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12v2. It's probably fine, right? Oh, yeah. The cables are modular. That's easy fix. Well, whoopsy doodle. Would you look at that? I've got a Falcon Northwest box here. What on earth could we possibly have? This is a Falcon Northwest Frag Box. It is a premium gaming machine. Falcon Northwest is a premium brand. They're boutique builder. They were also some of the first to get their hands on the 950 X3D2 dual edition CPUs. And I wasn't really sure how that launch was going to shake down. I don't really want to say anything more about it, but you know, sometimes if you're not sure or you get stuff late in the game, you can just go buy things. And we didn't end up buying five 9950X
3D CPUs so that we can do additional testing with the motherboards. Like that's a whole other separate project. But this is a gaming PC and this is the fastest gaming and content creation PC that you can get because it's the processor that has dual 3D vcache. Let's take a look at the system. Let's do some benchmarks and then let's do a community giveaway. The catch is that you already have to have been a member of the community. Falcon Northwest has been around a long time. I have here a computer shopper from uh November of 1998. Falcon Northwest has been in this business for kind of a long time as a boutique and high-end system builder. And this is their frag box.
This is I've triggered some of you in the audience that are now going to feel very old. All right. So, big thanks to Falcon Northwest for sending me this machine. This machine is part of a larger experiment which I will talk a little bit about, but there's no reason that experiment has to happen in my lab. It can happen at home while you enjoy gaming on it probably. Hence the community giveaway thing that we'll talk about later. But for now, let's unpack this. Well, okay. I've already unpacked it and been using it. Let's talk about
the build and how this is put together and Falcon Northwest and the delight from using dual 3D Vcash. I myself am one of the weirdos that has use cases for dual 3D Vcash. Most people don't, which is why it's priced the way that it is, which is why the launch the way that it was because AMD already had products to address what whatever you could possibly need. Oh, I'm in content creation. Great. Get a 950X. Oh, I want to do gaming. Great. get a 9800 or a 9850 X3D. Oh, I want to do a little bit. You know, there's the 12 core parts, there's six core parts at the lower end, but this is the highest wattage do everything part that you can get from AMD. And this is the machine that Falcon
Northwest has built around it. So, what you have with a frag box is an all metal like you can carry by this handle. It's designed for land parties and travel and all that. For a system that is transportable and repeatedly transportable, this is one of the best that you can buy because of the mounting mechanism for the GPU, plus the way that the case is designed, plus the handle, plus everything else. So, if you need to travel, you can travel. Now, this machine also has a bunch of, you know, level one text artwork on it. Thanks, Falcon Northwest. That is awesome. But you can get with custom artwork. It's not going to come decorated with level one. There's all kinds of example machines you can see on their website,
which is a lot of fun. The Frag Box design hasn't changed a lot since even the era in, you know, the computer shop or magazine. It has internally, but externally, they got a theme going on. Just a couple of thumb screws. It's aluminum, aluminum, but it's sturdy. Our configuration here, we have four fans configured for exhaust plus a radiator for our AIO which is connected to the CPU. We have an SFX power supply. So, it's a small form factor power supply. Even though this is a microATX motherboard, it's not ITX. So, it has better expansion capabilities than microATX.
The sides are removable independently, which makes for easy access and easy maintenance. We even have a little bit of breathability on the bottom to cool the bottom of the CPU socket. These four fans on the top here are configured for exhaust. There are two fans on the side here for intake and there's dust filters on both sides. So, hot air out the top, cool air in on the sides and a little bit on the bottom. Our power supply is exhausting warm air out the back. It's pulling air from above the VRM area. So, you get some active cooling around the VRM and your dims as well, which is nice.
