Falcon Northwest FragBox SLI: Dare to Dream
by Jarred Walton on May 3, 2006 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Far Cry v1.33
Far Cry is easily the oldest of the titles I'm still using for benchmarks. Amazingly, the graphics quality still competes well against the latest games on the market. The rendering of a bright, tropical environment is certainly different from most other titles, and we're looking forward to seeing CryTek's Crisis game in the future. With Far Cry, we record average frame rates from three passes on the following Ubisoft demos: Regulator, Research, Training, and Volcano. We then average the results from these four maps to come up with a composite score. If you're interested in the level-specific results, we can provide those as well, but in order to avoid generating a ton of different graphs we averaged the results.
At lower resolutions, Far Cry is still CPU limited, though with frame rates in the mid-100s, you're not really losing much in the way of performance. As resolution increases, frame rates eventually begin to drop, but everything short of 2048x1536 is more than playable with a single GTX card. The systems are once again pretty close to each other, with the DFI system being a bit faster at lower resolutions, while the FragBox takes the lead by a small margin at higher resolutions. Far Cry is another game that clearly doesn't benefit from more than 1GB of RAM, though as with most games, loading times are noticeably faster.
Enabling sound in Far Cry doesn't cause nearly as much of a performance hit as in other games, although the FragBox scores do drop about 4%. On the other hand, the shuttle and DFI systems, as well as the FragBox X-Fi configuration, all show less than a 4% performance decrease. That typically means the bottleneck is something other than the CPU, or else the sound subsystem is simply not as CPU intensive as in other games.
Far Cry is easily the oldest of the titles I'm still using for benchmarks. Amazingly, the graphics quality still competes well against the latest games on the market. The rendering of a bright, tropical environment is certainly different from most other titles, and we're looking forward to seeing CryTek's Crisis game in the future. With Far Cry, we record average frame rates from three passes on the following Ubisoft demos: Regulator, Research, Training, and Volcano. We then average the results from these four maps to come up with a composite score. If you're interested in the level-specific results, we can provide those as well, but in order to avoid generating a ton of different graphs we averaged the results.
At lower resolutions, Far Cry is still CPU limited, though with frame rates in the mid-100s, you're not really losing much in the way of performance. As resolution increases, frame rates eventually begin to drop, but everything short of 2048x1536 is more than playable with a single GTX card. The systems are once again pretty close to each other, with the DFI system being a bit faster at lower resolutions, while the FragBox takes the lead by a small margin at higher resolutions. Far Cry is another game that clearly doesn't benefit from more than 1GB of RAM, though as with most games, loading times are noticeably faster.
Enabling sound in Far Cry doesn't cause nearly as much of a performance hit as in other games, although the FragBox scores do drop about 4%. On the other hand, the shuttle and DFI systems, as well as the FragBox X-Fi configuration, all show less than a 4% performance decrease. That typically means the bottleneck is something other than the CPU, or else the sound subsystem is simply not as CPU intensive as in other games.
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Pirks - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
Thanks, but that's still very far from what I was asking. If all the PC is made of were just ONE SINGLE ABIT MOBO, then yeah it'd be a close shot :Pislandtechengineers - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
small and powerful; like another has stated; Build my own. being rich and able to let someone else do the work for you = lazy , but i wouldnt mind putting it in my car if i had cash to throw out...Inkjammer - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
"Performance nerd-vana" may have to be one of the best quotes I've seen in a while. =DMissing Ghost - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
What's so special about it?unclebud - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
the review was still interesting, as alwayswhat i was saying is that another group of journalists reviewed the fragbox before and they encountered a very different type of experience... it's also interesting that they sent a fragbox with an evga board now and not the msi/ati 480~
Gary Key - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
I cannot answer directly for Jarred in this case, but my previous experiences with Falcon Northwest have shown they do listen to their customers and will correct any product issues immediately.unclebud - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
"I can't really evaluate the support that comes from Falcon at this time."imagine that...
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
They put a customer sticker on every system. This one is for "AnandTech" - too bad I have to send it back.daftpunkit - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
My parents got me a Falcon NW for college, 4 years later it still runs pretty sweet, and 4 years in the computer world means it's ancient.The support was outstanding too I would say. They are quick too. I think the original had a MSI mobo but it blew up or something about a year into me owning it and I shipped it to them they replaced it with a nice ASUS mobo and got it back pretty quick.
Ryan Norton - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
Man, I remember when I was 10-14 or so and my dad still picked out the family computer, guaranteeing slowness and poor Doom II performance... he subscribed to Computer Gaming World and the Mach V ads always made me drool! I would never buy a FNW system when I can build my own so much easier, UNLESS I get rich one day... then man, I'm gonna beat a path to their door for whatever octo-SLI quad-CPU 32GB RAM madness reigns in the future.