Falcon Northwest FragBox SLI: Dare to Dream
by Jarred Walton on May 3, 2006 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Battlefield 2, v1.22
We've updated our BF2 benchmark (again), which means that old scores have been invalidated. It's really difficult to understand why a game patch necessitates new demo files, and ideally gaming companies will start to make demo file support backwards compatible if at all possible. If there's a good reason for the change, that's acceptable, but DICE has never been forthcoming about what "upgrades" have been made to the demo recoding/playback features.
We've tried to keep the demo file somewhat consistent, so we're still using the Operation Clean Sweep map with 16 players and a variety of camera angles including shots for infantry, planes, helicopters, tanks, etc. Other levels in Battlefield 2 are not quite as demanding on the system, but we wanted a large map with water to present something of a worst-case scenario. (Granted, getting a demo with 64 players would represent a better worst-case scenario, but creating such demos on our own is a bit difficult.) We didn't even bother running tests without 4xAA, as the game is almost entirely CPU limited on the top SLI configurations we're testing.
All of the platforms offer reasonable performance under Battlefield 2. Even the Shuttle system with a single GTX card manages to remain playable, and in fact it gives the 7900 GT SLI configurations a run for the money. Considering a single GTX card starts at $480 while two 7900 GT cards will run $580, not to mention the fact that you don't have to deal with SLI incompatibilities or headaches, and you can make a good point for going with a single fast GPU. That's something we'll keep an eye on throughout the rest of the game benchmarks, but of course the bottom line is that if you want maximum performance, the FragBox SLI system is about equal to the best full-ATX desktop systems.
Enabling audio causes quite a bit more load on the CPU, making Battlefield 2 largely GPUs limited. With dual GTX cards, the FragBox is about 17% slower than the DFI system -- this despite the fact that they both use the same Realtek ALC850 codec. Looking at the 7900 GT numbers, equipping the FragBox with an X-Fi card doesn't really help performance, though again we must say that it definitely sounds better. Something else to pay attention to is how much having only 1GB of RAM hurts performance in this configuration. It didn't seem to have much of an impact with the GTX cards, perhaps because they have 512MB of RAM each, but the 1GB GT SLI configuration is easily outperformed by a single GTX with 2GB of RAM.
We also tracked loading times for Battlefield 2, and though we don't have a graph made up, I can give you a couple quick numbers. The FragBox takes 100 to 140 seconds to load a level with sound when using to GT cards, the X-Fi, and 1GB of RAM. Upgrading to 2GB of RAM cuts the load times down to 50 to 80 seconds. That's the amount of time it takes to start a Battlefield 2 and load a level, but transitions between levels will also be substantially faster with 2GB of RAM.
We've updated our BF2 benchmark (again), which means that old scores have been invalidated. It's really difficult to understand why a game patch necessitates new demo files, and ideally gaming companies will start to make demo file support backwards compatible if at all possible. If there's a good reason for the change, that's acceptable, but DICE has never been forthcoming about what "upgrades" have been made to the demo recoding/playback features.
We've tried to keep the demo file somewhat consistent, so we're still using the Operation Clean Sweep map with 16 players and a variety of camera angles including shots for infantry, planes, helicopters, tanks, etc. Other levels in Battlefield 2 are not quite as demanding on the system, but we wanted a large map with water to present something of a worst-case scenario. (Granted, getting a demo with 64 players would represent a better worst-case scenario, but creating such demos on our own is a bit difficult.) We didn't even bother running tests without 4xAA, as the game is almost entirely CPU limited on the top SLI configurations we're testing.
All of the platforms offer reasonable performance under Battlefield 2. Even the Shuttle system with a single GTX card manages to remain playable, and in fact it gives the 7900 GT SLI configurations a run for the money. Considering a single GTX card starts at $480 while two 7900 GT cards will run $580, not to mention the fact that you don't have to deal with SLI incompatibilities or headaches, and you can make a good point for going with a single fast GPU. That's something we'll keep an eye on throughout the rest of the game benchmarks, but of course the bottom line is that if you want maximum performance, the FragBox SLI system is about equal to the best full-ATX desktop systems.