This is an exceptional build quality build. If you're a DIYer or into DIYing, this is what you should aspire to in terms of internal layout and organization and cable management and every little detail that you come across like that. So, cable management for fans. Yes, cable management for the power for any optional drives. There's a couple of two and a half inch bays in here if you want to add, you know, a SATA SSD for storage or something like that because, you know, pricing and everything else. There are options for that in this chassis. Even though it's relatively compact, the thing that I like about the Frag Box case is that it's not irresponsibly compact. When we're doing some builds with ITX cases, especially some of the
really extra small ITX cases, they are irresponsibly tiny, which means that you really give up a lot in your build in terms of connectivity, features, upgradability, serviceability, and you don't really give that up in the Frag Box because it's so modular. And that's also one of the reasons why the design has kind of evolved over the years because if you need to do AIO pump maintenance, it's pretty easy. If you need to get to your GPU, you just pop out some screws and then you can take the four fans out and it's pretty accessible through the side and the top here. That's great. Even replacing the motherboard in this kind of a chassis is not that much of a challenge compared to
smaller form factor ITX builds. So that's Falcon Northwest box number one. Box number two, you get a nice mouse mat. Yes, that is Cordura. You also get a nice Falcon Northwest mug, which I need not to foul too much because that's actually going to someone else. You also get a thank you from Kelt at Falcon Northwest. Uh, Pragmata and Crimson Desert are games that you might be likely to enjoy on the highest end machine that you can buy right now. You also get some Falcon Fuel coffee. Your power supply is modular. It's Silverstone. The unused cables are in the nice cloth sack. And then you get the extra unused motherboard accessories, OS reinstallation, that sort of thing in this box, including
your Wi-Fi antenna, quick release, Wi-Fi 7, extra M.2 mounting, accutra. Basically, the stuff that you might need possibly, maybe, just depending. Gosh, the coffee smells good. You also got a folder in the bottom which has some paperwork about your build and how they did the testing and that sort of stuff. I'll be hanging on to the folder with the order info and everything else, but this is all going back in the box. To show you what I mean by the GPU mounting, you start by taking the GPU out with two screws on the bottom. Yeah, these slots here, you pop out two screws and then you can unscrew the GPU from
this side. And then our ASUS tough motherboard has a quick release mechanism. So, you have to push that down to release the GPU. And then it comes out. It's like, oh, it's a Founders Edition 5090, but wait, what's this thing here? Well, if you look closely at a Founders Edition 5090 on the end, there's two mounting screws. Falcon Northwest uses that to mount their GPU, and this provides an exceptionally sturdy physical mounting that takes all of the stress off the edge connector, so there's no splitting or cracking or problems with the electrical connection. This thing is physically bolted to the case at both ends, so it's not going anywhere. And that's good because you know that's the single most expensive component in the
machine by a factor of like two or three threeish. It's funny. This has as much RAM as the 32 and 32. Woo. Is he hinting about ordering a more modest GPU if you decide to buy one of these? Oh, I think he might be. Of course, if you're going to max out one of these with, you know, 128 gigs of memory and a 5090 for AI or RTX 6000 for fun AI tasks, I wouldn't blame you. Let's get this thing connected to power. I said before and I'll say it again. Falcon North is about the premium experience, and it's the little details. You take it out of the box, you plug it in, you turn it on, the system boots up.
They've preconfigured it. They've preconfigured it with a local account that has your name and you don't have to go through any of Microsoft's upsell you literally everything and try to force you into something and you get just the Windows desktop. Take it out of the box, plug it in, there you go. Cuz Falcon Northwest doesn't really want to waste your time because it's nice. Now, I have already like done a bunch of benchmark on mine. like there's there's all kinds of mess littered on the desktop. Sorry. Also really like that through the side panel here, you can see the diagnostic LEDs on the motherboard. So, it's an ASUS tough motherboard, microATX, like I was saying. And uh you can see the
diagnostic LEDs. So, if something goes wrong or you got a BIOS update and it's going to do the DDR5 retraining, you have a clue that's happening because you can see the diagnostic LEDs through the side. It's nice. Now, the memory and storage configuration of this machine currently as configured is an RTX 5090. It's founders edition, the fastest of the fastest GPUs that you can get. 32 gigs of VRAM. At least that makes sense for this. I mean, I suppose I could put an RTX 6000 in it. And I actually have for our other testing, but this video is focusing on 5090 performance, not RTX 6000. If you really wanted an RTX 6000, you probably could ping them and talk them into building
your system with an RTX 6000, but don't tell them I put you up to it. 5090 is already ostentatious. Storage is a Kingston SFYRR S2T0 and our memory is a Kingston KF560C36. That is CL36 at Expo 6000 and the Expo 6000 profile was loaded for all of our testing. That is the SSD and the memory and GPU that we use for this configuration. In the giveaway, those might be different. Actually, the memory and the storage are not going to be different. The G the GPU is definitely going to be different cuz oh, we're not that big of a channel. We can't give away a 5090. You'll get something. I don't know. We'll talk about it. But yeah, it's a lot of fun. It has 32 GB of memory total with a handwritten IOU from
