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Falcon Northwest Talon

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0600

When Falcon Northwest submitted its Talon PC to us instead of its top-gun Mach V, we didn’t think the machine stood a chance of taking down the spate of ripping-fast 4GHz Core i7 rigs we’ve seen in the last few months.

And we were right. But the point Falcon was trying to make with its Talon was that its machine could deliver 90 percent of the performance of those big LGA1366-based Core i7 rigs at half the cost, half the noise, and half the energy consumption. Impossible? We thought so.

But that was before we’d ever heard of ATI’s new Radeon HD 5970 card. Code-named Hemlock, this new card features not one, but two of the GPUs that power the Kick Ass Radeon HD 5870.

Falcon uses two of these cards in the Talon, for quad-GPU action, and pairs them with an LGA1156 Core i7-870 overclocked from its stock 2.93GHz to very stable 3.83GHz. We stress-tested the Falcon for more than 48 hours without a single crash.

For storage, Falcon tapped a pair of Intel’s 34nm X25-M 80GB SSDs. Bulk storage is left to a 1TB Samsung Spinpoint drive.

The 64-bit Windows 7 Pro–based Talon’s benchmark scores didn’t disappoint—but they didn’t send us swooning, either. The Talon beat our zero point, a Core i7-920 overclocked to 3.66GHz. We saw predictable results, with the Falcon faster in Premiere Pro CS3 and Photoshop CS3. Photoshop CS3 actually saw a performance delta of 19 percent, thanks to the SSDs in the Talon and the higher Turbo mode clocks. However, in ProShow and MainConcept, the Talon’s scores were closer to the zero point’s, but still faster. In gaming, pitting two dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 cards against a single Radeon HD 4870 X2 turned out as expected: with almost an 80 percent difference in frame rates. Even better, the CrossFire (or should we say QuadFire?) Radeon HD 5970s let you tick on 16x AA in Crysis with nary a drop in performance. Frankly, for folks with a single, 24-inch panel, these two cards are overkill (but feel free to experiment with three or more panels in the cards’ Eyefinity mode).

Now, what about those claims of taking on those 4GHz-plus Core i7 boxes? Falcon hit its target. It couldn’t beat the $9,000 Velocity Micro Raptor SE that we reviewed in December, but it was just 10 percent slower. The Raptor SE’s tri-SLI also held a 5 percent edge in Crysis, but we suspect that with this class of machine, Crysis is quickly being limited by the CPU. Amazingly, the Talon managed to surpass the Windows Vista–based AVADirect machine we reviewed in our Holiday issue, even though the latter’s Core i7 was clocked up to 4.4GHz.

Even more amazing, the Talon could hold its own against machines that are almost twice as pricey, while being incredibly quiet. Not HTPC quiet, but you’d be unlikely to identify this machine as an all-out gaming rig judging by the sound output. In power consumption, the Falcon peaked at about 500 watts—half as much as the AVADirect machine.

The Talon is not the most powerful machine we’ve ever tested, but it still gets our approval for being fast, freakishly quiet, and even energy efficient. Heck, it’ll even save you a few thousand bucks, to boot.

Falcon Northwest Fragbox II

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:45:19 -0500

A lunch-box computer that eats the lunches of bigger PCs

You know when a little person shows up in a Ben Stiller movie he’s gonna whoop some ass. Sometimes that’s not just a comedy film cliché. Take, for example, Falcon Northwest’s size-challenged Fragbox II.

You’d think this Halfling PC would have a hard time competing with full-tilt, big-ass gaming rigs, but Falcon brings its A-game to the table by managing to stuff an overclocked Core i7 into the wee chassis.

This is the third Fragbox II we’ve seen in recent years and it’s also clearly the fastest. With its overclocked 2.93GHz Core i7-940, 6GB of DDR3/1066, Lite On Blu-ray burner, Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda, and a pair of GeForce GTX 285 cards in SLI, this PC is hardly wanting.

Think of the Fragbox II as Hervé Villechaize mixed with Samuel L. Jackson.

The Fragbox II didn’t set any Lab records in benchmarks. The majority are still held by Velocity Micro’s Raptor Z90, which we reviewed in our Holiday 2008 issue. With its larger and cooler-running desktop case, the Raptor Z9 packed a 3.2GHz Core i7-965 overclocked to 3.66GHz. That’s enough to keep the Falcon’s slightly overclocked 3.06GHz Core i7-940 at bay.

