Image: Foundry
Summary created by Smart Answers AI
In summary:
- PCWorld examines whether Falcon Northwest’s premium custom PCs remain worthwhile investments after 30 years in the boutique gaming market.
- The review focuses on a new Talon desktop featuring high-end components including an Nvidia RTX 5090 and AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D processor.
- While Falcon Northwest maintains excellent craftsmanship and build quality, the analysis questions whether their premium pricing is still justified in today’s competitive PC market.
When Falcon Northwest opened its doors in the ’90s, the boutique PC builder quickly earned a reputation for selling powerful custom-built PCs to folks who didn’t want to build their own. And while the company’s high-end PCs came with commensurately high price tags, that didn’t stop PC gaming fans like me from imagining how well everything from Crysis to Quake would run if I could only afford a Falcon Northwest machine.
Fast forward 30 years and Falcon Northwest is still in business, but now there are a slew of competitors and the process of building your own PC has become considerably easier, provoking the question: Is shelling out for a beastly Falcon Northwest PC still worth it?
To find out, PCWorld’s Adam Patrick Murray recently unboxed a brand-new custom-built Falcon Northwest Talon desktop packing an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU paired with a speedy AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU. Adam didn’t just benchmark the beast, either; his camera takes you through all the key aspects of the build while breaking down its performance, giving you a first-hand look at how the folks at Falcon Northwest are routing cables and organizing components when building gaming PCs in 2026.
It’s a great builder’s-eye look at the work of one of the oldest boutique PC builders in the business. In fact, Falcon Northwest is often credited with popularizing the idea of buying boutique gaming PCs in the early ’90s, and everyone from Valve’s Gabe Newell to Epic’s Tim Sweeney has been credited with shopping at Falcon in the past. But while the quality of the work on display in this cutting-edge Talon PC is generally excellent, there are a few potential weak points that Adam calls out as he walks us through an inspection of not just the build quality and hardware but also the software suite, performance, and cooling.
If you like what you see and want more insight into how Falcon Northwest has evolved over the last few years, why not check out our unboxing video of a similar Falcon Northwest Talon back in 2021 packing a (then cutting-edge) GeForce RTX 3090? The tech has certainly come a long way, but it’s interesting to see how Falcon Northwest’s approach to building and shipping gaming PCs has (and hasn’t) changed over the years.
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Author: Alex Wawro, Senior Video Creator
Alex Wawro has more than 15 years experience as a tech journalist, and has covered everything from laptops and CPUs to PC gaming and handhelds. As part of PCWorld’s video team, you can see him going hands-on with the latest and greatest tech on YouTube, TikTok, and Reels, and his writing will appear on PCWorld.com. Alex has also written for Tom’s Guide and Game Developer.
