Without tweaking any settings and with the fan curves left at the Falcon Northwest defaults, the Intel Core i9-13900KS made this a crazy 320+ watt (over 350 watt at times) desktop processor and still maintains super high clocks of this pre-dated sample. The Core i9-13900KS is a ridiculous product, but it’s still very impressive. Toasted, but impressive. (We go in-depth on the thermal characteristics of this CPU in the video.)

As for the GPU, our system’s NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 was a PNY model, the XLR8 Gaming VERTO EPIC-X RGB, and this produced results typical of this GPU while remaining very quiet. These slim insert fans are a great idea for today’s monstrous GPUs. In a 24 – 25 C room, this graphics card never exceeded 70 C, which is especially impressive considering both the compact housing and the low noise output.

Speaking of noise, the highest reading I could get from my SPL meter, located just 12 inches away from the FragBox, was 42.5 dBA during a punishing multi-core Blender workload that pushed all CPU cores at 100%. Gaming was well below that (below 40 dBA) and I only really noticed system noise during these all-core Core i9-13900KS benchmarks.