Enabling audio causes quite a bit more load on the CPU, making Battlefield 2 largely GPUs limited. With dual GTX cards, the FragBox is about 17% slower than the DFI system -- this despite the fact that they both use the same Realtek ALC850 codec. Looking at the 7900 GT numbers, equipping the FragBox with an X-Fi card doesn't really help performance, though again we must say that it definitely sounds better. Something else to pay attention to is how much having only 1GB of RAM hurts performance in this configuration. It didn't seem to have much of an impact with the GTX cards, perhaps because they have 512MB of RAM each, but the 1GB GT SLI configuration is easily outperformed by a single GTX with 2GB of RAM.
We also tracked loading times for Battlefield 2, and though we don't have a graph made up, I can give you a couple quick numbers. The FragBox takes 100 to 140 seconds to load a level with sound when using to GT cards, the X-Fi, and 1GB of RAM. Upgrading to 2GB of RAM cuts the load times down to 50 to 80 seconds. That's the amount of time it takes to start a Battlefield 2 and load a level, but transitions between levels will also be substantially faster with 2GB of RAM.
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poohbear - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
maybe it's just me, but a big part of my computer hobby is actually putting it together and fine tuning all the components myself. if someone else put it all together for me, it'd ruin the fun portion for me.:/PeteRoy - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Daquing Oilfields is the most graphic and memory intesive map in Battlefield 2, it also has the most vehicles in the game.Next time, make a demo for Battlefield 2 using the daquing oilfields map.
AaronAxvig - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
I was under the impression that the harddrives were still a bottleneck at times. Why are 15k SCSI drives never used. Surely two of them and a controller wouldn't put the price over $10,000. And there are a few that would pay that much out there somewhere.2x 147GB 15k Maxtors: $2000
1x Controller Card: $200
And those are rounded up prices.
fatpipes - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
15K drives are not very nice for home use. Loud, lots of vibration, shorter lifespan, smaller capacity. A raid array is much nicer for this purpose. 15K drives are almost exclusively SCSI (haven't seen a SATA one yet), which would be essentially impossible for this form-factor and purpose. You would need a board with integrated SCSI, which is not available on any nForce4 boards. Or you would need to drop a video card to free up a PCI slot for a SCSI card.fatpipes - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Basically, you'll be forgoing SLI for SCSI either way (either non-nForce4 with integrated SCSI or nForce4 with a SCSI card). In the tower chassis, this is possible, but still not very sensible compared to SATA RAID.phusg - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Yeah there are a few, and after receiving their PC with 15k HDDs they will realise that the Raptors are silent by comparison and send the box back complaining about the high pitched whine...CrystalBay - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Thanks, that was fun...fatpipes - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
The CPU heat sink fan is _directly_ below the PSU bottom-intake fan. There's just one problem... the CPU fan pulls air DOWN into the fins while the PSU fan pulls air UP into its enclosure. This is worthless for CPU cooling! They'd be better off with a tall passive heat sink.The hard drives could use some shock mounts with a fan bolted directly to the metal frame of the drive cage.
However, their cooling strategy for the GPUs is novel, especially in such a tight space.
Forgive me for being highly critical of SFF PCs, the pressure zones in this case have to be very messy. It looks to me like the airflow moves in a downward spiral starting at the GPU cooler fan and coming out from the back of the power supply after looping over the hard drives and the "front-top" of the motherboard.
However, a warning about placing a positive and a negative fan side-by-side (PSU output, GPU input, 1" apart), they can actually recycle each others' air lowering the efficiency of the fan. You can even see this if you have a single high-speed fan, it actually recycles some of its own air if it isn't enclosed for at least an inch to each side of the opening.
High performance computers don't belong in a box that small.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
I did notice the layout issue with the CPU/PSU fans opposing each other. It certainly looks less efficient than having both fans moving air in the same direction. One option is to reverse the direction of the CPU fan, which shouldn't be too hard for FNW to accomplish. Why didn't they do that? Probably because they don't need to.The bottom line is that the system ran stable through all sorts of testing over several weeks of use. Ambient temperatures in my house ranged from 60 F to 80 F depending on time of day, and I was constantly running all sorts of benchmarks and stress tests. No system crashes or BSODs occurred, and the worst thing that happened was a few game "illegal operations". Those pretty much always happen at some point or another during normal use - one of those "Windows is like that" things. A few games exiting once or twice over weeks of use doesn't worry me - it happens on my own PCs as well, and is more likely to be caused by software bugs than anything else. (I had similar periodic application crashes on the DFI system as well, in case you were wondering. There was no pattern or repeatability to them.)
