Falcon Northwest RAK Intel Xeon W-3400 Internal Hardware Overview
Inside the system, we wanted to focus for a moment on this photo. One can see the massive, and barely fitting NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, but we also installed a NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada without an issue, and installing two should be easy as well. Even though this is a short-depth system at 468mm or under 18.5″ with a liquid cooling loop inside, it also has plenty of room for a huge motherboard and components.
A big part of that, as well as making this system relatively easy to service is the liquid cooler. The liquid cooler is from Silverstone, but it seems to be a custom solution for Falcon Northwest. The stock Silverstone XE360-4677 is a triple 120mm fan unit that would not fit in this system.
Under the liquid cooler is the big feature, the CPU. The Intel Xeon w9-3495X is a massively quick processor with 56 cores, PCIe Gen5, and DDR5 ECC RDIMM support.
Flanking the Intel Xeon W, we get an 8 DIMM Kingston Fury Renegade Pro 16GB DDR5-6000 ECC RDIMM kit. Not only do we get ECC RDIMM support, but the Intel Xeon w9-3495X supports overclocking the memory as well. Instead of DDR5-4800 support, as we would get with a traditional OEM, Falcon Northwest offers DDR5-6000 for a huge memory bandwidth upgrade.
Although the CPU supports a massive number of PCIe Gen5 lanes, there was one small feature that brought a smile to our team’s faces: WiFi. The ASUS motherboard that this system comes with does not have built-in WiFi. Falcon Northwest did the same thing we did with our test system and used a massive PCIe Gen5 x16 slot to hold a small WiFi 6E module. There is another solution, but this is often the easiest if you have free PCIe slots.
On the subject of the motherboard, this system uses the ASUS Pro WS W790E SAGE SE. This is a massive motherboard that is simply too large to fit in many consumer cases. That is what makes it fitting in a sub 18.5 inch (468mm) deep chassis so exciting.
Although the system does not have a huge number of drive bays, there are PCIe Gen5 slots for storage expansion and the motherboard has three onboard M.2 slots as well for storage expansion.
Overall, the system is a mind-bender. It looks small since it is only slightly deeper than it is wide, and we are accustomed to 5U and deep workstations from companies like Dell, Supermicro, Lenovo, and HP. Then you look inside and it has a surprising amount of expansion in such a small footprint and it almost feels like it should not be the case. Yet, here we are.
Next, let us get to the block diagram, performance, and more.
