Chillblast Fusion Photo OC IV review

The combination of Chillblast’s expertise and a motherboard tray ensures it’s tidy inside, though. And upgrade room is generous, with four DIMMs free – two either side of the processor, two free PCI Express x16 slots and single PCI Express x1 and PCI slots. It’s worth mentioning that, thanks to the new X79 chipset, those vacant PCI Express x16 slots will both now run at full speed if an extra graphics card is added.

Elsewhere, three side-facing hard disk bays are fitted with tool-free entry clips and sound-absorbing rubber mounts, and the pair of empty 5.25in bays are similarly equipped. There’s a wealth of ports available thanks to the motherboard, too: four USB 3 sockets, six USB 2, a PS/2 port, two eSATA sockets, an optical S/PDIF output and a clear CMOS button. There’s also a card reader on the front – something we’re seeing less in desktops.

It’s an easy case to work inside, thanks to the Corsair H100 watercooling. Its unobtrusive waterblock is strapped to the top of the processor and doesn’t interfere with the eight DIMMs. There’s no radiator on the back of the machine to get in the way either. Instead, its 240mm cooler unit, accompanied by two 120mm fans, hangs in the roof of the machine.

It works reasonably well, too, given the challenge it faces. A peak processor temperature of 86˚c is a little high but, given the massive overclock and power requirements, it’s decent, and the graphics card’s maximum temperature of 78˚C acceptable too.

The Photo OC IV isn’t loud, either, outside of an initial whoosh during boot. The rest of the time there’s an unobtrusive hum and little else, with the noise levels barely increasing even during our stress tests. We wish we could say the same for power consumption, though: an idle figure of 208W rocketed to a peak of 679W when both processor and graphics card were stress-tested. The i7-3930K is the main culprit; we turned off the graphics card’s stress test and the system’s peak was still 524W – significantly higher than rival machines.

The fastest machine in the world doesn’t come cheap, either. This record-breaking base unit costs £1,799 – more cash than you’d need to buy the Chillblast’s Fusion Flash or Dimension machines, both of which include peripherals, and both of which are faster in games. If you’ve got the cash to burn, and aren’t worried about slightly shoddy build quality, though, this is as fast as PCs get.