Custom-tailored, hyper-fast, and engineered to the nines? Falcon Northwest doesn't build systems any other way. The Oregon boutique's Tiki small-form-factor gaming desktop offers the performance of a jumbo tower in about one-third the volume and does it pretty much without compromise. Available with AMD or Intel CPUs and gaming-class or professional-workstation graphics, this strictly-high-end affair starts at $3,208 for AMD versions or $3,658 for Intel. Outfitted with AMD's exotic Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor and a 24GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card, our review unit rings up at $4,591. That's a ton of money, but immaculate craftsmanship, top-shelf components, and an admirable warranty set the Tiki apart. More upgradable than the Corsair One a200, the little Falcon Northwest is our Editors' Choice winner among elite small-form-factor gaming PCs.The Design: It's All Custom EngineeredThe devil is in the details, and the Tiki has plenty. It starts with the case. There's no official definition of "small form factor," but among desktops that advertise themselves as such, the Tiki is truly petite. Designed in-house, the all-metal case measures just 13 by 4 by 13.6 inches (HWD) for a volume of 11.6 liters.Digital Storm's Bolt is noticeably larger (20 by 6 by 15.5 inches, 30.5 liters), as is the Maingear Turbo (12.3 by 6.7 by 14.4 inches, 19.5 liters). The Tiki is even a bit smaller than the Corsair One a200 (15 by 6.9 by 7.9 inches, 12 liters). Yet it offers the same full-bore desktop components as those towers and remains entirely end-user serviceable. The latter isn't a given with small towers. The case can only be oriented vertically for cooling reasons. Its base, a detachable six-pound piece of aluminum machined from a single block, keeps it upright. Our unit had a plain finish, but Falcon Northwest offers high-resolution UV printing on the front, sides, or the entire case. You can change the RGB colors of the illuminated Falcon Northwest logo in the Asus AuraSync app.Connectivity is good. Topside are two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, an audio combo jack, and power and reset buttons, along with lots of perforations for cooling. Much of the exhaust from the graphics card is sent through these vents. Considering it's only 6.7 inches square, the Asus ROG Strix B550-I Gaming mini-ITX motherboard offers ample input and output ports: four USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (one Type-C, three Type-A), two legacy USB 2.0 ports, 2.5Gbps Ethernet, and three LED-illuminated audio jacks. You'll also see two gold-plated antenna jacks for the internal Intel AX200 Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 card; you must connect the included external antenna for optimal range. Internal antennas are more aesthetically pleasing, but in a small, specialized tower like this there might not be room for them. Meanwhile, video outputs from the GeForce RTX 3090 include three DisplayPort and one HDMI. The motherboard's HDMI and DisplayPort connectors are disabled since the Ryzen CPU in our unit lacks integrated graphics.The Inside: Packed Yet OrganizedThe Tiki's innovative thumbscrews make for easy case opening. Not only are they retainer-style so they don't come out of the side panel, but they're also spring-loaded so their ends automatically pop out when the threads are loosened enough. The side door doesn't fully come off since the Asetek 120mm CPU cooling radiator is secured to it, but it can be folded flat.The vertically mounted graphics card dominates the view of the interior. Falcon Northwest lets you choose the exact GPU model; ours is a top-shelf EVGA XC3 edition of the GeForce RTX 3090, with a massive heatsink and three cooling fans. It gets auxiliary cooling from two low-profile SilverStone fans and is a cost-no-object choice for gaming or creative use. As noted, the Tiki can also be had with a professional graphics card, the peak being the Nvidia RTX A6000. The memory configuration is also your choice. The two 16GB modules (32GB total) seen here are elite Kingston Fury Renegade RGB DDR4 running at a speedy 3,600MHz. In our unit, the storage drive is a 2TB Seagate FireCuda 520 PCI Express Gen 4 solid-state drive, which is properly covered by a heatsink. The M.2 slot is PCI Express Gen 4x4, while the other M.2 slot on the motherboard's opposite side is Gen 3x4. If you don't like M.2 drives, the Tiki can also take one 3.5-inch or two 2.5-inch SSDs or hard drives, though our review unit has none. The empty drive cage is on top of the power supply shroud. Note the plaque with our publication's name in the photo below; customers get that customization treatment, too. Each Tiki is hand-assembled by one person. The Asus ROG Strix B550-I Gaming motherboard deserves a paragraph. As you'd expect, it's a premium model, with features such as active VRM cooling and built-in wireless. Its only real downside, being a Mini-ITX board, is that it has just two DIMM slots, capping its memory ceiling at 64GB (more than enough for gaming and creative use). Falcon Northwest offers an Asus X570-based board as an option, but it wouldn't be a sensible choice for our configuration since the Ryzen 7 5800X3D isn't