
There was a day when the size of your desktop was a pretty good indicator of the performance inside, or at least potential performance. That's all gone out the window lately with the emergence of high performance small form factor (SFF) PCs, some of which are specifically intended for living room gaming. Enter Falcon Northwest and its 4-inch wide Tiki PC, an SFF that can now be configured with Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition and Xeon E5-2699 V3 processor options for up to 18 cores of computing muscle.
Support for Intel's Core i7 5000 Series and mighty Xeon processor come courtesy of an option to configure a Tiki PC around the Santa Clara chip maker's X99 chipset, though a top-end CPU is only the beginning. If your pockets are overflowing with cash and weighing you down (a problem we'd all like to have), you can configure a Tiki PC with up to 32GB of DDR4 memory and a fast graphics card like Nvidia's GeForce GTX Titan X.
"Tiki is proving once more that the micro-tower is the size and shape of PCs of the future," said Kelt Reeves, president of Falcon Northwest. "While Tiki has remained unchanged at 4 inches wide and 13 inches tall, its power-per-cubic inch has skyrocketed. This latest leap has doubled its maximum memory capacity, and more than quadrupled its CPU core count. With 8 Terabytes of internal drive storage capacity and 4K-capable graphics, there are now very few scenarios when a system larger than a Tiki is actually necessary for most users."
Configuring a Tiki PC based on Intel's X97 chipset starts at $1,858 while an X99 foundation begins at $2,490. We went a little crazy and spec'd out a loaded system consisting of the aforementioned Xeon chip and 32GB of DDR4 RAM, plus a painted case, Titan X graphics card, 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSD (RAID), 6TB Western Digital Red HDD, Blu-ray burner, SilverStone 600W modular PSU, and Windows 8.1 Professional. The finally tally? Almost ten grand ($9,830). Dream big, right?
There are also Quadro graphics card options if you're looking to be a small but potent workstation (the Tiki PC has dual LAN ports, eSATA, USB 3.1 connectivity, and Ultra M.2 PCI Express x4 storage support). And come this fall, Falcon Northwest will offer the Tiki in official Steam Machine variants.
In the meantime, upgraded Tiki PC options based on Intel's X99 chipset are available now.
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