Sam Alton for another 32 gigs. That was a joke. Now, before we get to the benchmarks, there's one other thing I want you to notice while I'm running a benchmark to stress the system and doing some stuff in the background. Listen to this system. It has four fans in the top. Plus, you've got the fans on the AIO. Plus, you've got two more. This is This thing's all fans on the inside. I'm a fan. Just for the sound test, I've turned off the air conditioning in here, so it's sweltering. What do I hear? The whoo of air. Even if the computer were right next to your head, this would not be off-putting. If you're a streamer or you're into streaming and you're worried about background noise from the microphone picking it up or anything like that,
you're this machine could be basically anywhere around your microphone and it's not going to contribute significantly to the noise floor of your room. And the temperatures, as reported in hardware info 64, we're nowhere near our limits. Now, the 950X3D2 does float around 95 degrees C when we're running like Blender workloads or something like that, but for gaming, it's not even 70C most of the time. Borderlands gets it up there. But in 4K, the GPU is a bottleneck. So, the GPU is not quite working as hard as it could. 35 to 37 dB max. This is something that I always struggle with. I want the system to be cool, but quiet is also nice. This is a shockingly quiet system, especially considering that we have a 600 watt GPU in here and the highest TDP
CPU that AMD has ever done. Plus, memory and DDR5 memory has its own set of cooling requirements, which I'm literally the person that found the problems with that. Well, I'm sure other people found the problem, too, but I did a video on it. Yeah, it's 180 fps at 3840 x 2160 ultra on a 950 x3d2 and a 5090. Now, dual 3D vcache, it doesn't make a lot of difference for games. It also doesn't make a lot of difference for productivity workloads. The places where it makes a difference is almost exclusively where the operating system made a mistake. You have in a normal like the 3DV cache 16 core, you normally have eight of your cores that have 3DV cache and eight that don't. And there is
a little bit of a penalty. There's sort of a jolt if the operating system moves what you're doing that needs 3DV cache off of the 3DV cache for some reason to somewhere else cuz operating system scheduled things in the background. It's doing a lot of juggling. This is a problem that should be able to be overcome in software. This is a problem that has 98% been overcome in software. In Linux, Windows, I don't know. Microsoft doesn't seem to be it's like that's an AMD problem. AMD engineers should solve that. And maybe there is a way to do that in userland, but there's not really a lot of facilities in the operating system to make it easy to
handle that directly. At least it's way easier to handle that kind of thing. Like userlander land programs can suggest to the kernel how to handle things better in Linux, not so much in Windows plumbing that the plumbing for that not really there. So one way to solve it is just 3D dual 3D vcash. This is the weakness where you could get a 9800 or 9850 X3D with Vcash and generally have better gaming performance than a 16 core part where you got the same CCD. It's the same chiplet. It's physically the same cores plus eight extra cores. How does adding eight extra cores make the system slower? And it was really just because of the uh operating system not properly juggling where
things are running because communication from one set of cores to the other set of cores has a much higher penalty than communicating you know the cores among themselves in one complex. The penalty is still there for dual 3D vcash. So you can still have some performance anomalies from some things like you have half the game running on one chiplet and half the game running on the other chiplet. It is possible to get into those situations where you have some anomalous performance, but AMD has updated their software and games that historically have had problems with that like DS DSX Mankind Divided, which is now really an ancient title, but it's very useful for testing, um, will behave better because of the software updates
from AMD and what they've been able to do with Microsoft to actually try to address the problems. But the operating system, not having to think about what kind of core it's going to run on does go a long way toward giving you an overall better experience, especially when you're a mega tasker. That's really a lot of words to say. The 9950X3D2 pricing from AMD is not about keeping the value proposition flat. It is premium part. It has premium pricing. the pricing doesn't make sense for the level of value that you get. Which is why I think a lot of reviewers didn't really, you know, they weren't really super excited about it because they point out rightly that, hey, you can get
it's a better value for all these other different AMD CPUs depending on which scenario you're trying to solve. But this is a CPU that you buy where you don't have to think about it. It's like, yeah, I just want I want 16 cores for when I need 16 cores and I also would like the games to run as fast as they possibly can. here it is. This is the product for you. If you're doing scientific computations and you don't want to spend the money on Thread Ripper, this is also really good because things like computational fluid dynamics, certain kinds of code compilation workloads like your like Babby's first office application or whatever you're developing. No, even if you're working on large projects like VLM, uh it doesn't it's not a it's
not the slam dunk. The vcash for code compilation is not the slam dunk that it once was, but it can be for certain applications, but you're doing a lot of AVX 512 and floatingoint compilation and your work can be cached in memory. The extra 3DV cache takes a lot of pressure off of main memory. I think 3D vcache is a must actually for scientific workloads and especially if you're running four DIMs. Four dim configuration takes a lot of pressure off of the memory controller and with four dims you're going to be running at lower memory speeds. Anyway, that said, other than price, there's really no downside for the 950X3D2.
