PC builder Falcon Northwest today announced their new mid-sized tower PC, the Talon 20th Anniversary Edition. The culmination of a 2-year in-house case design project, Talon takes aim at winning over the Mac-using creator crowd with top-end components, careful thermal management and high-end metal exterior. It's also targeted at Falcon's game-playing clientele with options for glass sides, custom paintwork, and embracing the gaming trend Falcon has mostly resisted: RGB LED lighting.

"It's amazing!" said Chris Roberts, CEO of Roberts Space Industries and the creative genius behind Star Citizen and the Wing Commander game series. Chris was the recipient of the very first 20th Anniversary Talon. "It's butter smooth and super quiet. I love the beautiful artwork and that I can easily open up the sides to see the immaculate components, cabling and lighting."

Major American PC and consumer-electronics OEMs, namely Dell, HP, Microsoft, and Amazon, are reportedly moving some of their manufacturing out of China, in the wake of the ongoing US-China trade-war, an offshoot of which inflicts import-tariffs on a spectrum of products imported from China. This impacts China as a destination for manufacturing. According to Japanese business publication Nikkei, HP and Dell are each moving 30 percent of their laptop manufacturing volume out of China. This roughly aligns with their volumes bound for the US market. They could continue manufacturing in China for volumes headed to other markets.

Currently, the U.S. Government imposes import tariffs on $200 billion worth goods imported from China, and fully built PCs were immune to these tariffs. This has had an adverse and unfair impact on U.S.-based system integrators such as OriginPC, Falcon Northwest, etc., who import components and assemble gaming PCs and notebooks on U.S. soil, on a build-to-order basis. A new round of import tariffs proposed by Washington changes this, and brings even fully-built laptops, smartphones, and gaming consoles under the ambit of import tariffs. This explains why Microsoft and Amazon are eager to change their manufacturing landscapes. Microsoft makes its Surface line of premium portable computers, and Xbox game consoles in China, while Amazon makes a vast array of IoT products under its main brand, and various knick-knacks under its Amazon Basics brand.

Gaming PC builder Falcon Northwest teased a picture of its upcoming Tiki compact high-performance desktop built on the AMD Radeon theme. The silver-bodied beast shows off a Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition graphics card through an acrylic cutout on its side, and will be one of the first pre-built desktops you can buy with the $1,000-ish air-cooled Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition. Not much else is known about this variant of the Tiki. Looking at its prominent AMD branding, it's entirely possible that the side-panel hides a mini-ITX socket AM4 motherboard with a Ryzen 7 series chip; or maybe not, and it sticks with a Core i7 "Kaby Lake" with a 200-series chipset mini-ITX motherboard.

AMD, which has been timing its upcoming dual-GPU "Fiji" graphics card to launch sometime this year, may have demoed a production version of the card in one of its launch partners, Falcon Northwest's, Tiki high-end gaming desktop, as a "VR developer box." AMD's Roy Taylor, in a recent tweet, captions a picture of this dev box as being "the world's best DirectX 12 VR developer box," leading the press to speculate that it's running the company's dual-GPU "Fiji" card.

A close look at AMD's VR dev box, through its windowed graphics card compartment, reveals an air-cooled AMD reference graphics card, which VideoCardz' trigonometry pins as being shorter than a Radeon R9 390X reference board. It could be a reference R9 380X, but then a reference dual-GPU "Fiji" PCB is roughly of the same length, and a R9 380X wouldn't earn the title of being the "world's best" from a senior AMD exec while there are faster AMD cards, such as the R9 Fury. The ability of the full-spec "Fiji" silicon to cope well with a rather simple air-cooler in the R9 Nano fans even more speculation that a dual-GPU "Fiji" board could make do with a powerful air-channel cooler.

At the Virtual Reality Los Angeles (VRLA) event, AMD along with a few gaming PC manufacturers demonstrated their desktop builds featuring the company's upcoming dual-GPU graphics card driven by a pair of "Fiji" GPUs. Among the desktops demoed include a prototype Falcon Northwest Tiki compact gaming desktop with a dual-Fiji graphics card, and HTC Vive HMD. Falcon Northwest commented that the dual-GPU "Fiji" graphics card is small enough to squeeze into its 4-inch thick Tiki, indicating that the card will be super-compact. AMD is expected to launch the dual-GPU "Fiji" graphics card some time in Q2 2016.