Falcon does keep things competitive, however, by enabling Turbo Mode, which takes the proc to 3.3GHz in some applications. That’s enough to embarrass some far more extravagant rigs. The most glaring example is the $10,000 Hardcore Reactor PC we reviewed in February. The tiny Fragbox II manages to pull even with that monster in our Premiere Pro CS3 benchmark and speeds past the Hardcore in MainConcept Reference encoding and ProShow Producer. Interestingly, the two GeForce GTX 285 cards in the Fragbox II leap ahead of the tri-SLI based Hardcore in Unreal Tournament 3. Why? The Core i7 in the Fragbox II is faster than the Core 2 Extreme in the Hardcore and we run our test at a “low resolution” of 1920x1200. Tri-SLI needs ultrahigh resolutions to overcome its inefficiencies in less GPU-intensive games.

The Fragbox II doesn’t just ace outdated Core 2 Extreme PCs, either; it also manages to put a dent in Gateway’s FX6800, which we reviewed in April. The Fragbox II turns in better scores in Premiere Pro, ProShow, MainConcept, and both gaming tests since it, surprisingly, has higher specs than the larger Gateway. There’s one area where the Fragbox II falls short, though: storage. The Fragbox II’s single 1.5TB drive can’t keep pace with the SSD and RAID 0 Velociraptors elsewhere, and it gets spanked in our drive-intensive Photoshop benchmark. Falcon does sell an uber SSD version of the Fragbox II, but didn’t sample it to us. Pity.

Obviously, you can’t cram the same ton of parts in an SFF box that you can with a full-size desktop machine. But it’s not something that should take anyone by surprise, so we can’t ding the Fragbox II for that. Noise is a different matter. To keep all this hardware cool requires fans. Given the Fragbox II’s size, that means smaller, shriller fans. The Fragbox II isn’t unacceptably loud, but you won’t keep it running in your bedroom at night. You might even notice it if it’s in the room next door. Still, the biggest negative is the price. At $4,632, this rig is hardly budget.

It is, however, smaller and faster than a lot of the gaming machines we’ve seen recently. Heck, it’s even cheaper than some of them too.

Falcon Northwest FragBox II

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:28:37 -0500

Falcon keeps the FragBox II’s price at $1,500 by using a GeForce 8800 GT and a new Wolfdale Core 2 Duo chip.

Can you get Ferrari performance for the price of a Camaro? That’s the question we asked when we uncrated 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 constructed 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 gooses 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 configurations, but we were baffled by this rig’s RAM setup. With four DIMM slots available in the FragBox, Falcon chose to outfit 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 configure RAM in single-channel mode?

Falcon gave us three reasons for this decision: There’s only a minimal performance advantage to running dual-channel mode with this box; RAM is the second-most-likely component to fail (the GPU is first), so using just one DIMM cuts the chance 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 configs, but dual-channel has become the de facto configuration 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, but interestingly, the dual-core Penryn holds its head up high in the ProShow Producer, Photoshop CS3, and Premiere Pro CS3 tests. The extra 575MHz and faster Penryn design is just enough to achieve parity with the older quad Kentsfield.

We couldn’t compare the FragBox II’s performance against that of the $1,500 PC we built for the April issue because the OSes are different, but we can compare specs. Our desktop machine outdoes the FragBox II in just about every category: RAM, graphics, storage, and CPU; however, that comparison may be unfair since a desktop is still cheaper to build than a small formfactor rig.

What we have here is a reasonably fast small formfactor box that’s good for standard-resolution gaming. You don’t want to pair this wee rig up with a 30-inch panel—and really, who wants to lug a 30-inch LCD to a LAN party. The bad news is that we probably wouldn’t use the FragBox II with even a 24-inch panel, but that’s because we’re used to the smoking performance of GTX cards in SLI.

We certainly don’t think the FragBox II is perfect. We would have preferred a quad-core Penryn inside and perhaps a GeForce 8800 GTS 512 card, but then it wouldn’t be a $1,500 box or nearly as quiet. Of course, we’re still not sold on Windows Vista, but we’re getting as resigned to it as a 2-year-old is to a new baby sibling. We know that Mom and Dad just aren’t taking the new kid back to the hospital, even if he is Chucky.

Falcon’s FragBox II is not as sexy as what the company normally produces, but for a $1,500 small formfactor machine, it’s pretty damned solid.