![]() As some of you may recall, SilverStone later sold a variant of this case in 2005 without the FragBox’s iconic handle. The goal for this in-house designed chassis was that it could fit off-the-shelf PC parts and so the legendary FragBox 2 went on to make its official debut in 2004. Not content with the limitations of the Chyang Fun 220watt PSU as well as the Chyang Fun CF-S96 motherboard that included a mid-range Intel 845GE chipset, Reeves then designed and commissioned a case to be built by a startup in the case industry SilverStone (founded in 2003). ![]() In 2003, Falcon Northwest then completed the 10.86 liter FIC Ice Cube IC-VG61 chassis to become the original FragBox, winning PC of the Year from Ziff Davis magazines alongside several Editor’s Choice awards. While the Area-51 ALX desktops were getting bigger, Reeves had seen the interest that Shuttle had garnered with their 8.72 liter SV24 (released in 2001), and wanted Falcon Northwest to give LAN-goers a portable PC with the power of a desktop. In 2003, Alienware released their first in-house designed Predator chassis at a whopping 82.66 liters. Not only did Falcon Northwest manage to steal Alienware’s thunder in a big way, but Falcon Northwest’s lust worthy Exotix paint jobs were the desire of every PC gamer, all while producing some of the fastest gaming PCs in every head-to-head battle, for years to come. If you wanted your computer painted to match the exact color of your 1999 Dodge Viper GTS, their award winning certified master tech, with over 20 years of auto painting experience (at the time), could make it happen. In 2002, Falcon Northwest raised the bar with the Mach V Exotix that utilized the Cooler Master ATC-110 chassis (50.75 liters) with 10 layers of base coats, colors, tints, and clearcoats. In 2000, Alienware revolutionized the look of gaming PCs by pushing case aesthetics, and even colors. In 1993, Reeves then introduced the very first pre-built gaming PC to the world, fittingly called the Mach V, at a time when adults were ashamed to admit using their personal computers for gaming.įast forward to 1996 (one of the peak years for LAN parties thanks to Quake) and Falcon Northwest’s first real competitor emerged on the national scene Alienware. At the time, Reeves was still attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, where he built high-end computers for people to enjoy Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0 with. Let’s fill in a few more blanks shall we? Before SFF computing really came to fruition, especially SFF gaming, a visionary (some might even call him a gentleman), by the name of Kelt Reeves, founded a company called Falcon Northwest in April of 1992. The legendary FragBox 2, at 19.82 liters, was unleashed upon the world. Shuttle released a gaming capable barebones SS51 XPC at 10.13 liters.Īrprotek, a division of Chyang Fun Industry, releases the barebones CF-S968L at 10.86 liters.įirst International Computer rebranded the barebones CF-S968L as the barebones FIC Ice-Cube IC-VG61 -marketed worldwide.įalcon Northwest released the FragBox, the first prebuilt SFF gaming computer, based on the FIC IC-VG61. Shuttle released the barebones SV24 at 8.72 liters. Get ready for one epic nostalgia trip and be sure to stick around for the Q&A at the end! SFF Bullet Points 1993įalcon Northwest pioneered and introduced the pre-built gaming PC to the world.Īpple released the 8” Power Mac G4 Cube at 9.77 liters. To help make sense of it all we look to Falcon Northwest, a company that has widely been credited as the father of pre-built gaming PCs. ![]() However, while these facts are pretty well documented, the actual timeline for small form factor gaming computers remains cloudy, as the world never bothered to chronicle how modern SFF gaming computers really came to be. It wasn’t until companies like AOpen and First International Computer later replaced the word “Shuttle” with “Small” in their marketing materials, did that evolve into its modern-day definition. In fact, SFF as we know it, originally stood for “Shuttle Form Factor” (also SFF), coined by Shuttle Computer Group with the release of their SV24 chassis in 2001, which was the worlds first commercially successful Small Form Factor computer. These days, most of us would scoff at the idea of owning any chassis that was over 20 liters in a size, but to understand how we got here, we first need to understand that gaming computers had a very different size back in the ’90s, and that “Small Form Factor” wasn’t even a label that could be applied to the size of a desktop computer. While some computer historians may argue, Small Form Factor computers as we know it have been around for just over 30 years, starting with Steve Job’s NeXTCube ($7,995, $17,355.08 in 2022 dollars) at 28.37 liters and the NeXTStation ($4,995, $10,842.86 in 2022) at 9.29 liters, both of which were released to consumers in 1990. ![]()
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