Valve announces a number of product and technologies at this week's Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. "We continue to see very strong growth in PC Gaming, with Steam growing 50% in the last 12 months," said Gabe Newell, Valve's president. "With these announcements we hope that we are helping build on that momentum."

Steam Machines, Windows PCs, Macs, and Linux PCs will be able to take advantage of a new product announced at GDC called Steam Link. Designed to extend your Steam experience to any room in the house, Steam Link allows you to stream all your Steam content from any PC or Steam Machine on the same home network. Supporting 1080p at 60Hz with low latency, Steam Link will be available this November for $49.99, and available with a Steam Controller for an additional $49.99 in the US (worldwide pricing to be released closer to launch).

Oregon-based custom PC builder Falcon Northwest has also adopted Intel's new high-end desktop line and is making it available on three of its systems, the Mach V, the Talon and the FragBox. The X99-powered configurations feature the 8-core Core i7-5960X or the 6-core i7-5930K or i7-5820K, liquid cooling for the CPU, up to 64 GB of DDR4 memory, up to six storage drives, and up to three graphics cards set up in SLI or CrossFireX.

The Haswell-E-based Mach V, Talon and FragBox start at $3,021, $2,330 and $2,313, respectively.

PC maker Falcon Northwest has created a radical upgrade option to the popular Tiki micro-tower: The Tiki-Z Special Edition. At only 4" wide and 13" tall, Tiki-Z retains the same physical size as the standard Tiki - roughly the size of an original XBOX game console. But behind Tiki-Z's new case window sits the fastest graphics card NVIDIA has ever made: the GeForce GTX TITAN Z-powered by two Kepler GPUs.

"Tiki-Z gives our customers the dual GPU option they've wanted since Tiki was first released." said Kelt Reeves, president of Falcon Northwest. "They can now play truly demanding 3D games at 4K resolution in a slim PC that can easily fit on anyone's desk. Tiki-Z takes our power-per-cubic-inch mission to an entirely new Level."

NVIDIA today introduced the new GeForce GTX TITAN, powered by the fastest GPU on the planet and designed to unleash the world's fastest gaming PCs including personal gaming supercomputers and svelte, quiet, small form-factor PCs.

"GeForce GTX TITAN is a beast of a GPU -- and the only one in the world powerful enough to play any game at any resolution at any time," said Scott Herkelman, general manager of the GeForce business unit at NVIDIA. "And yet, all of this immense power is housed in a sleek, sexy design, so gamers can also build beautifully-designed PC gaming machines about the size of a gaming console, yet magnitudes more powerful and always upgradeable."

Gaming PC maker Falcon Northwest announced that Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro are being offered as OS options for its entire lineup of gaming desktops and notebooks, including the flagship Mach V desktop, Talon performance desktop, Fragbox LAN party desktop, Tiki signature compact desktop, DRX desktop-replacement notebook, and TLX thin-and-light gaming notebook.

Although Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate are available as options, Windows 8 Standard replaced Windows 7 Home Premium as the base OS choice, with Windows 8 Pro being available at a premium of US $44. Windows 7 Professional comes at the same exact premium (+$44), while Windows 7 Ultimate is the most expensive option, at +$102.

PC maker Falcon Northwest intends to change the perception of how big a powerful PC needs to be with their new Tiki "micro-tower". At only 4" wide and 13" tall, Tiki is roughly the size of an original XBOX game console. Inside Tiki packs the fastest NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, the fastest Intel 3rd Generation Core-i7 "Ivy Bridge" quad-core CPUs, 16 gigabytes of memory, and up to four terabytes of storage. It's even got a liquid cooling system.

"Tiki is a showcase of how far the PC industry has come in just the past year," said Kelt Reeves, president of Falcon Northwest. "CPUs and graphics cards have taken massive leaps in performance and power efficiency. Tiny solid-state storage has become affordable, and the miniaturization of motherboards all mean that your average tower PC is now much bigger than it really needs to be. With Tiki, we solved the heat and noise challenges involved in getting rid of all that excess space."