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Secret Life Of Dads hosted a braiding workshop for fathers at a London pub, and tapped into something bigger than hair.
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Mafia: The Old Country demands to be played on an enormous screen. As much as I love my 32-inch Alienware OLED gaming monitor, it doesn't do justice to Mafia's cinematic vistas of Sicily. But, I also wanted to play that game in its full 4K glory, with none of the compromises of today's game consoles. So why not just shove a tiny gaming desktop under my home theater? Enter the Fragbox, Falcon Northwest's revamped small form factor gaming PC. While it's very expensive, starting at $3,997, it's incredibly powerful and gives you the freedom to easily upgrade the hardware down the line. I know what you're thinking: "A $4,000 desktop, in this economy?" That pricing also doesn't include upgrading from the stock NVIDIA's RTX 5070 GPU, as well as adding more RAM and larger SSDs, all of which could drive the price up thousands more. I initially planned to review the FragBox back in early December 2025, before the AI-induced RAMaggedon made memory, storage and other components dramatically more expensive. Falcon Northwest is mainly known as a boutique and high-end system builder, so its wealthier clientele can likely weather the pricing storm. If you're looking for a deal, though, you won't find it here. So what, exactly, is a FragBox? Imagine a typical mid-tower desktop squashed down to a system that's only 10.2-inches tall, 10.5-inches wide and 15.9-inches deep. When Falcon initially debuted the FragBox in 2004, it was notable for being a genuinely small PC that used full-sized parts. That's still a main selling point today: It can still fit in large NVIDIA GPUs, including the beefy RTX 5090, as well as either Intel's latest Core Ultra chips or AMD's Ryzen 9000 CPUs. A huge 280mm radiator sits at the top pulling out hot air, and it 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 around. Most mid-tower desktops usually weigh between 20 and 35 pounds, depending on their case material. But they're also much larger and harder to squeeze into tight spaces. The FragBox's relatively squat size makes it easy to shove into a home entertainment center, or just sit on the corner of your desk. I do wish the handle was removable, though. It was about half an inch too tall for one of my shelves. Falcon Northwest FragBox Devindra Hardawar for Engadget Despite its density, the FragBox's elegant design makes it a cinch to access to all of the system's components. Just unscrew the side and top panels and you can easily remove the GPU, RAM, storage and other major components. There are three slots of 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 as well: There are two USB-A and one USB-C connections right up front, alongside a headphone jack. On the rear, you've got your typical assortment 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 jacks and one HDMI connection (which you'll see on most GPUs). Wi-Fi 6E is also built-in, though at this price it would have been nice to see Wi-Fi 7. Falcon Northwest FragBox Devindra Hardawar for Engadget The FragBox, thankfully, lacks the garish LEDs and cheesy thermal glass you find on more ostentatious gaming rigs. Falcon Northwest's aluminum case looks and feels stately, like an old-school luxury car. If you want something flashier, you can shell out an additional $400 for a custom UV printed case or $149 for a UV-printed front panel. Our review unit was equipped with AMD's Ryzen 9950X3D CPU, NVIDIA's RTX 5090, 96GB of DDR5 RAM and a 2TB SSD. So sure, even before benchmarking or running any games, I expected it to be a beast. In PCMark 10, the FragBox scored a whopping 13,810, which is around 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 sat at a chill 52C and 65C, respectively CPU GeekBench 6 CPU GeekBench 6 GPU Cinebench 2024 Falcon Northwest FragBox 3,445/22,787 390,148 N/A Desktop with AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, RTX 5090 3,366/18,950 381,400 134/2,124 Desktop with AMD Ryzen 9 7900X, RTX 5090 2,822/14,216 358,253 113/1,103 Apple Mac Studio M4 Max 4,090/26,394 116,028 190/2066 To get back to my initial point, it ran Mafia: The Old Country in 4K flawlessly, with every graphics setting cranked all the way up. While playing on my 120-inch projector home theater setup, the game reached 62 fps natively, and flipping on DLSS upscaling and frame generation bumped that up to 120 fps. Not that you need a super higher framerate for a slow-paced, mostly cinematic action game. I was just happy to be playing without any compromises even the PS5 Pro can't reach the same level