There are about five potential "hot spots" inside high-end comptuers. GPU(s) are the major one these days, followed by CPU, HDD(s), RAM, and chipset(s). Of all the hotspots, the only one I'm really concerned about long-term with the FragBox is the HDD cage. I've had a couple HDDs die on me after a year or so due to heat, and making a "hard drive sandwich" is always a bit of a risk. The cables above the HDDs also limit air flow for the area. However, I can say that the 150GB Raptors do run quieter and cooler than the 74GB Raptors, so hopefully no one has issues. (Short of stress-testing dozens of systems for a couple years, though, there's not an easy way to find out whether or not the system really works well in every possible way.)
"High performance computers don't belong in a box that small"? I disagree. High performance should be available anywhere people want it, and there's definitely a market for SFF computers. There are also laptops that have an even smaller volume than the FragBox and yet they pack in FX-60 chips and dual video cards. The market dictates what products get created, and while the FragBox certainly targets a niche market, it still fills a "need" that some people have.
Pirks - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
All this quad-sli stuff is good, and definitely has its market. However, after reading so many reviews of Voodoo, Alienware and such, I still have one unanswered question - is there at least ONE PC builder/vendor that creates monolithic Apple-like software/hardware combo with full integrated support and such?Let me explain. When you get a mac you get a box which has one central manufacturer and software supplier, and they are also your central source of updates. The deal is: get the box, plug it in and forget the rest. The box will updfate itself, ALL THE HARDWARE DRIVERS/FIRMWARE, all the software, everything. Mac users in general never ever go out and search a driver or something. They got the box, the box works, zero administration and trouble.
Now look at windows. They have online updates, right, but what about drivers, bios and such? What puzzles me here is that there's nothing preventing anyone to become an Apple clone. All you have to do is just prebuild your PCs, ship them with a custom WinXP with all updates integrated and provide one central site where the system quietly goes and downloads all the updates/drivers/bios/software patches/etc, and user NEVER EVER goes to search a driver or a patch or something.
There's even more - such a PC OEM could also do the work of finding reasonably good hardware and sell it to its customers. Wanna get a nice slick video which runs Doom 3 the best? There you go, here's the OEM site, click a button, choose a card rated by game FPS (for example), pay with your CC or PayPal, get the card next day, plug it in, XP goes to OEM site, gets drivers, lock, stock, done! The only thing you do is 1) choose the card 2) pay 3) plug it in 4) and reboot XP when it gets the drivers from OEM. AND NOTHING ELSE!
Well, there could also be a custom XP DVD or something. Say your XP is dead for some reason. You say ah what the hell, pop a DVD, it boots, you say - gimme OS back, it installs over just like Mac OS X (preserving all your old settings/software), or in some similar fashion, doesn't ask you questions (!) and that's it.
OEM could mail out those OS DVDs on request, or whatever... let ppl download them for a small fee.
I mean, this is a golden opportunity people! I've been beaten in Mac forums like hell, they all say the same - go prick yourself with your drivers/bios/chinese hardware and virii/worms. WE SMART MAC FOLKS HAVE OUR FIRE'N'FORGET BOXES which you stupid Windoze moron will NEVER GET because Windoze is a legacy ancient OS that _STINKS_, your custom PC is a pile of chinese bullpuke and blah blah blah...
I mean, not taking into account a crowd of crazy people in those forums (some of them DO require a help of specialist) they say very reasonable thing. PC is excellent for enthusiast, Mac will suck forever at that. But for the stupid Joe, for the guy who doesn't know where the floppy slot is - why there are no PC OEMs who provide anything that at least distantly resembles this special "fire and forget" experience of Macs?
There are many OEMs like Voodoo and FNW who specialize in ultra fast machines. The question is - is there at least ONE PC builder that specializes in ULTRA-CONVENIENT and ZERO-ADMINISTRATION machines, similar to Macs? If there is none, then WHY???
Gimme some fresh thoughts on that, I need nice good rest from those Mac forums. Maybe they right, PC is really $h1t, but there must be some serious reason why PC OEMs can't or don't want to provide similar "everything in one fire'n'forget box" experience like Apple provides. If I got some bags of gold in my vault, I'd established my own cmpany right away. If noone has this feature of providing "Mac-like" friendly and easy to setup/use PCs, I could become the next Dell! Just need some startup capital first, hehe :)