have 64GB (2x 32GB) of Kingston Fury DDR5 memory. Falcon Northwest has this set at DDR5-5600 speeds, so we get a bit more performance in its system. The company has other capacities, speeds, and brand options as well.
For the GPU, we have a fairly large one since this is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. We were close to the GeForce RTX 4090 launch, but we also had extra Founders Edition 3090 Ti’s so that we could use the same GPU in this system, as well as in the Intel Core i9-12900K and AMD Ryzen 9 5950X systems. We ripped the PSU, cooler, and memory and converted Our New Streaming Test Rig for Project TinyMiniMicro and STH Mini PC so we could use it. We then also used a lab RTX 3090 Ti so we could get fairly comparable test data from the three platforms, albeit with different cases.
On the bottom of the system, we had a single expansion slot. For these, we used M.2 2TB SSDs from Kingston as well. This system is designed mostly to use with NVMe SSDs and a GPU, with a few systems probably using NICs or other PCIe devices.
One really cool feature of this is that under the GPU, we have an additional cooling fan. In most chassis, this would just be an additional set of I/O blanks. This fan would limit our ability to use an add-in NIC in the PCIe slot, but it also looks like it is an optional feature.
Next, let us get to the back of the system and then look at performance.
“…largely soleless workstations…”
Unless those workstations had no bottoms of their feet, I think you meant soulless.
Relative performance graphs are the scourge of the hardware world. Show true numbers. ~1,4x performance in Chess? Doing what? It’s Premiere rendering, or scrubbing?
It would appear that they chose to install the RAM in the DIMM_A2/B2 slots. Was that on purpose?
I bought a (different) ASUS AM5 board recently, and the DIMM_A1 slot didn’t work at all, so just curious if this is a bigger problem.
@Sam, yes those are the correct slots for two modules. It’s in every Asus mobo user guide, since DDR3 at least.
Yeah that’s the right one. That’s why it’s good for people to do pre-builds.
Did I just miss it, or was the ‘as built’ cost not posted in the review? I read through it once completely, then skipped around all the pages looking for ‘$’, ‘price’, ‘cost’, etc, but found no specific dollar amount listed; I might be losing it though, haven’t had my coffee yet