![]() ![]() Intel 750-Series shinesīesides the CPU and GPU, Falcon pulls off a real nifty hat trick un getting an Intel 750-series SSD inside the Tiki. More on this in our performance section later.įalcon Northwest cleverly uses an Intel 750-series SSD in SFF-8639 form in its Tiki. 1 percent of power users, this many cores pays heavy dividends. But dammit, it’s a glorious overkill in a way that’s only possible on the PC. The fact is the Xeon-packed Tiki is massive overkill for someone who doesn’t truly use workstation-class applications or isn’t running 20 simultaneous virtual machines. But for the prosumer, who does encode video or earn a living money as a 3D modeler or generally runs multiple, multi-threaded workloads, a 6- or 8-core CPU pays true dividends and an 18-core takes that to the nth degree. Just why the hell do you need an 18-core CPU?įor most consumers, a quad-core is plenty, and many people don’t even really need Hyper-Threading. Here’s what the 18-core, 36-thread Falcon Northwest Tiki looks like during our Handbrake encoding test. I’ve put together a quick comparison chart of the Xeon and two other common high-end Intel chips here. ![]() The Tiki keeps its thermals under control with an Asetek closed-loop liquid cooler. Since the Xeon has 18-cores under its lid instead of 8, it’s actually a fairly hot chip, with a TDP rating of 145 watts. Clock-for-clock, they should perform no better or worse than another Haswell core at the same clock speed. The cores themselves, though, are still Haswell cores. As a Xeon, the E5-2699 V3 gives you 40 PCIe Gen 3.0 lanes and actually supports running in a multi-processor configuration, which is lingo for saying you can run two of these CPUs if you dare in the same in same PC. The chunky chip makes the already beefy Core i7-5960X CPU look positively anemic. Although it clips into the standard LGA-2011 V3 socket, it’s actually physically larger, no doubt to accommodate the extra cores. The real star of the show is the CPU though: The 18-core Xeon 2699 V3 chip with a base clock frequency of 2.6GHz and a Turbo clock speed of 3.6GHz. The 18-core Xeon E5-2699 V3 (left) is actually physically larger than the 8-core Core i7-5960X (right). Despite its size, the Tiki I received for testing had 32GB of ECC RAM in it, and Falcon just certified 64GB ECC modules. Falcon Northwest’s console-sized PC may give up memory bandwidth, but at least it has plenty of memory capacity.
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