Verdict: A no-frills, affordable quad-core gaming rig
It's easy to overlook the spectacular when it comes to computers. Moore's law and market economics mean that we take for granted massive leaps in power and plummeting prices for last year's kit. Chillblast's latest PC doesn't look remarkable, but compared with PCs we were reviewing a couple of years ago, it is.
Despite costing a shade under £1,200 (excluding VAT), the Chillblast features a quad-core CPU and a high-end DirectX 10 graphics card.
The disadvantages of multicore CPUs have been clear for a while now - they require multithreaded software to work at their best - but this is no reason to lose sight of the fact that we're talking about four CPU cores in the space where, a year or so ago, there was only one. Throw them some encoding work, and they'll leave a single-core machine in the dust.
The CPU is a Core 2 Quad Q6600, Intel's only consumer quad-core CPU that doesn't carry the ludicrously expensive Extreme tag. Even so, a single Q6600 costs £336 from Scan, so it's all the more impressive that the Chillblast is so cheap. As standard, the Q6600 is clocked at 2.4GHz, but Chillblast has overclocked it, raising the FSB from 266MHz (1,066MHz effective) to 310MHz (1,240MHz effective). This ups the speed of all four cores to 2.79GHz, not far off the 2.93GHz of the new Core 2 Extreme QX6800. To support this overclock, the CPU has been overvolted to 1.4V, while 2GB of Geil PC2-6400 RAM is fitted to keep pace. The RAM is set to 2V, a little under the 2.1V at which Geil specs it when running at its top speed.
As mentioned previously, the Chillblast doesn't look remarkable. Despite the fact that it's full of overclocked and overvolted components, the CPU is fitted with the reference Intel HSF. While the Chillblast was never unstable, the reference HSF doesn't dissipate heat as well as many third-party coolers: for example, the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro drops the temperature of a 2.66GHz quad-core chip by a further 8ûC. As a result, the Chillblast's CPU runs fairly hot - Coretemp reports it hitting the mid-60s in our DVD encoding benchmark, although this is nothing to be concerned about.
Another reason the Chillblast doesn't exactly scream remarkableness is that it's housed in the compact Cooler Master Centurion 530, which has been around for quite some time. It isn't a bad-looking box but it's hardly the most visually exciting case in the world. Its age is obvious when you look at its cooling provision too - an 80mm fan at the front and a 120mm fan at the back. These don't provide much airflow, further hindering the lacklustre reference HSF. As a result, the heatsinks on the motherboard and memory became very hot and, while the machine was perfectly stable for the two weeks we had it, we'd have been happier if Chillblast had fitted extra cooling for the motherboard. What's more, the 80mm front fan and Intel reference HSF make more noise than we'd like; while the Chillblast wasn't deafening, it emitted an annoying buzz.
The Asus P5B-E Plus motherboard is a solid choice, as it's a budget member of the all-conquering P5B family. For graphics, the Chillblast is fitted with a 640MB Asus GeForce 8800 GTS, which hasn't been overclocked, so the GPU runs at the usual 500MHz and the memory at 800MHz (1.6GHz effective). Sound comes from one of Creative's new half-height cards, the X-Fi Xtreme Gamer. As the Chillblast comes with Windows Vista Home Premium, you'll need Creative's ALChemy application to enable EAX in older games. For storage, there's a half-terabyte Western Digital drive (465GB of space in reality); this didn't distinguish itself in last month's Labs test, but at least it's big. There's also an18x Samsung DVD writer for backups. The case's sole external 3.5in drive bay is filled with a memory card reader, and the PC is powered by a 600W OCZ PSU. It's all neatly put together, especially considering the small size of the case. A two-year collect and return warranty, along with impressive lifetime phone support, completes the package.
Performance
Of our Media Benchmarks, only the the video encoding test is truly multithreaded. Here the Chillblast recorded a massive score of 2.73 - far faster than any of last year's Dream PCs. This is quite a feat for a PC that costs less than a quarter of the price of some of those machines. DVD encoding is another task that's easy to multithread, but it is far more difficult in other applications. However, the CPU's relatively high clock speed means that even when all four cores aren't fully occupied, the machine fares well, gaining a score of 2.03 in the image editing test.
While we tend to prefer the 320MB version of the GeForce 8800 GTS, as it's cheaper and not much slower than its 640MB relative at medium resolutions, the extra memory allows the GTS GPU to cope with higher levels of anti-aliasing. The combination of a fast Intel CPU and a GeForce 8800 GTS makes the Chillblast great for gaming. The frame rate in Need for Speed: Carbon was a bit low, since the game isn't best friends with Windows Vista. As it's a Vista machine, there's an exciting world of Vista-only games. Well, Halo 2 and Geometry Wars. The latter is a PC conversion of the Xbox 360 Live Arcade title, and just as much fun. It's essentially a sparkly update of frantic shooters such as Space Invaders and SpaceWar, and definitely worth the $8 price. Whatever games we threw at it, the Chillblast was happiest at 1,680 x 1,050, although if you can do without AA and AF, it could cope with 1,920 x 1,200. However, TFTs that support this resolution cost more than £500 - half the price of the PC.
Although the PC is pre-overclocked and doesn't have the best cooling system, we felt obligated to try to overclock it further. Pushing the CPU beyond 3GHz was surprisingly easy, with no further voltage increases required to push the FSB to 340MHz (1,360MHz effective). At this speed, the CPU temperature was more than 80ûC when benchmarking, so it's no surprise that we couldn't push it further without the PC becoming unstable. Still, with four cores at 3.06GHz, the benchmark results are mighty, with a DVD encoding score nearly three times quicker than that of our Pentium D reference PC.
Conclusion
Intel's quad-core CPUs are remarkable, especially with the right software. They're also surprisingly overclockable, so even software that isn't multithreaded will run well. While the overclocked CPU is great, the rest of the Chillblast is less so and, for many people, its lack of 'that certain something' over a home build won't do it any favours. The noisy and mediocre reference CPU cooler is disappointing, and while this is easy to replace, the small case is trickier to fix. However, it's hard to argue with the power you get for the money and, if you're into DVD encoding or gaming, the Chillblast certainly has more plus points than negatives.
