Falcon Northwest Talon (2024, Threadripper Pro) Review

We’ve reviewed Falcon Northwest’s Talon as a gaming desktop, but you can configure one as a professional workstation, too. Starting at $8,724 and about $22,000 as tested, this Talon is an epic machine like everything else from the Oregon-based PC boutique, featuring a 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro processor and 256GB of memory as configured. Everything fits neatly inside Falcon’s custom-machined, hand-built chassis that shows the meticulous care the company is known for. This year’s Talon is one of the best-performing workstations we’ve ever tested, and it costs less than many major retailer options, so it earns Editors’ Choice laurels for high-end workstations.

Design: Next Level Attention to Detail

The Talon is Falcon Northwest’s largest and most configurable desktop. We’re reviewing it as a true workstation with a 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7895WX CPU, but it can also be ordered with Threadripper HEDT, Ryzen 7000 series, and 14th Gen Intel Core processors. It can even be ordered in a 4U rackmount configuration for data centers.

Falcon Northwest is renowned for its build quality, and handling or being around the Talon is enough to elicit admiration from the staunchest critic. Like all the boutique’s desktops, the Talon is designed and built in-house, so you’ll find nothing else like it. The case, at 19 by 8.8 by 17 inches (HWD), is similar in size to the HP Z6 G5 A (17.5 by 6.7 by 18.3 inches) and noticeably smaller than the HP Z8 Fury G5 (17.5 by 8.5 by 21.7 inches).

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

The Talon’s metal shell feels like it could deflect a bullet. None of the panels flexes or makes a sound under my hands using even the strongest pressure. Our model, with its solid aluminum side panels, doesn’t visually impress like the gaming models we’ve reviewed with tinted sides, but you won’t find much to see on these workstation models anyway. The pro-grade motherboard doesn’t support RGB lighting, and even Falcon’s logo on the front panel is static.

Top ports include two USB 3.2 Type-A, one USB 3.2 Type-C, and a 3.5mm universal audio jack. The power button is also here.

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

Rear connections on the Asus Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE motherboard include two USB4 ports, two mini-DisplayPort inputs, dual 10Gbps Ethernet jacks, six USB-A ports, a USB 2.0 port, and two audio jacks. Dedicated VGA and Ethernet for the baseboard management controller (BMC) are also included. You’ll also find BIOS flashback and clear CMOS buttons, which you won’t find on mainstream workstations.

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

For interior access, the side doors are magnetically secured and gracefully swing rearward. The Talon can be ordered with both the aluminum and glass side panels; switching them out is easy to do by lifting the panel off its hinge.

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

The interior is exceptionally clean and organized. The Asus motherboard alone weighs 12 pounds, so this is as serious as it gets. It supports 2TB (yes, terabytes) of RAM via eight DIMM slots, which Falcon populated here with 256GB (eight 32GB DIMMs) of registered DDR5 running at 6,000MHz, far faster than the 4,800MHz seen in most DDR5 workstations. The board also houses an astounding seven PCIe 5.0 slots, four M.2 slots, and an active voltage regulator module (VRM) cooler. It even has a SlimSAS slot for connecting industrial drives and other equipment.

Falcon Northwest uses its own 280mm liquid cooling radiator to keep this CPU cool; the cooler is able to handle many more watts (W) of power under stress than air-cooled systems. (This comes into play in our performance tests.) The Threadripper Pro’s WRX90 socket is massive, as you can see from the size of the water-cooling block. The radiator is mounted behind the front panel.

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

Just below the CPU is an Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU, which adds about $7,000 by itself. Falcon’s special braided cables coming off of it look flashy. For those with limitless budgets, the Talon accommodates up to three of these cards. Our unit also has a Micron SSD installed in one of the PCIe expansion slots, which has its cooling fan.

The other side of the tower has spots for 2.5-inch drives on the back of the motherboard tray and shows off the Seasonic Prime TX 1,600W modular power supply. All Talons get a customized nameplate like ours.

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

The Talon comes standard with a bloatware-free copy of Windows 11 Pro and a three-year warranty that covers both parts and labor, with first-year overnight part shipping. I’ve used Falcon Northwest’s support and can vouch for its quality.

