Date:
Monday , October 31, 2005
Author:
Kyle Bennett
Google +1

FragBox 2 Failure Ruffles Falcon Feathers

Falcon Northwest lays down the law and lets HardOCP know that we were wrong in our recent FragBox 2 evaluation.

ATI Not The Problem

For those of you that missed our evaluation of the Falcon Northwest FragBox 2 published last week, it ended up with us having a $3200 “gaming” computer that locked up after a couple of hours of gameplay. After spending countless hours with Falcon Northwest’s excellent support staff, our FragBox 2 was sent back to Falcon Northwest with the same problems that it arrived with.

The underlying problem with the system seemed to be the ATI Xpress 200 chipset-based motherboard. Falcon’s technical support focused on the motherboard being the issue repeatedly, as did we. After Falcon Northwest had sufficient time to diagnose the problem in-house, they reported to us that all the FragBox 2 problems boiled down to Falcon having installed a “bad” video card.

Kelt Reeves (President Falcon Northwest):

The issue is HardOCP treated MSI and ATI very harshly, and us for choosing them. Now that the cause is known, it's clear that you've made a mistake pre-judging the motherboard and chipset as the cause of the instability. It would be very unethical and unfair of HardOCP to both MSI & ATI not to at least correct that.

Kelt Reeves of Falcon Northwest asked in a mail that we point this out to our readers. We immediately agreed to allow an addendum to the FragBox 2 evaluation and even offered to allow him to have it added in his own words, since Falcon of course was the company identifying the problem. He turned us down and basically insisted that we reevaluate the box for the video card problem they discovered. We turned down the forceful offer that we revisit his issues and stated this in an email.

Kyle Bennett – HardOCP:

Seeing that you have had at least a full week to tweak the box, its value is lost for HardOCP evaluation purposes. The reason we don’t evaluate hand-picked tweaked systems is because they do not represent what the retail customer buys. I know this from my personal experience in the industry. With the FragBox 2 in question, that is where we are back to. In retrospect, we should have gone through the full RMA process and never exposed that we were evaluating the product. That is truly the mistake here, because we did rob you allowing your company to shine through fixing the issue. That said, we were over a full week into your tech support with no solutions being presented. I will also say that our evaluation simply showed a bad product from a great company, and we stressed many times that we did not feel that our FragBox 2 performance was truly representative of the FNW brand.

Who’s At Fault?

Kelt Reeves of Falcon Northwest is telling us that after a couple of weeks of diagnosing and tweaking the FragBox 2, that the problem was solved by simply swapping a faulty video card with a new one. We have wholeheartedly defended our opinions put forth in our evaluation. Keep in mind that we also offered to add an addendum to the article with an explanation from Falcon Northwest about their findings. Here is an excerpt from one of Kelt’s last emails.

Kelt Reeves:

You just don't seem to be getting this: you are perfectly entitled to your opinion of the ATI chipset. I'm not trying to change it and I don't want to write an opinion against yours. We've had our PAST issues with it as well, which is why we remained objective and suspected it as a possible cause. BUT IT WAS NOT THE CAUSE OF THE PROBLEM YOU FAULTED IT FOR IN THIS REVIEW.

No one suspected the BFG card. It appeared to be working fine. Our tech support did everything they could remotely but 4 weeks on the phone with them would not have made things any different. A bad video card can happen, in a $399 box or a $3,200 box. I'm sure you've had it happen in a review before, and I doubt you handled that by publicly thrashing the motherboard & chipset it was run on.

Just to be clear, Falcon Northwest fully blames the BFGTech’s 7800 GTX video card for the FragBox 2 system stability issues.

Falcon Northwest Statement

As originally offered, we wanted to give everyone a shot at having a parting word on the FragBox 2 system issues.

Kelt Reeves:

I have no problem with our scores. Unstable is unstable, but the cause is important to readers and companies. HardOCP guessed at the cause instead of having us find it. When they finally returned the FragBox, we found the BFG video card was the actual source of the BF2 instability. We informed HardOCP of this, and offered the exact same system back with a new video card (as well as the bad card to verify). We requested an amendment of their accusation that the motherboard/chipset caused instability. HardOCP has refused to even look at it, insinuating that we could trick them somehow.

