Verdict: As quiet as a church mouse, but better at gaming
Noise can be cool. Riding a Harley-Davidson must be fun, but for every person who dreams about breaking the sound barrier in a MiG, there'll be just as many people who dream about trekking quietly across the Himalayas. Because silence can be cool too.
The Chillblast Phantom is a system for those who appreciate their peace and quiet. You have to be dedicated to silencing your PC to base it around a £180 Lian Li PC-S80, a case as pricey as it is gorgeous. Its brushed aluminium exudes quality, accentuated by elegant styling. Even the front door shuts with a smooth click.
It might be simple on the outside, but the interior is more complex. Beneath the side panels there's another layer of metal plates to shield the outside world from any noises generated within. The outer panels have mesh vents in them, the idea being that the area between these outer panels and the inner panels acts as a funnel to guide air into the case, before it's expelled by a rear 120mm fan. Furthermore, the PSU and rear 120mm fans are partially blocked off by a large metal enclosure that's intended to reduce the volume and pitch of the fan noise. This cage lowers the frequency and volume of the noise of the fans, but it also hampers airflow. We criticised the PC-S80 the first time we came across it, as this design makes for a hot interior, especially when compared with windsocks such as the Antec Nine Hundred, and nothing about the design has changed since then. However, our first review was back in the days of the sizzling Pentium 4, and as the Phantom contains a more efficient Core 2 Duo CPU and a mid-range graphics card, it doesn't appear to be worried about too much heat. It ran two instances of Folding for 24 hours, and this didn't cause it a problem either - the Phantom was rock-steady. Perhaps the neatly wired insides help - the cables are all tidily enclosed in shiny plastic covers.
The front door and outer side panels of the Phantom's case have also been reinforced with thick sheets of sound-dampening matting. It's a shame that Chillblast wasn't neater when cutting and fitting this matting, as it was fraying on our review PC. It isn't a huge problem, but an £1,800 PC should look neat and sleek.
The obsessive attention to low noise levels is impressive, even if it is over the top - most of the components of the Phantom are whisper-quiet even before modification. The two main case fans are Sharkoon Silent Eagle 1000 models, which won our first case fans Labs test. At maximum rotational speed, the Sharkoon fans are all but inaudible, but each fan has been slowed by a Zalman Fanmate controller to further cut the noise. The CPU cooler, a Scythe Infinity, is huge and accommodates a large, quiet 120mm Scythe fan. The CPU being cooled by this monster is a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, and both of its cores have been overclocked to 2.7GHz, thanks to a 300MHz FSB. Despite the overclocked FSB, the 2GB of Kingston RAM is PC2-5400 (676MHz), so it still has some headroom for overclocking. That said, the Phantom's memory is less suited to overclocking than the 2GB of OCZ Special Ops Edition PC2-7200 found inside the Gladiator Trident CPC6600.
The Phantom's motherboard is the brilliant Asus P5B Deluxe WiFi-AP, which has a passively cooled chipset and a wireless LAN transceiver, so the Phantom can act as a WiFi hotspot in a home network, as well as connecting to a wireless router, which is a neat feature. The Asus also boasts some of the best Core 2 Duo overclocking abilities on the market. The graphics card is a passively cooled MSI GeForce 7950 GT, which promises lots of power and no noise, making it the perfect choice for this system.
If you were building a system, and had £1,800 to spend, then of course you probably wouldn't choose anything less than the DirectX 10-compatible Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS, and the Phantom's excessive price is certainly its least impressive feature. We saw the GeForce 7950 GT and Core 2 Duo E6600 combo offered recently in the Gladiator Trident, which is a massive £730 cheaper.
However, while we praised the Gladiator system for its relatively low noise levels, there's no doubt that the Chillblast Phantom puts the Trident to shame in terms of acoustics. But being quiet doesn't fully justify the Phantom being £730 more expensive than the Trident.
The hefty price tag of the Chillblast system can be partly attributed to the Phantom's Lian Li case, which retails at around £180, compared with the Trident's cheaper £75 Antec Nine Hundred. The Phantom also has a 400GB Samsung SpinPoint hard disk, as opposed to the 300GB Western Digital Caviar found in the Trident, which also boosts the overall price somewhat.
PERFORMANCE
As we've come to expect from a system powered by an overclocked Core 2 Duo, the Phantom menacingly tore through our Media Benchmarks (this being CPC, we couldn't resist a cheap Star Wars reference!). Still, the Phantom was noticeably slower than the Gladiator Trident. This is because Chillblast has been more reserved than Gladiator when it comes to overclocking the CPU; while both systems use the same model, in the Chillblast, it's clocked at 2.7GHz, and in the Gladiator, at 2.97GHz. The Phantom's overall score of 1.82 is fast, but the far cheaper Gladiator scored 2.01.
Despite being clearly geared towards low noise rather than optimal cooling, the Phantom proved to be a good overclocker in our hands. We clocked its CPU up to 3.24GHz, thanks to an FSB speed of 360MHz. Since this pushed the memory to 712MHz, 36MHz over its rated speed, we needed a little extra voltage, but this wasn't a problem. Considering that the Gladiator overclocked to 3.09GHz, we weren't surprised to see the Phantom outpace its noisier nemesis by 2.07 to 2.00 in the image editing test, but the Phantom's 150MHz higher overclock didn't offer any advantage in the DVD encoding test. In the multitasking test, both systems were essentially level-pegging when it came to overclocked performance.
The Phantom's passively cooled GeForce 7950 GT was more than comfortable when playing our 3D games benchmarks, providing smooth gameplay at1,680 x 1,050, the native settings for a 20.1in or 22in widescreen display. While the results for Need for Speed: Carbon look unimpressive, the low minimum frame rate 16fps didn't equate to a poor game experience, and both F.E.A.R. and Prey were excellent fun, with smooth minimum frame rates of 30fps and over.
CONCLUSION
If you want a good-looking, near-silent system, then you may feel that the Phantom is worth the premium price tag, as it offers noise levels comparable with a system built in a Zalman TNN 500AF chassis, yet doesn't cost the earth. However, with the Phantom, you're essentially getting good mid-range performance for a top-end price, and we're not convinced that all the fiddling and tuning is essential, especially given the price that results.
