Falcon Northwest Talon Review: A 12-Core Ryzen Powered Battle Station

Name: Falcon Northwest Talon Gaming Desktop
Brand: Falcon

by Chris Ledenican — Friday, October 25, 2019, 10:30 AM EDT

Falcon Northwest Talon 20th Anniversary Review: Power Consumption And Acoustics

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points—namely, power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter.

Total System Power Consumption And Acoustics

Tested at the Outlet

Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet.

We measured the load wattage on this system by running a combination of Prime95 and Furmark for an extended period of time and then taking note of peak usage. This gives us an idea of a worst case scenario. In this case, the 20th Anniversary Talon (as configured) idled at around 136W, and peaked at 631W under full load. There are a couple of things we can take from this. One, the 1000W power supply in the system has plenty of headroom, if you plan to add more hardware to the system. Two, running dual graphics cards, a high-end processor and 64GB of memory will increase your power bill.

Falcon Northwest Talon Noise Profile

The 20th anniversary Talon is a powerful system, but that doesn't mean it's a loud system. During most of our testing the Talon was quiet... extremely quiet. When idle you can literately be four feet from the machine and hardly hear a whisper. With dual RTX 2080 Super graphics cards though, the Talon can get loud under extreme workloads. So, there were times when the fans would ramp up and become noticeable. Even under these circumstances the system as a whole was quiet though compared to other systems we have tested. One of our main computers is a DIY system built in a Fractal Design case. Comparing the two systems is night and day. The fans in the Fractal case are always noticeable from a couple of feet away and under load the Fractal case doesn't dampen the sound as much as the Talon's thick metal chassis. Overall, we were very pleased with the acoustic performance of the 20th anniversary Talon, especially, when you take into account the performance it delivers.