Testing the Falcon Northwest Talon Workstation: Epic in Every Sense of the Word

Our Falcon Northwest Talon is again a workstation model featuring a 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7985WX CPU, an Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada GPU with 48GB of video RAM, 256GB of eight-channel registered (ECC) system RAM, two 2TB PCIe 4.0 solid-state drives in RAID 0 with Windows 11 Pro, and a 3.84TB Micron storage SSD.

As noted, the Talon is highly configurable for either high-end gaming or workstation tasks. Buyers lucky enough to afford one of these systems will pick from the choicest components. Falcon also says it sells many specialized add-in cards for workstations that aren’t in its online configuration tool, so if you don’t see something you need, you only need to ask.

The Dell Precision 7875 and the HP Z6 G5 A lead off our performance comparisons with the 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX, while the 56-core HP Z8 Fury G5 and the 36-core HP Z6 G5 use Intel Xeon W-series silicon. These units all employ professional Nvidia GPUs, the single most powerful of which is our Talon’s RTX 6000 Ada, though the quad-GPU Z8 Fury G5 and the triple-GPU Z6 G5 ought to have the edge in multi-GPU scenarios. Whatever happens, this is the most powerful and expensive (easily more than $100,000) lineup we’ve ever assembled, so enjoy the show.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.

Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Talon is an epic performer, with a dominant score in PCMark’s main test and leading performance in the storage test, thanks to its liquid-cooled processor and its Crucial T700 drives in RAID 0. Its Cinebench R23 score was the most impressive of all considering it performed nearly as well as the 96-core Precision 7875 and Z6 G5 A, so Falcon’s liquid-cooling solution and motherboard configuration give it amazing strength. The Talon also proved untouchable in Geekbench and Photoshop, and it had the fastest HandBrake time.

More clues into the Talon’s outstanding performance are in its BIOS: Falcon enabled AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) feature (standard on the Asus WRX90 motherboard) to let the CPU use up to 600 watts of power instead of the standard 350 watts, giving it a massive advantage. Falcon says liquid cooling is the only way to maintain such high power levels, and it’s the only tower in this group of workstations using it. Note that PBO is technically an overclock, and Falcon only enables it at the customer’s request, but you can also activate it in the BIOS at any time.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We test the graphics inside all laptops and desktops with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

To further measure GPUs, we also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests are rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions as well as exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation, respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

These aren’t gaming machines, so we won’t spend long on these results. Regardless, the Talon’s RTX 6000 Ada GPU propelled it ahead of the others.

Workstation Tests

We measure workstation performance primarily using SPECviewperf 2020, which renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wireframe models using view sets from popular ISV applications. We run the 1080p resolution tests based on PTC’s Creo CAD platform, Autodesk’s Maya modeling and simulation software for film, TV, and games, and Dassault Systemes’ SolidWorks 3D rendering package. Results are listed in frames per second (fps); higher numbers are better.

Our other workstation test is Blender, an open-source 3D content creation suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We record the time for Blender’s built-in Cycles path tracer to render two photo-realistic scenes of BMW cars, one using the system’s CPU and one using the GPU. Lower times are better.

The liquid-cooled Talon continued its winning streak with the lowest times in Blender and the best numbers we’ve seen in SPECviewperf. None of our tests utilize multiple GPUs, so the multi-GPU workstations didn’t show any advantages in our testing. (Falcon, of course, sells the Talon with multiple GPUs.) This is again proof that liquid cooling can take workstation performance to new heights without ballooning costs comparatively.

Verdict: Epic Liquid-Cooled Speeds for Thousands Less

Falcon Northwest routinely impresses us, but this Talon workstation takes it to the next level both in performance and price. Showcasing the company’s expertise in cooling and motherboard configuration, the Talon challenges mainstream 96-core Threadripper Pro workstations using only a 64-core chip for thousands of dollars less. Beyond that, multiple upgrade options, meticulous hand-built quality, an excellent standard warranty, and Falcon’s attentive support make the Talon an easy Editors’ Choice award winner for high-end workstations.