It does everything. It does everything pretty well. Some of you might say that the increased power is not worth it. Fair. I have also noticed like the newer 950X3Ds with eco mode, like if you look at the at wall power, they have improved since launch day. We averaged at the wall about 630 watts through the benchmark. Currently sitting on this screen, it's about 575. That's almost entirely our 5090. Average 163.31 FPS score 27,751. Let's get to the real benchmarks. As expected, the Falcon Northwest machine is fast. 950 X3D2.
It's the fastest. Like there's just no sense in comparing it to anything else because why? 950 X3 dual edition. Now, the only thing that's really interesting here, we had that anomaly with Borderlands in my original review and now that I've had a little bit more time to actually play Borderlands and like go through and do gaming in Borderlands, there really is something to dual 3D VCH with Borderlands just because it's got so much going on in the background. At 1080p, 129 FPS, well ahead of the 950X 3D and the 9850X3D. At 1440p, it's still ahead. Even 4K, it's ahead. especially our 1% lows.
Borderlands 4 likes having a lot of computational horsepower. Or it could be Windows because it behaves a little differently on Linux than it does on Windows. Now, the rest of our gaming benchmarks, it's about what you'd expect. I mean, Monster Hunter Wilds, 1080p, 1440p, 4K, it's all pretty similar performance. If you do ultra ray tracing, again, it's pretty similar performance. The 9850X 3D. It's the better gaming value obviously, but if you just want to buy a CPU and not think about it, well, 950 X3D2 dual edition will get it done and then some. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, an ancient title, identical performance between the 9850 X3D2 and the 9850 X3D at 1080p, 1440p, and even 4K. It does have some rate tracing capabilities, and you can see that you
don't have any performance regressions between the 8 and the 16 core. It's a little slower at 4K, just a few FPS, but really, do you really want to split hairs over 168 versus 172 FPS? I mean, that's basically identical performance. It's a similar kind of story with Monster Hunter Wild when you're looking at the topline number and how things are performing with that RTX 5090. It really is a no compromises CPU. Even with ultra ray tracing, 124 fps at 1080p, 111 fps at 1440p, and 84 fps at 4K. DSX Mankind Divided, that was one of the games that is supported specifically to deal with specific regressions in
that game. 303 FPS, beating out the 9850X 3D at 1080p at 1440p and 4K. 4K is kind of the great equalizer here. 1440p DSX Mankind Divided 297 FPS. Not a huge difference between the 9950 X3D and the 9950 X3D2. Doesn't suggest that DSX Mankind Divided is using both Vcash chiplets. Far Cry 6. Far Cry 6 is one of the games from AMD that has some specific optimizations. So, it depends on if you're playing the canned benchmark or if you're playing the game. These numbers are from the canned benchmark. And so, you look at this and you say, "Oh my gosh, the 950X 3D is f. just the benchmark. If you actually play the game, the 1% lows are just a little bit better. And overall,
the experience is a little bit better. But it's again, there's there's functionally no difference for gaming between these three CPUs. And the 9850 X3D is less work to figure things out. It doesn't matter as much. The performance here is just processes bouncing between the two Vcash chiplets. If you the game is partially running on one chiplet and partially running on the other chiplet, that can be the source of some performance anomalies and that does seem to happen in a canned benchmarks, but does not seem to happen when you're doing actual gameplay.
You can also reinstall the chipset driver and get different results. Clare obscure, it's slightly faster with our dual vc, probably owing to the fact that the CPU has a higher TDP. It's pretty much identical performance at 1440p and 4K. really that it's it's it's identical performance at 1080p as well. Now, for productivity, rendering, that sort of stuff, Blender is going to be way ahead, way out in front. 950X3D2, more cash, more wattage. It's going to win. Same with Junk Shop, leading with 253 FPS. Same with Monster, 350 FPS versus 311.
