Who remembers that Fred Armisen and Scarlett Johansson Marble Columns "Saturday Night Live" skit?
The granite base on the bottom of the Falcon Northwest Tiki might not be to everyone's aesthetic taste, but there's no denying the technical and design achievement behind this slim tower gaming desktop. Should you spend $2,783 for it? With competing systems out there that offer more-flexible and more-powerful graphics card configurations in a similar price range, it's hard to recommend the Tiki unless you are unwaveringly attached to its slim-tower design.
The Tiki is the boutique PC answer to the mass-market-leaning Alienware X51 . Alienware delivered a capable, tidy gaming system when it launched the X51 back in January. The x51's primary innovation is that, thanks to some clever motherboard manipulation, it was the first slim-tower PC with a full-size, dual-slot graphics card.
Falcon Northwest borrows heavily from the Alienware X51 here, adopting a similar slim-tower design in the Tiki, and the same full 3D card connected via a PCI Express daughter card. It also seems to have improved on Alienware's concept.
While the X51 has a massive 330-watt external power brick, the Tiki has an internal 450-watt power supply, as well as liquid cooling hardware. Liquid cooling is important, because it helps Falcon Northwest manage internal temperatures well enough that it can overclock the Tiki's third-generation Core chips. Alienware doesn't overclock. It also doesn't charge over $1,800 for any configuration of the X51. The Tiki starts at $1,870 or so. Our review unit will cost $2,793 when Falcon starts taking orders at the end of June.
That brings us to the granite base. However innovative the interior, the overall design of the Tiki is taller and narrower than the X51. That means it's top-heavy, and prone to falling over. The solution, Falcon Northwest has decided, is to include a custom cut-and-polished piece of granite that you can screw into the bottom of the unit.
I will not disagree that the granite serves its functional purpose. It also makes the Tiki look like an employee-of-the-month award, at least with the light-gray version included in our review unit. Falcon offers a black option that might look better. You also don't need to use the granite at all.
| Falcon Northwest Tiki | Alienware X51 | Maingear F131 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $2,793 | $999 | $2,999 |
| Motherboard chipset | Intel Z77 | Intel H61 | Intel Z77 |
| CPU | 4.3GHz Intel Core i7-3770K (overclocked) | 3.0GHz Intel Core i5-2320 | 4.7GHz Intel Core i7-3770K (overclocked) |
| Memory | 8GB 1,866MHz DDR3 SDRAM | 8GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM | 8GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM |
| Graphics | 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 | 1GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 555 | (2) 2GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 680 |
| Hard drives | 256GB SSD, 2TB 5,400rpm Western Digital hard drive | 1TB 7,200rpm | 60GB Corsair Accelera SSD, 2TB 7,200rpm Seagate hard drive |
| Optical drive | Blu-ray drive | dual-layer DVD burner | dual-layer DVD burner |
| Operating system | Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) | Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) | Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) |