overclockable.As for power, the Tiki is too narrow to accommodate a standard desktop power supply so it uses the next best thing, the industry-standard SFX-L form factor for smaller PCs. Unlike the even smaller SFX format, SFX-L supports a 120mm fan for quiet operation, and indeed I never heard a peep from the SilverStone SX800-LTI in our system. Rated for 800 watts and 80 Plus Titanium (94% efficiency) certified, it's overpowered even for our top-end components, but that means it doesn't have to work at full load. A 1,000-watt power supply is optional, but realistically the SX800-LTI will satisfy any configuration.Quietness is one of the Tiki's many assets. Its fans sent quite the volume of warm air away from the tower during our testing, but that's about all I can say. There's no motor noise or other annoying sounds. Good-quality fans and well-placed ventilation help it maintain its cool.Can't Touch This: Benchmarking the Falcon Northwest TikiTo recap the core specs, the $4,591 Falcon Northwest Tiki tested here has a 3.4GHz (4.5GHz turbo), eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor, a 24GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card, 32GB of DDR4-3600 RAM, a 2TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD, Wi-Fi 6, and Windows 11 Pro. The standard warranty is three years.The Tiki (or anything Falcon Northwest builds) will never qualify as a budget system, but that doesn't mean it’s unreasonably priced; I found our unit less expensive than a comparably equipped Digital Storm Bolt and not much more than a Maingear Turbo. Notably, I had to add an extended warranty to both systems to match the Tiki's standard three-year coverage, which includes parts as well as labor. You also get overnight service for the first year and lifetime tech support.The system is also price-competitive with Corsair's One a200, which I saw for $3,399 on Corsair.com with a Ryzen 9 5900X, though that machine tops out with a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and has only a two-year warranty. The Corsair runs almost silently, but graphics-card upgrades are basically out of the question because of its proprietary liquid cooling. Another mini PC to consider is Intel's "Dragon Canyon" NUC 12 Extreme Kit. It uses lower-wattage (65-watt) Intel "Alder Lake" processors but can take up to a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, 64GB of RAM, and three storage drives. Alas, it's a DIY option; Intel only sells the kit in bare-bones form, meaning you'll need to add everything else and be your own tech support.Let's get into testing. I compared the Tiki to the Corsair One i300 (the AMD-based One a200 didn't complete our latest benchmarking regimen), the Intel NUC 12 Extreme, the Dell XPS Desktop 8950 mid-tower, and the enormous HP Omen 45L. This is a tough group, all based on 12th Gen "Alder Lake" CPUs boasting more cores than the Tiki's Ryzen 7 5800X3D, but the Falcon Northwest mini should be competitive throughout.Productivity and Content Creation TestsOur first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. We look for at least 4,000 points from high-performance PCs, and the Tiki clearly had no problem vaulting that bar. It also scored well in the storage test.Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.The Tiki's eight-core Ryzen 7 5800X3D is most evenly matched with the Core i5-12600K in the Dell tower. The Core i7 and Core i9 chips in the others were almost unbeatable, but remember the Tiki can be had with those chips. Let's move on to gaming.Graphics and Gaming TestsFor Windows PCs, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming tests. The former includes two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Also looped into that group is the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL performance.Moving on, our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege representing simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games, respectively. We run F1 with and without Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing.The Tiki swept the real-world gaming benchmarks, even besting the Core i9-equipped HP and Corsair. AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D is one of, if not the, best gaming CPUs you can buy, and at a much lower price than the Core i9-12900K. (And don't forget that it doesn't require DDR5 memory, either.)Small-Form-Factor Gaming ExcellenceIt's hard to downsize without compromise, but the Falcon Northwest Tiki does it. This extra-compact tower uses full-fat desktop components, is fully user-serviceable, and runs quietly. Its memory and storage ceilings aren't as high as those of a midsize or full tower, but that's unavoidable considering its size. Falcon Northwest even offers it with professional GPUs for users of workstation apps. Though the privilege of owning a PC like this doesn't come cheap, the Tiki is price-competitive with the Corsair One a200 and the Maingear Turbo and offers a superior standard warranty. Top-notch craftsmanship, complete customization, and blistering gaming frame rates complete its Editors' Choice qualifications. The Tiki is the high-end, small-form-factor gaming PC to beat.

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