of graphical fidelity as the monstrously powerful RTX 5090. Falcon Northwest FragBox Devindra Hardawar for Engadget I'm no stranger to big-screen PC gaming, but previously I've had to run a laughably long HDMI cable from my desktop to make it work. I'm just too old for that mess now. And it also doesn't work consistently, especially at higher framerates, thanks to the massive bandwidth required to pump out 4K at high refresh rates. In-home game streaming is also an option, but that's not great when you're blowing games up to an enormous TV or projector screen. It's just too hard to ignore the imperfections of streaming compression. (Admittedly, I need to test newer high-bandwidth options, especially after I was impressed by NVIDIA's GeForce Now upgrade last year.) The FragBox also made it easy to jump into all of my recent Steam titles, including Mewgeneics and Arc Raiders on a big screen. Unfortunately, Windows itself remains a key stumbling block for home theater PC gaming. You'll still need to keep a keyboard and PC around to deal with the initial OS configuration. And even once I enabled Steam's Big Picture mode, which offers excellent controller options, I still occasionally had to deal with Windows Updates and other annoyances. Falcon Northwest FragBox Devindra Hardawar for Engadget 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. For now, though, 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 $700 PS5 Pro, instead. The latter will still get you smooth framerates 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 gets everything right.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/falcon-northwest-fragbox-review-a-compact-gaming-rig-that-does-everything-right-130000837.html?src=rss
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It looks like a March launch is no longer in the cards for Artemis II, NASA's first crewed trip to the moon's vicinity since the final Apollo mission over 50 years ago. While preparations were underway at the Kennedy Space Center for a launch as soon as March 6, the space agency says it ran into an issue with the flow of helium to its SLS rocket's upper stage this weekend and it now has to roll the rocket from the launch pad back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to figure out what's wrong and fix it. A media briefing is planned for sometime this week to discuss the problem and what's next. But in a post on X, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman confirmed the rollback will "take the March launch window out of consideration." NASA noted on its blog that the current effort "potentially preserves the April launch window, pending the outcome of data findings, repair efforts, and how the schedule comes to fruition in the coming days and weeks." It's a four-mile trip back to the VAB that will take hours to carefully transport the massive rocket and the Orion spacecraft. NASA says it's eyeing February 24 for this trek.The issue occurred overnight in the early hours of February 21, when NASA says it observed "interrupted flow of helium to the SLS (Space Launch System) rockets interim cryogenic propulsion stage." The space agency explained:The upper stage uses helium to maintain the proper environmental conditions for the stages engine and to pressurize liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellant tanks. The systems worked during NASAs Artemis II wet dress rehearsals, but teams were not able to properly flow helium during normal operations and reconfigurations following the wet dress rehearsal that concluded Feb. 19. Operators are using a backup method to maintain the environmental conditions for the upper stage engines and the rocket, which remains in a safe configuration. The Artemis II crew Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, Mission Specialist had just entered quarantine a day before the issue arose. NASA says the astronauts have since come out of quarantine.At the start of this year, NASA announced an accelerated timeline for Artemis II, which was previously set for April 2026 after experiencing delays in 2024. For this 10-day mission, which will be the first crewed flight of the SLS rocket, the Artemis II astronauts will take a trip around the moon in the Orion spacecraft. While it initially targeted early February, the launch was pushed to March due to issues that popped up during the wet dress rehearsal. Now, we're back to the beginning with a possible April launch, but thatll depend on the fix being a quick one. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasas-crewed-artemis-ii-launch-gets-pushed-back-again-this-time-due-to-a-helium-issue-231010042.html?src=rss
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