Recently we have been in contact with Falcon Northwest after we posted a not so kind article about their FragBox 2. Specifically, we had some major issues with stability in the one program that we bought it for: Battlefield 2.
During the course of our troubleshooting alongside Falcon’s technicians for a period of over a week, everyone involved was looking at a memory timing issue on the MSI motherboard powered by the ATI Xpress 200 chipset. I had already experienced poor quality sound out of the integrated solution, and I needed a driver update to get 5.1 surround sound to operate properly and to get rid of a ‘popping’ sound that would occur in Battlefield 2. For over a week, we heard from Falcon Northwest about all of the trouble they had getting the motherboard to be stable in games like World of Warcraft and Serious Sam 2 while running at the rated CAS speed of their Corsair memory. They finally ended up having to lower the CAS latency to 3 from its default of 2 to get these games to run stable. They also required at least one BIOS fix from MSI. An email from Falcon’s support stated specifically that our problems resided in the motherboard’s ability to handle memory timings.
So when I went into the final stages of writing our article, in my mind the problems existed squarely with the motherboard. We published the finished article last Tuesday. Falcon Northwest had received the system the day before, and immediately began troubleshooting the problem.
By Thursday they came to the conclusion that the issue was a very subtle, and still undiagnosed, problem with the video card. Kelt Reeves, Falcon’s President, was extremely surprised that it was the video card and not the motherboard.
I have no reason to doubt Falcon Northwest in their assessment. Assuming their diagnosis is true, it calls into question some of the statements I made regarding the motherboard in the FragBox 2. I stated in the article that the MSI motherboard with ATI Xpress 200 was a poor solution. I was extremely confident in my remarks after the hours of conversation with Falcon Northwest technicians and Kelt Reeves. However, I think that our timing of returning the system and publishing the article was unfortunate and I regrettably made definitive statements about MSI and ATI without having the issue fully resolved.
Regardless, I stand by my overall assessment of the FragBox 2 as stated in the article. I was unhappy with the performance of the system we received, and after weeks of troubleshooting it, I felt that as a consumer who just spent $3200 on a gaming machine, I needed to mitigate my risk and return the system. Whether or not the problem lay in the motherboard, video card, or magic pixie dust, it all comes down to the fact that the system simply didn’t work.
Either way, I appreciate Falcon Northwest’s communications with us after the article was posted, their resolve to fix the issue, and their continued participation in our systems evaluation program. We look forward to getting another one of their systems in our labs.
