Falcon northwest tiki: Mini tower review

The Tiki pushes its CPU as hard as any full tower box.

Here’s a little inside OEM trivia: Falcon Northwest is one of the most competitive system builders we deal with. The company flatout doesn’t ever like to lose a showdown on performance grounds. Price? Fine. Bundle? OK. But when it comes to performance, Falcon will sacrifice almost everything to win in that category.

That’s just what the company has done with the latest iteration of the Tiki, which damn near maxes out what can be done in a machine of this size.

For example, the 3.5GHz Core i7-4770K in this machine is clocked as high as in the Maingear full tower rig with custom water cooling that we reviewed in August: 4.7GHz. Falcon does this with the aid of an Asetek 120mm cooler that magically folds into the slim chassis. Of the boxes here, only the iBuypower Revolt and Falcon Northwest Tiki pack liquid cooing. The Revolt’s cooler is bigger at 140mm but its chassis is also pudgier.

Alongside the Tiki’s OC’d Hassy, we also find a GeForce GTX Titan, which, true to Falcon’s competitive spirit, is also overclocked.

The Tiki isn’t watered down in storage, either. You get two 240GB Crucial M500 SSDs in RAID 0 and a 3TB Western Digital Green drive. Despite its micro tower form factor, you should be able to easily push 2TB in SSD and 4TB in HDD. Not bad for such a tiny box.

Amazingly, all this runs off of a 450-watt Silverstone PSU. This is down 50 watts from the 500-watt units in the iBuypower Revolt and Digital Storm Bolt. We’re actually impressed that all three boxes buck Nvidia’s mandate of a 600-watt minimum for the Titan. Will there be problems long term? We guess not, as each vendor would have to eat the cost of replacing a bad PSU (all of them offer a three year warranty). It’s more likely that the 600-watt spec by Nvidia is based on a full tower application, which could run multiple hard drives and a dozen fans if so desired by the builder. A micro tower, on the other hand, is inherently limited to two SSDs, a hard drive, and a single GPU.

You can easily access the RAM and CPU under the Asetek cooler.

Getting inside the Falcon is a very straightforward, almost mid-tower-like affair. Remove two thumbscrews in back and slide off the side door. The 120mm Asetek’s radiator is attached to the door and can be easily removed, if need be. With the door off, you have easy access to the GPU, RAM, and drives. One problem, though: If you need to access the back of the motherboard to futz with a cooler backplate, you’ll have to pull the board, as it doesn’t have the giant cut out in back like the Digital Storm Bolt, nor can you pull off the right side of the case. As with like the Digital Storm and iBuypower boxes, getting to the GPU is work. It’s not horrible, but it’ll take a few minutes. Surprisingly, this makes the Alienware X51R2 the easiest box in which to access to the GPU.

In all four units, access to the critical components really isn’t bad. It’s not as easy as a mid-tower or full tower, of course, but it’s actually easier than most shoebox SFF cases and systems we’ve wrenched on.

The granite base was also a source of debate among staffers. We’ll admit that the aesthetic isn’t for everyone, but we’ve come around on its utility. Falcon Northwest has always said the heavy granite base helps prevent the system from getting knocked over. Most of us scoffed at that likelihood, but after taking the Alienware X51 R2 to a small LAN party and seeing how tippy a 3–4-inch-wide system can be when placed on a folding plastic table, we’re more convinced of the granite’s usefulness. The Falcon Northwest Tiki isn’t tipping over unless you shove it. We have to point out, though, that with the Alienware X51 R2, we could just lay the box flat on an unstable surface. The Tiki has no such option for that orientation.

In performance, it was no surprise that the Tiki cleaned everyone’s clocks. With its Core i7-4770K at 4.7GHz and its overclocked Titan, it made quick work of all three of its challengers. And we don’t mean by margin of error spreads, either. The Falcon Northwest is largeer, small and in charge. From CPU centric tasks to gaming, the Falcon had an edge over the others. Against its old foe and nemesis, Alienware’s X51 R2, the Falcon Northwest Tiki was nearly twice as fast in almost all of the benchmarks. If it took almost 4,000 seconds for the X51 R2 to encode a video, it took half that time for the Falcon Northwest Tiki.

There is a cost to all this performance, though. The Tiki under heavy CPU duress can get loud. Fortunately, it’s not the shrill fan noise or never ending whir that plagued machines of five years ago, but loud nonetheless. Acoustically, it was slightly louder than the Alienware (which also gets loud when its CPU is pushed hard) but quieter than the Digital Storm Bolt. At idle, the Falcon Northwest Tiki was as quiet as an agnostic mouse having an existential moment, but render a video hitting all eight threads of the chip for 25 minutes and it’ll get noticeable. The GPU, for its part, is better behaved even under heavy load.

The only other dig we have against the Tiki is its price. The system comes in at $4,443, which is more than twice as much as the iBuypower Revolt and more than three times the price of the Alienware X51 R2. Part of the price is the paint job, which costs $900 itself. Even with that removed, it’s still a lot of cabbage at $3,500, but it does have far more storage onboard than the others here.

As we said, Falcon doesn’t care if it doesn’t win the love of accountants; it just wants to prove that it can make the fastest computers around. With this Tiki, the company accomplishes that. There’s no doubt which machine here is the fastest, or the most expensive.

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