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.
Tiki is less than half the size of a predecessor machine.
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.
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