Chillblast Fusion Photo OC III

Fantastic performance for photo and video enthusiasts, but you'll pay though the nose for it.

Price when reviewed: £1,260 (£1,449 inc VAT)

Eighteen months ago we reviewed the Chillblast Photo OC II, a PC that came with an overclocked quad-core CPU, 8GB of RAM and hard disks arranged in a RAID array, all designed with photographers in mind. It may have seemed a little over-specified then, but that seems positively tame by today's enthusiast standards.

So Chillblast is back with the Photo OC III. As before, components have been chosen with performance computing and photo editing in mind, beginning with a 80GB Intel X-25M SSD that boots into Windows Vista Home Premium in a blistering 34 seconds.

There are practical benefits elsewhere, too, with intensive applications springing into life faster, and Vista feeling snappy and responsive at all times.

The rest of the rig is geared towards high performance computing. The Core i7-920 processor is a Chillblast favourite, here overclocked from 2.66GHz to a mighty 3.8GHz, and it returned a fantastic 2D benchmark score of 2.55 – a mere 0.03 points short of the current PC Pro record.

Those sick of waiting for Photoshop to load high-resolution images will be heartened by a massive 12GB of 1,333MHz DDR3 RAM, and plenty of standard storage has been provided alongside that SSD, in the form of two 1TB Hitachi Deskstar hard disks.

The ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card may be a mid-range part, but there’s plenty of power available for handling whole stacks of digital photographs: a score of 34fps in our 1,600 x 1,200 high-quality Crysis benchmark indicates the power available.

As usual, Chillblast’s meticulous attention to detail results in an exceptionally well-built PC. The Cooler Master Sileo chassis is a newcomer to the PC Pro Labs and makes an instant statement with its dramatic black façade.

Inside, the front, sides and bottom are all coated with sound-dampening foam, and the Intel stock CPU cooler has made way for a whisper-quiet Akasa Nero. The result is a PC that won't even register when it’s tucked under or beside a desk – and is barely audible right up close.

The numerous cables snaking out of the 600W OCZ PSU have been tidied away, too, with some bunches hidden behind the motherboard, others lashed to the sides of the case and yet more bundled into empty 5.25in bays. The combination of this tidiness and the tool-less entry onto every expansion port and bay means working inside the Sileo is simple.

It may be easy to access, but the superb core specification leaves little headroom for the future. The six DIMM slots, three 3.5in hard disk bays and pair of front-facing 3.5in bays are all occupied, and the four free empty 5.25in bays are crammed with spare cables – and expanding into these areas would potentially disrupt vital airflow in this silenced system.

The Asus P6T SE motherboard offers more upgrade potential, with a pair of PCI-Express 16x and two PCI sockets free although, again, cramming these sockets with other components – perhaps an additional graphics card, for instance – could potentially heat the chassis up to unstable levels. It’s a relief that the sheer power of this machine means that the need for upgrading will be limited for several years.

Conclusion

At £1,260 exc. VAT, this is one of the more expensive base units we’ve seen, and adding peripherals will increase that price to Ultimate PC levels. Chillblast’s own Fusion Katana was not quite as fast in our 2D graphics benchmark test, but it has a faster graphics card and includes excellent peripherals for £1,477 – near enough what you’d be paying if you added a decent monitor to the Photo OC’s specification.

With such healthy competition, the Fusion Photo OC III becomes more a niche offering. If photo editing is one of multiple primary uses for your PC, you may be better off opting for the more rounded and affordable Katana. But this PC's SSD and monstrous amount of RAM do make it a beast of a graphics companion, so if that's what you spend the bulk of your time doing it's a front-runner for your cash.

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