It's a monstrous CPU, just like our monstrous Blender benchmark. Nice job, Falcon Northwest. And we managed to get through all of the benchmarks without the computer bursting into flames thanks to the tab that I broke. Sorry. Just for giggles, let's do Ray tracing overdrive with 4x DLSS because it's 4x frame generation. Throw these results out. Use the benchmark section, Luke. Not this random guy that's just trying to see what kind of a crazy number we get. H like 290 FPS. Yeah, that's fine. If I had one complaint or like what would my complaints be? This is the Asus B850M motherboard. You can look that up if you like this. You know, you can attempt to build something like
this. That's one of the components that goes into this. I really wish that ASUS had put a faster nick on this. It's 2 and a half gig nick. I was hoping for like 5 GB. 10 Gbit is probably asking too much, but there are some new USBC 10 GB Ethernet adapters on the market, so that'll be fun to sort of try and test. However, this is also microATX, so if I wanted to add a dual 25 GB to this platform, I totally could do that because I've got two free expansion slots. Well, there's two free expansion slot covers. There's there's only one spot I can actually put it, but it would work on this motherboard because it's microATX and not ITX. So, that is an option. Yeah. 3840 by 2160 rate tracing
overdrive with the Transformer model on the resolution preset 293.37 FPS. Uh so divide that by 4ish and that's the native speed which is about what you'd expect for a 5090. Now I mentioned uh community supporting the community and uh you know some like how do you lay hands there's there's some warmth coming out of the top of that. All right so I'm running a long-term experiment. If you've been following the channel for a long time, testing motherboards and different CPUs, these CPUs, um, depending on how you read the specification, you know, it's like 200 watt TDP, but through the socket, it can be up to 270 watts. 270. Now, some places like that's a short I don't know.
There's there's a lot of detail there that I don't want to get into, but 9950 X3D2 gives us a useful platform for testing ramping between relatively low power usage and then blasting the socket with as much power as possible. I think that might produce artificial wear. And so, uh, Falcon Northwest is helping directly and indirectly support that kind of a project. So, there's a little piece of software on here that is giving us some telemetry. It's basically hooked up through hardware info 64, but a little tray application on this will give us some data in terms of how this is being used and how many watts that is the system is using as reported by hardware info 64, which is not quite as
accurate as our wall meter, but it's it's good enough. It's good enough for government work. It's good enough for our work. And so you take this and you use it and you just leave the computer on and you do stuff with it. And then we will get telemetry on how this system is being used. That means it doesn't have to be running in the lab. So if you have an account on the level one forums, if you've been a member of the community for a long time, I'm going to pick somebody from the community that this is going to go to. I don't know what GPU it's going to go with yet. The configuration of the system, I might add more memory to it. I might do some other configuration changes, some internal
hardware changes, but mostly it's going to be this chassis. It's going to be the 9950X3D2. Tell you that. Beyond that, I don't know. you'll we'll figure that out cuz I've got about another month of testing to do, give or take. Probably have a couple follow-up videos, some other stuff going on there. And that is a thank you to being a member of the Level One Text community. And again, reminder, you could just buy this. He's got RAM. Get him. No, no, not me. Falcon Northwest. Falcon Northwest has RAM. Get them. At least a little bit of RAM. Not a lot. So this machine will be going to somebody that can enjoy it and generate data for us. Like your job is to generate data with this so that we have
something to compare to some telemetry. And then of course should something go catastrophically wrong, you'll have to send it back to us. But we'll be glad to pay for all that and probably replace it. Although Falcon Northwest is going to be really interested in that, too. In terms of the reliability and that sort of stuff, Falcon Northwest really knows what they're doing because they have picked all of the components in this based on their own reliability testing and their own engineering and their own thermal scans and their own like they it is not amateur hour with Falcon Northwest. They have done a lot of R&D and they've done a lot of engineering. I know because when I have tripped over bugs not even
on this project I've gone to them to say this is how I you know can you confirm or deny and it's not always like there's NDAs and like you can't there's not always it's not it's really weird plus also it's like oh everybody's nervous because you know I might say something and blah but Falcon Northwest has always been very transparent for things like why did you choose this? Does this have to do with failure rates? What kind of failure rate percentages are you seeing for this that and the other and they are a boutique system builder but they have very excellent valuable data and now you too can help
us generate very excellent valuable data. So again thanks to Falcon Northwest for supporting this project and thanks to whoever and ends up with this to help us generate some data and do some fun things. I'm will this is level one. This has been a quick look at the Falcon Northwest frag box. If you want to buy one of these, you can just buy it. You can just go buy it. It's fine. If you're inspired by this, you can build it. Although uh pricing is a little rough. I don't know. I mentioned those Sam Alman IUS. Uh if it makes you feel better, there's a lot of corporations that are getting Sam Alman IUS. Patients may be wearing a little thin, but I didn't tell you that.
I'm one of those level one. If you have any questions or you want to hang out in the forum or you want to see me test something on this platform, uh I'm signing out. I'll see you in the level one text forum.
