Without tweaking any settings, and with fan curves left at Falcon Northwest’s defaults, the Intel Core i9-13900KS was doing that insane 320+ watt desktop processor thing (hitting over 350 watts at times), and still maintaining high clocks of this pre-overclocked specimen. The Core i9-13900KS is a ridiculous product, but it’s still very impressive. Toasty, but impressive. (We go in-depth into the thermal characteristics of this CPU in the video.)
As to 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 for this GPU, while remaining very quiet. Those slim intake fans are a great idea for today’s monster GPUs. In a 24 – 25 C room this graphics card never exceeded 70 C, which is especially impressive considering both the compact enclosure and the low noise output.
Speaking of noise, the highest reading I could get from my SPL meter, positioned just 12 inches away from the FragBox, was 42.5 dBA during a punishing Blender multi-core workload that pushed all of the CPU cores to 100%. Gaming was well below this (sub-40 dBA), and I only really noticed system noise during those all-core Core i9-13900KS benchmarks.