Falcon Northwest FragBox review: A compact gaming rig that does everything well

Mafia: the old country demands to be played on a huge screen. As much as I love my 32-inch Alienware OLED gaming monitor, it doesn’t do justice to the cinematic vistas of the mafia in Sicily. ButI also wanted to play that game in its full 4K glory, without the compromises of today’s gaming consoles. So why not just slide a small gaming desktop under my home theater? Enter the Fragboxthe updated small form factor gaming PC from Falcon Northwest. Although it is very expensive, starting at $3,997, it is incredibly powerful and gives you the freedom to easily upgrade the hardware later.

I know what you’re thinking: “A $4,000 desktop, in this economy?” That price also doesn’t include upgrading the standard NVIDIA’s RTX 5070 GPU, as well as adding more RAM and larger SSDs, all of which could push the price up thousands more. I initially planned to review the FragBox in early December 2025, before AI-induced RAMaggedon made the memory, storage, and other components dramatically more expensive. Falcon Northwest is best known as a boutique and high-end system builder, so its wealthier customer base can likely weather the price storm. However, if you’re looking for a deal, you won’t find it here.

So what exactly is a FragBox? Imagine a typical mid-tower desktop compressed into a system that’s just 10.2 inches high, 10.5 inches wide, and 15.9 inches deep. When Falcon first debuted the FragBox in 2004, what stood out was that it was a really small PC that used full-size components. That’s still a major selling point today: it can still fit big NVIDIA GPUs, including the powerful RTX 5090, as well as Intel’s latest Core Ultra chips or AMD’s Ryzen 9000 CPUs. A huge 280mm radiator at the top draws warm air out and also serves as an All-in-One (AIO) liquid cooler for the CPU.

At 25 pounds, the FragBox isn’t exactly light, but its sturdy metal handle makes it easy to move. Most mid-tower desktops usually weigh between 20 and 35 pounds, depending on the case material. But they are also much larger and harder to squeeze into tight spaces. The FragBox’s relatively stubby size makes it easy to place in a home entertainment center, or simply sit on the corner of your desk. However, I wish the handle was removable. It was about half an inch too high for one of my shelves.

Despite its density, the FragBox’s elegant design makes it a breeze to access all the system’s components. Just unscrew the side and top panels and you can easily remove the GPU, RAM, storage and other important components. There are three slots for M.2 SSDs, as well as two locations for 2.5-inch drives and a spot for a large 3.5-inch HDD. The system is bundled with a 1,200W power supply, which should be more than enough to handle future GPUs and CPUs.

Ports are plentiful too: there are two USB-A and one USB-C sockets on the front, in addition to a headphone jack. Around the back you have your typical range of mid-tower connections, including four USB-A 2.0 connections, seven USB-A 3 ports, one 20G USB-C 3.2 port, 2.5G Ethernet, HDMI and DisplayPort. Our RTX 5090 review unit also included three DisplayPort connections and one HDMI connection (which you see on most GPUs). Wi-Fi 6E is also built-in, but at this price it would have been nice to see Wi-Fi 7.

The FragBox thankfully lacks the flashy LEDs and cheap thermal glass you’ll find on more flashy gaming rigs. Falcon Northwest’s aluminum casing looks and feels stately, like an old-fashioned luxury car. If you want something a little more eye-catching, you can spend an extra $400 for a custom UV-printed case or $149 for a UV-printed front panel.

Our test model was equipped with AMD’s Ryzen 9950X3D CPU, NVIDIA’s RTX 5090, 96 GB of DDR5 RAM and a 2 TB SSD. So definitely, even before I benchmarked or ran games, I expected it to be a beast. In PCMark 10, the FragBox scored a whopping 13,810, which is about 500 points higher than my mid-tower system with the same CPU and GPU. It also scored the highest 3DMark Speedway and Port Royal ray tracing scores I’ve ever seen. Even more impressive, the FragBox’s fans were barely audible under load, and the CPU and GPU were at 52ºC and 65ºC respectively.

To get back to my original point: it ran Mafia: the old country in 4K flawlessly, with every graphics setting turned all the way up. While playing on my 120-inch home theater setup, the game reached 62fps natively, and enabling DLSS upscaling and frame generation boosted that to 120fps. Not that you need a super higher framerate for a slow, mainly cinematic action game. I was just happy to be able to play without compromise – even the PS5 Pro can’t achieve the same level of graphics fidelity as the monstrously powerful RTX 5090.

I’m no stranger to big-screen PC gaming, but previously I had to run a laughably long HDMI cable from my desktop to get it to work. I’m just too old for that shit now. And it doesn’t run consistently either, especially at higher frame rates, thanks to the massive bandwidth required to push out 4K at high refresh rates. Game streaming at home is also an option, but that’s not great if you’re blasting games onto a huge TV or projector screen. It’s just too hard to ignore the imperfections of streaming compression. (Granted, I need to test newer high-bandwidth options, especially after being impressed with NVIDIA’s GeForce Now upgrade last year.)

The FragBox also made it easy to jump into all my recent Steam titles, including Mewgenics And Bow Raiders on a big screen. Unfortunately, Windows itself remains a major stumbling block for PC gaming in a home theater. You will still need to have a keyboard and a PC handy to do the initial operating system setup. And even after enabling Steam’s Big Picture mode, which offers excellent controller options, I still occasionally had to deal with Windows Updates and other annoyances.

Microsoft is currently trying to optimize Windows for gaming handhelds, and it’s reportedly doing even more to make a future PC-powered Xbox feel more console-like. But for now, using a Windows PC in your home theater doesn’t feel much different than it did a decade ago. Steam is your savior, Windows is your enemy. Or you could just save thousands of dollars and buy a $500 PlayStation 5 or a $700 PS5 Pro instead. The latter still gives you smooth frame rates and a healthy dose of ray tracing, without the annoyance of Windows, keyboards and mice.

But if you just want a compact and insanely powerful gaming desktop, and you don’t mind spending a premium, it’s hard to deny that the FragBox does everything right.