reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED
C
an you get Ferrari performance for
the price of a Camaro? That’s the
question we asked when we uncrat-
ed Falcon Northwest’s small formfactor
FragBox II. Falcon, the recognized father of
the modern gaming PC, normally throws us
lustworthy $9,000 gaming rigs. At $1,500,
the FragBox II is no such home wrecker.
That doesn’t make it any less of a
machine, though. Inside the solidly con-
structed aluminum box is Intel’s new
Core 2 Duo E8400 dual-core CPU. Code-
named Wolfdale, this 45nm chip runs at a
stock clock of 3GHz, which Falcon goos-
es a notch to 3.24GHz. With the Wolfdale
capable of much, much higher speeds,
why not crank it up even more? Falcon
said the FragBox II is designed to be a
cool-running, quiet, inexpensive gaming
box. Overclocking it further would have
upped the noise and thermals too much.
The E8400 is plugged into an Asus
P5E-VM DO mobo that’s based on Intel’s
Q35 integrated-graphics chipset. The
craptacular Intel graphics are switched
off and an EVGA GeForce 8800 GT takes
command from the board’s single x16
slot; a 500GB Seagate hard drive, a Lite-On DVD burner, and 2GB of RAM round
out the package.
Pretty standard fare? Not really. We’re
used to Falcon being just about perfect
when it comes to system confi gurations,
but we were baffl ed by this rig’s RAM
setup. With four DIMM slots available in the
FragBox, Falcon chose to outfi t the machine
with 2GB in a single slot. Even Mac users
know that you need to populate two DIMM
slots for dual-channel support. So why
would Falcon confi gure RAM in single-
channel mode?
Falcon gave us three reasons for this
decision: There’s only a minimal perfor-
mance advantage to running dual-channel
mode with this box; RAM is the second-
most-likely component to fail (the GPU
is fi rst), so using just one DIMM cuts thechance of failure in half; and three free
DIMM slots provides a better upgrade path.
Sure, buddy. Skeptical, we called
Falcon’s bluff and populated the rig with
two 1GB sticks of DDR2/800 and reran our
tests. The results? Pretty much the same.
What the hell? We admit that it’s been a few
years since we benched dual-channel vs.
single-channel confi gs, but dual-channel
has become the de facto confi guration for
enthusiasts. Could the 6MB of L2 in the
Penryn CPU really be ameliorating RAM
bottlenecks? We’re not sure, but obviously,
there’s egg on our faces, not Falcon’s.
In performance benchmarks, the
FragBox II didn’t break any records, but it
didn’t fall on its face, either. Up against our
standard quad-core GeForce 8800 GTX
SLI zero-point desktop box, the FragBox
II gets smoked in the gaming benchmarks
and our Main Concept H.264 encoding test,Falcon
Northwest
FragBox II
This small formfactor rig surprises in
more ways than oneToting the FragBox II to a LAN party is easy, thanks to the beefy handle on top.74 MAXIMUMPC | MAY 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
1,490 sec (-12%)ZERO POINT SCORES0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%150 sec
1,504 sec
2,640 sec (-45%)69 fps (-49%)30 fps (-78%)Our current desktop test bed is a Windows Vista Ultimate machine using a quad-core 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 RAM on an EVGA 680 SLI moth-
erboard, two EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX videocards in SLI mode, Western Digital 150GB Raptor and 500GB Caviar hard drives, an LG GGC-H20L optical drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi
soundcard, and a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad PSU.VISTA BENCHMARKS
PREMIERE PRO CS3
PHOTOSHOP CS3
PROSHOW
MAINCONCEPT
FEAR 1.07
QUAKE 41,310 sec
152 sec
1,506 sec
1,448 sec
137 fps
135 fpsUNDER THE HOOD
CPU Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
(3GHz overclocked to 3.14GHz)
MOBO ASUS P5E-VM DO
RAM 2GB Crucial DDR2/800
@ 716MHz (one 2GB stick in
single-channel mode)
LAN Gigabit
HARD DRIVE One Seagate 500GB 7,200rpm
Barracuda
OPTICAL Lite-On LH-20A1HVIDEOCARD EVGA GeForce 8800 GT (650MHz
core, 950MHz RAM)
SOUNDCARD Onboard
CASE Custom Silverstone
BOOT: 48 sec. DOWN: 7 sec.BRAINSBEAUTY