Actually, trickery has never come into it. Kelt fails to understand that we are not willing to change our original evaluation of a product that has been out of our control for weeks. In my eyes, it is not fair to our readers to change evaluations on products that have been sent back to the builder for repair. Obviously, it is only fair that we share the thoughts of Falcon Northwest on this, but we simply are not willing to change our evaluation and how it turned out.

ATI Statement

“I’ve read your recent review of the FragBox2 that includes the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. It’s unfortunate your experience wasn’t great. We take reports such as this very seriously and have looked into the matter. As you know, in AMD Athlon 64 architecture the memory controller is part of the CPU, which means memory stability has nothing to do with the chipset. We have contacted Falcon Northwest regarding the system instability and they’ve traced the issue to the graphics card. Radeon Xpress 200 is a robust and stable chipset as shown by the many positive reviews and millions of products sold. We understand Falcon has addressed the issue and has repaired the system. We’re confident the vast majority of FragBox 2 owners are happy with their purchase.”

Sincerely,

Phil Eisler

General Manager of Chipsets

ATI Technologies Inc.

Phil is 100% correct in pointing out that the memory controller now lies on CPU in AMD systems and has little to do with the chipset itself.

That said, we base our opinions here at HardOCP on our experiences with the hardware we have the opportunity to work with. We were very excited about ATI’s entry into the AMD Athlon chipset market, and it looked like they were going to build a solid enthusiast product, which is exactly how it was pitched to us. We had high hopes for the Radeon Xpress 200 as we expressed in the FragBox article.

ATI’s Radeon Xpress 200 series looks to be a chipset that will be a worthy competitor in the enthusiast retail motherboard market. If ATI can be a success with the computer hardware enthusiast, ATI can move into any market it chooses. There is no doubt in my mind that the Radeon Xpress 200 will be a “winner” for ATI on a scale they have yet to see in the motherboard chipset market.

However, ATI’s current implementation of their chipset misses the mark. My enthusiasm for the Radeon Xpress 200 was simply misplaced. We have yet to see a true enthusiast product produced with this chipset, and if you ask ATI, they will tell you that the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset is not positioned at the high end of the market. ATI’s placement of the chipset has very much changed over the last year, quite possibly due to its performance. We of course chalk this up to personal experiences with the Radeon Xpress 200 that have been frustrating at best. The chipset has never performed up to our levels of expectation based on our experience with retail products based on it.

So while ATI might be building the perfect chipset, it seems as though no company can build an enthusiast level motherboard using the Xpress 200.

HardOCP’s Chris Morley's Statement

Seeing that Chris wrote the FragBox 2 evaluation, it seemed only fair to give him the floor along side Falcon Northwest and ATI.

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.

The Bottom Line

Falcon Northwest says that HardOCP is wrong to blame ATI’s chipset for the terrible gaming instabilities we found in the FragBox 2. We accept that and are of course addressing that here. If we have made an error, and according to Falcon Northwest we have, then we apologize for that error.

I still firmly stand by our opinions of the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. I would neither use one in my personal system, nor any system that I might build due to the stability issues I have seen with it in the past. The chipset might be fine for email and Web surfing boxes, but it is not a good solution for gamers. When I pay $3200 for a gaming computer, I simply expect to be supplied with a powerful solution and not one that even its own manufacturer doesn't consider to be high end.

We at HardOCP fully stand behind our evaluation of the FragBox 2 and its overall 6.5/10 Bottom Line Score. The FragBox 2 computer we purchased from Falcon Northwest can be easily summed up as a bad product from a great company. We have heard from 3 other FragBox 2 owners that shared the same stability issues, but, overall, the majority of FragBox 2 owners seem to be very happy customers. Just to be fully clear, Falcon Northwest is a company that we will not hesitate to refer your business to, we just have issue with the hardware configuration specified in the latest FragBox 2.

Please feel free to discuss this article in our forum thread addressing this issue.

  • « Previous Page
  • Next Page »