Falcon Northwest FragBox 920 Gaming Small Form Factor Desktop PC

Mar 27 2009 - Those who want an extremely fast PC in a mobile platform to be used for gaming can find little wrong with the Falcon Northwest FragBox 920 small form factor box. The performance is superb thanks to the Core i7 920 processor and the 6GB of DDR3 memory. While the graphics are fast, it would have been nice to see them include a newer generation graphics card for a system that is designed for graphics. Of course, the near $2000 price tag will detract a number of people as well.

Mar 27 2009 - Falcon Northwest's FragBox 920 is designed as a portable PC gaming platform and it does an extremely good job with this. Thanks to the selection of components, this is one of the fastest systems available in a small form factor for those than want to be able to easily take their gaming PC with them.

The base of the FragBox 920 is the new Intel Core i7 920 quad core desktop processor. This latest generation processor may be the lowest model available but it outperforms all of the current mobile processors and the previous generation desktop Core 2 models. The built-in memory controller combined with the triple channel 6GB of PC3-8500 DDR3 memory allows it to plow through memory intensive tasks.

Storage is quite good thanks to the use of full sized desktop drives. Most gamers actually don't require a huge amount of space but the one terabyte drive should provide plenty of space for digital media files in addition to PC games. The dual layer DVD burner allows the system to easily playback or record CD and DVD media.

Since this is designed as a gaming platform, 3D graphics performance is key. Falcon Northwest chose to include a fairly old but still decent NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ graphics card. This can easily handle 3D games up to the 1680x1050 resolution without issue. It would have been nice to see a newer generation NVIDIA or ATI graphics card for a gaming dedicated system. The 750W power supply can easily handle the newer cards although some can't fit into the limited space of the smaller case.

The big problem with the FragBox 920 though is the price. For roughly the same price, it is possible to get a dedicated gaming laptop that is more portable yet still capable or a full sized desktop with more performance and a monitor to go with it.