20 Questions with Kelt Reeves President Of Falcon Northwest The Definitive Interview Part 2 What follows is Part 2 of the Definitive Interview with Kelt Reeves of Falcon Northwest Computer Systems. If you missed Part 1, you can catch up here . Otherwise, take a gander at what the king of Computer Gaming Systems has to say about the future of this niche market, gaming magazine reviews, the "competition", and most importantly - the Holy Trilogy! -Vincent Vega 11. Falcon Northwest is probably best known for its blazing fast systems, and second for its exceptional customer service. Have the new extended hours of customer service (Monday - Sunday 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM) made it hard to keep up that quality of service? Actually it’s made it easier. We used to have a Monday backlog in support from Sunday’s calls. Now we don’t. It means support has to work Sundays, but its more customer focused service now. 12. Have you started to feel any pressure from big systems manufacturers like Dell and Gateway in terms of infringing on your core group of hardcore gaming enthusiasts? If anything they’ve backed off lately. Dell even stopped selling intel Extreme Edition processors for a while. Rumor was they didn’t have the market for it and couldn’t move them, and I have to believe that was true. One week I was screaming my head off at intel to get my Extreme Edition orders filled, then the week Dell stopped selling them the market was flooded with them. Distributors were calling us trying to get rid of them all. Gateway picked up the Wavemaster case and I heard did very well with it with a gaming SKU. But our market is generally already bored with Wavemasters and has moved on. The core is always way out ahead of anything the big guys do. They’re big, but they can’t move fast. 13. I would imagine that most of your customers are hardcore gamers, but how many would you say use your systems primarily for purposes other than gaming? We actually poll this on our customer surveys. Most do both work and play. Only about 5% are business only. There are so many different degrees of gamer these days, it’s very hard to find someone that doesn’t mix a bit of gaming in their work and vice versa. 14. Did you have a presence at E3 this year? To what degree and how do you position your systems at the world's largest gaming conference? We don’t do a booth ourselves. That would be preaching to the choir in our market. But many vendors show off on our systems. ATI, nVidia, Corsair Memory, and Hitachi were all showing off on our systems. Perhaps the biggest was the Americas’ Army booth though, where they had LAN tournaments of Army Rangers vs. average joe gamers on a sweet 10-FragBox layout. Really, our E3 presence is just to make other vendors products look good. 15. Computer Gaming World and similar gaming periodicals have a long tradition of doing head to head competitions amongst system manufacturers. But, it seems that after the competitions, the letters pages of these magazines are filled with complaints from readers and sometimes even system manufacturers themselves concerning both the results of the tests and the tests used to determine a winner. What is inherently flawed, in your opinion, with this type of competition and the results they achieve? Man this is going to be a long one. Refill your drinks folks. Since the very first competitions, we’ve had to deal with the “big boys” hand-built systems as competitors. For instance, Dell hand builds their early review PCs with the kind of loving attention you know system # 6,412 off their assembly line did not get. So no matter what, you’re going up against a massive corporation’s best efforts. And they have a lot of muscle in getting early products and a lot of R&D money. By contrast, all of our PCs are hand built and tuned, so we’re not doing anything a customer doesn’t get. Then there’s the issue of the pricing stated to the reviewer. It’s just become a joke. So many companies have gotten caught completely blowing a competition’s $X price cap, that the magazines just do not care about enforcing them. They don’t feel they should have to be policeman about this, and I can sympathize with that point of view, even if I don’t agree with it. For instance, last year at a major competition, the winner was $1,000 more than the price cap. They sent paintwork that was supposedly “not included” (but obviously it was there for the photos), and the magazine had to practically force the company to honor the price when they got caught. The company finally capitulated and offered it as a package deal exactly as shown, and slapped a “Sold Out” sticker on the offering shortly after that. The last we heard of it was their customers complaining they had been waiting for as long as two months and hadn’t received their orders. The complaints eventually fade from public memory, but the award logo they won lives forever on the winner’s website. And then there’s the overclocking. It used to be a no-no. Now it’s become the only way you’re going to win. A while back at UGM we got props for being the “fastest non-overclocked PC”. We came in FOURTH. None of the 3 companies ahead of us were actually shipping to customers with the overclocks they showed the magazine. But no one polices that. The newest problem is the “okay we’ll make everyone a winner” strategy. Last fall at the infamous PC Magazine issue 21 shootout, we swept the benchmarks and were one of only two companies out of approximately 30 to get a perfect 5 out of 5 stars. But we didn’t get an Editor’s Choice award. That went to a company with slower performance, but a better price. That’s fine if the magazine wants to be very firm and say only one Editor’s Choice per category. But in their last two PC roundups of 4 systems each, 2 of the 4 systems received Editor’s Choice. This month we got one with 5 out of 5 stars, AND Dell got one with 4.5 out of 5 stars. Do I begrudge Dell their Editor’s Choice? No, but if they can get one with 4.5 stars, why couldn’t we get one with 5 last fall? CGW just did the same thing, handing out 3 Editor’s Choice Awards in a field of 7 competitors. We won the benchmarks in every possible, conceivable way you could slice them, yet we were given a 4.5 for speed and a slower entry got 5. This made the averages all come out nice and equal, so Editor’s Choice awards all around. You’d think I’d just be happy with the award and not bitch to the editor, right? Wrong. If we lose fair and square, fine. But it’s just as important to be judged fairly when you win. I’ll annoy an editor for giving me an award for the wrong reasons just as much for not winning for the wrong reasons. Yes, editors are sick of me. And finally, the worst offense to system reviews so far: the “project”. Whether this is a single PC that someone built in their garage, or a reputable company putting up their own lab project, the effect is absolutely ruining the magazine’s ability to judge anything these days. For an example of a single PC that can turn things upside down, take Lieberman. They