Kelt Reeves has been creating custom gaming PCs since 1992. Before he got out of college, Reeves started Falcon Northwest in Medford, Oregon, and it’s cranking out gaming PCs with the polish of a small company.
I have interviewed Reeves over the years and used a number of his machines. I saw him again on a sad occasion at the memorial service for Gordon Mah Ung, one of the original and finest gaming hardware reviewers.
I tried out a Falcon Northwest machine back in 2019, and I used the Falcon Northwest PC to try the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 when it came out in 2022. And so it feels like home to try out the latest Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics processing unit (GPU) on a Falcon Northwest Tiki gaming PC. This machine is awesome.
But the thing I’d like to point out in this review is the contrast between 2022 and 2025. Falcon Northwest has taken the Nvidia 50 Series graphics card and put it in a machine that is less than half the volume of the case from the 2019 machine, and there was no way a 4090 system from 2022 was going to fit into the same size chassis as this year’s Tiki machine, which has a double flow-through design that gets rid of heat. The Tiki machine weighs about 20 pounds.
I’ve played some fairly intense games on the machine, including Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Call of Duty: Warzone and Doom: The Dark Ages.
Many reviewers wrote their stories on the machine when it started shipping. But I took some time and watched some of the news come out about the 50 Series, which has some GPU models still selling at around $4,000. The whole system cost around $7,024.
The details
The machine is pretty much a beast, but it all lives inside a fairly compact Falcon Northwest LED-lighted Tiki 1.5 chassis, with an aluminum black base, air cooling, and an Asus ROG Strix X870-i motherboard. It has an Advanced Micro Devices CPU, the AMD 9800X3D Ryzen 7 processor with eight cores and up to 5.2GHz operation at 120 watts. It also has a 1,200 watt Silverstone power supply and a big Noctua NH-L9A-AM5 CPU cooler. That’s more wattage than a 4090 machine, but it runs cooler.
For the GPU, it has an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition with 32GB of video memory. For memory, it has Kingston Fury Beast RGB 64GB (2X32GB) at 6000 MHz DDR5. It has on-board sound and networking, and 4TB Kingston Fury Renegage SSD storage. And it’s running the Windows 11 PRO 64-bit operating system.
The performance
I’ve been running the system and leaving it on. And in contrast to the very noise 4090 machine that I have, this machine runs quiet. You can barely hear the noise, while I have had frequent comments that people can hear my old machine on Zoom calls or during recorded Warzone matches. I prefer quiet.
And when I’m playing, I like the machine to fade into the background. I’ve played the game on my 65-inch Samsung TV and it hasn’t stuttered yet. It’s also quite competent at productivity software but you haven’t come here to read about that.
What this means is that you don’t have to worry about outrageous fan noise during online games that will have your teammates making fun of you. And you can also put it on the desk and use it for your everyday productivity purposes. It doesn’t take an insane amount of space under your desk or on top of your desk, and that makes it a machine you can even take with you to LAN parties instead of a laptop.
It’s also got impressive AI performance on device for those who want to run a lot of AI applications. It’s got 3,352 AI TOPS, 318 RT TFLOPs and 105 Shader TFLOPs of performance, with 4K 240Hz path tracing. It has 32GB of video memory, which is important for AI.
I played Doom: The Dark Ages on the machine and it didn’t crash on me. It was impressive to see the game on a big screen and show me all of the explosions and fires as I battled the demons of hell.
It’s also using AI inside the graphics card, where the AI can predict the next pixel and preemptively draw it, resulting in an eight times improvement in performance thanks to what Nvidia calls DLSS4 acceleration, where AI does the frame generation. Yes, Nvidia’s AI features are helping this generation of graphics cards get a huge boost in performance than you don’t see from one generation to the next. It smooths the images and makes each detail in any given graphics scene better. And frame generation uses less power. Of course, my eyes could not tell any difference between natively generated frames from the graphics card and the AI frame generation.
With various sliders that show DLSS4 on or off, you can see it looks so much better with the AI turned on. You’ll find plenty of games like Cyberpunk 2077, Marvel Rivals, Star Wars: Outlaws, Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Alan Wake 2 making use of these technologies.
The RTX neural shaders and RTX neural faces reduces the load on the graphics card and produces human faces that are highly realistic. For streamers, some of the graphics improvement means they can stream their games at a high-quality level and not worry so much about the streaming affecting the performance.
Should you buy it?
I like how Tiki fits into your home office life as well as your gaming life.
I’ve watched the graphics market in recent weeks and you won’t get better performance from AMD-based graphics cards, which are far more affordable but fall well short of 5090 performance. The tariffs in the trade war between the U.S., China and other countries don’t seem to have affected prices. And these cars are popular so it’s going to be some time before you see a price cut. The card prices are as high as a few thousand for a Nvidia 5090 card, which is more than what most people spend on the whole machine.
But if you’re a graphics fan who thinks Roblox is the worst thing ever and you want Cyberpunk 2077 (especially the scene capturing the lighting and shadows around Night City’s neon lighting in a bazaar) to look even better than it does, then this is your kind of machine.
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