Availability: Currently Sold Out

Falcon Northwest has always been something of a specialty computer company, catering to the upper crust of the gaming community. I remember seeing the first Falcon Northwest review in Computer Gaming World and being amazed by the rig's performance, components and high sticker price. These monster machines were especially tailored to gamers at a time when large companies like Dell and Gateway barely acknowledged our existence. Falcon Northwest must not have been satisfied with ruling the PC gaming worldso, with their Xentor 32 and Voodoo3 SE cards, they have branched out into 3D video cards.

The Falcon SE Xentor shares much of the same physical traits as the standard Xentor 32. The PCB board is an exact duplicate and they share the same VGA-out and S-Video back plate connectors. The Falcon SE Xentor PCB is even labeled "Xentor 32" and has the same physical layout, though the Xentor 32 was a 2X AGP card and the Falcon SE Xentor is AGP 4X compliant. A cooling fan/heat sink, similar to the TennMax Lasagna, is also included on the board. The fan has a pass-through power cable, thereby lowering the Falcon SE Xentor's motherboard voltage requirements. The other differences between the Xentor 32 and its SE brethren are with the included TNT2 Ultra chip and the SDRAM memory. The Falcon SE Xentor's TNT2 Ultra chips must have been very hard to come by, considering that the stock speed of the TNT2 was only 150 MHz. The Falcon SE Xentor is clocked at an incredible 195 MHz stock, making it one of the fastest 3D cards of any generation.

The SDRAM memory is another story altogether. While the 195 MHz TNT2 Ultra is impressive, the 4.3 ns memory on the Falcon SE Xentor is the fastest seen on a 3D card. The Falcon SE Xentor's SDRAM is rated at 233 MHz and runs at 235 MHz, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. To ensure that performance was stable and to ensure some overclockability, there are individual heat sinks on each of the memory chips. This is one of the more innovative cooling methods for a video card, and although it might add to the cost, might not be a bad idea for others to emulate. I've employed much the same strategy with my PIII-450 and attached strip fans to its cache chips. As any overclocking guru will tell you, every little bit of cooling helps.

Falcon and Guillemot have treated their SE Xentor card in much the same way we upgrade our PCs with new CPUs and memory. While the motherboard may remain the same, the addition of a faster CPU and PC133 SDRAM can lead to some serious performance increases. The Falcon SE Xentor shows off the very best of the TNT2 Ultra batches, along with some extremely high-speed memory. The only negative to this card is its current sold out status at Falcon, both for Falcon PC and video card customers.