Falcon northwest fragbox case2/11/2024 ![]() The single 1TB hard drive offers a respectable amount of storage, but it's also the only drive you can fit inside. The two, double-wide 3D cards take up all of your card expansion room, so sound cards, TV tuner cards, and other internal feature upgrades are out. Any $1,500 system can post a decent Unreal Tournament 3 score, but maintaining a respectable frame rate on our higher-end Crysis test makes an argument for this FragBox 2 as one of the best gaming PC's we've seen this year.Īlong with all that power, you also get the typical expansion limitations inherent to the small form-factor case design. That means smoother play with better image quality. But with so much GPU horsepower (and we suspect so much RAM), the FragBox 2 loses comparatively fewer frames per second on the higher resolution benchmark. Normally, as you'll see with the other PCs on the Crysis chart, we see a significant drop-off between the 1,280x1,024 and the 1,600x1,200 tests, an indicator of the grueling nature of the Crysis test. The 1,600 x 1,200 Crysis score is the most impressive indicator, and owners of large 24 and 30-inch LCDs should take heed. We suspect it will iron those issues out eventually, if not at launch, but typically new CPU releases focus on mainstream desktop designs first, so it could be a while before the FragBox 2 becomes Core i7-capable.Īs impressive as we find its application results, the FragBox 2 truly shines as a gaming system thanks to those four fast 3D cores. Still, there's no guarantee Falcon will be able to fit a new, potentially hotter, potentially more energy-hungry chip in its small case, much less find an appropriate motherboard for it. That's a very real reason to hold off on any high-end PC purchase right now. This is not to say that you won't be able to get more for your money once Intel's Core i7 chips ship in a few weeks. Shuttle hasn't elected to do that here, which makes the $550 version in the FragBox 2 look like an exceptional deal. The primary difference between the two is that the Shuttle's Extreme chip has an unlocked clock multiplier, which means you can overclock it. The Core 2 Quad Q9650 in the Falcon costs $550, and the clock speed, L2 cache, and front-side bus speeds are all identical. The Shuttle system also uses Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650, Intel's second-fastest desktop CPU, and a $1,000 part if you were to purchase the chip by itself. The $3,995 FragBox 2 comes with 64-bit Vista and 8GB of memory. We didn't find that system attractive compared with the $1,500 FragBox 2, largely because it uses the 32-bit version of Windows Vista and only comes with 2GB of RAM. That $3,200 desktop is designed to compete with Falcon's FragBox line. To help us illustrate that point we'll direct you to the configuration of the Shuttle XPC P2 4800X. But anyone shopping for a small, superfast gaming PC will be more than happy with the performance this high-end FragBox 2 delivers today. You may want to wait until Falcon Northwest has incorporated Intel's new chips into its FragBox configurations, assuming it will. That makes the processor almost secondary compared with the sheer amount of graphics horsepower inside. Thanks to a pair of Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics cards, Falcon has crammed four graphics chips inside this pared-down box. That doesn't mean that we can't appreciate what Falcon Northwest has done with its highest-end FragBox 2. With Intel's new processors just a few short weeks away, it's hard to get that excited about spending $4,000 or so on a high-end gaming PC now. You might rightly wait for Intel's new CPUs to ship before making a pricey PC purchase, but if you buy this system now, you'll be treated to a superfast little desktop. ![]() Falcon Northwest's high-end, preconfigured FragBox 2 leans on a pair of top-of-the-line ATI 3D cards to achieve some of the fastest 3D scores we've seen.
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