got the cover of Maximum PC with arguably the first PC they had ever built. They were operating out of a P.O. Box at the time, had a “hoax investigation” page dedicated to debunking them, and by all accounts had never shipped a PC to a customer. But with a gorgeous, completely misleading website, they managed to negotiate a cover story with Maximum PC. Now Maximum PC is actively after them for putting one over on them. But it set an evil precedent in this industry: get publicity, then start the company with it. Anyone in a garage can make one good PC these days. When magazines review these first efforts as if there were an established company behind them, they really do all of us a disservice. And the project isn’t limited to startup companies. We lost a PC Magazine competition a few months ago to a PC that, 3 months later, has never been offered by the manufacturer. They aren’t even pretending to offer it. It’s not even “coming soon”. It was their one-off overclocking project, and it sure enough it beat our non-overclocked PC. The editor’s reaction to this was “we’ll let their customers police it”. How is that going to happen, exactly? So it’s become exceedingly tough to stick to the high ground that Falcon has always tried to tread. But we’re taking our gloves off. If you saw our most recent PC Mag head-head, you saw we absolutely rocked the benchmarks, even against some heavily overclocked competition. Yes, that’s an early look at a liquid cooled system we’ll be offering later this summer. But it’s certainly real, and WILL be offered. I’ll never stoop to the level of some of these competitors, but Falcon is not going let these guys win this way anymore. There’s only one way the public can fight this downward-spiraling trend and get a review they can trust. I’ve begged editors at many magazines to do this but none has taken me up on it yet: actually buy the PCs anonymously from each company and review what the customers really get. After the review they could let the companies know what they’ve done and get their money back, so it wouldn’t cost a dime. But, the editor would have to get their publisher to front $50K+ to get the article started. And every editor I’ve brought that up to has said their publisher would never even consider it. But, if enough readers asked them to do it… you never know. I’m very proud of the fact that no matter what ugliness the competitions devolve into, that Falcon Northwest actually SHIPS the best PC in the world. 16. The GeForce 6800 ultra and the ATI X800 are now available to consumers. Which in your opinion is the fastest and which will Falcon Northwest offer to its customers and why? We offer both and can easily recommend either card. Both are literally twice as fast as the last generation. They are huge leaps in technology, and great reasons to upgrade your system. In general, they are close in performance. However, in our opinion the GeForce 6800 is the winner in this fight for a few reasons. The first is pure speed. When the cards were first announced and both cards are left at their defaults, the ATI won by the slightest of margins. However, nVidia has sped up their default core GPU speed from 400 to 425, which clearly puts it out ahead. The second is pixel shader 3.0 support. The nVidia card has 60 million more transistors than the ATI, most dedicated to PS 3.0 support. While no one really knows how soon this will be implemented in future games, the demos I saw of titles like Far Cry running PS 3.0 demos were compelling. If you have the choice, why not take the 3.0 hardware? And lastly, driver support. nVidia wins here as well. They are just frankly better about getting their drivers right the first time, and at making the card you buy now go faster in the future. Just in the month or so that we’ve had both of these cards available, nVidia has already sped up their card through drivers by a significant amount. 17. Has Falcon Northwest ever thought of offering custom products other than gaming computers? Like custom painted iPods or other products that your customer base might use while gaming? Well, we have our own brand of coffee, Falcon Fuel, which we give away with our Mach V PCs. It’s a high caffeine content blend that our customers can definitely use while gaming. ;-) Other than that, we haven’t really had much desire to get into the consumer electronics space. Other PC companies have done so, selling everything from MP3 players to TVs in an attempt to make up for flagging computer sales. Luckily, we haven’t had that problem. 18. One of your so-called competitors recently announced at E3 that they would be releasing a product that they claim increases the speed of their systems between 50% and 70%. How do you feel about this product and what sort of strategy will Falcon Northwest use to compete against this technology if in fact it does come to fruition? There’s a reason I waited so long to answer this question, as I’ve been under NDA about SLI until recently. As you may have seen by nVidia’s SLI announcement, this is something that has been in the works for a long, long time by a company that specializes in graphics. We’re very pleased to be a launch partner for nVidia’s SLI technology, and I think it’s going to kick some serious butt. We were the first manufacturer to sell SLI as standard equipment back in the days of the Voodoo2, and we have begged and pleaded for SLI’s return ever since 3Dfx crumbled. 19. What game that is out right now puts the most pressure on the performance numbers of one of your top of the line Mach V gaming machines? Without a doubt, Far Cry. UT2004 is interesting because it’s actually CPU-limited at this point, but Far Cry is by far the most system grinding game overall. Just try to run in at 1600x1200 with 4x/4x on anything less than the latest Falcon with a 6800 Ultra, and it’ll be a slideshow. Even with the best of everything, there are still a few spots with tons of enemies near the end of the game where things will slow down. It’s just the most beautiful, demanding game in years. And incredibly fun to boot. And you can get it free with any Athlon 64 based PC from Falcon! 20. I am of the opinion that Episodes I and II are important to the Star Wars legacy in that they lay the ground work for the Holy Trilogy. Do you feel these chapters will hold up over time, and most importantly, what is your prediction for Episode III? ;-) Sadly, they don’t really hold up over time, in that I’ve seen them both many times and still have a hard time remembering them. They are both enjoyable films, but they just didn’t have the “magic”. The Lord of the Rings trilogy proved that that kind of filmmaking can still be done though, so I’m hoping George finds his roots with Episode 3. And hopefully he’ll get the digital effects down. So much of 1 & 2 had the look of people walking through paintings. What made the Holy Trilogy so good was it was all so real you could reach out and touch it. In the meantime, play Knights of the Old Republic. Good Star Wars magic can still be had on the PC! Thanks Kelt!