Chillblast Fusion Storm Trooper review

Sitting in one of the motherboard slots is the card that marked Nvidia’s resurgence in the high-end graphics market: the GeForce GTX 580. It’s the fastest single-chip card we’ve ever seen, and continues its run of good form here. In Crysis it scored 55fps in our test, run at 1,920 x 1,080 and Very High quality settings, and that result fell to a still-impressive 48fps when we enabled 4x anti-aliasing. Suffice it to say, this isn’t a PC that will struggle with any modern game.

The Storm Trooper isn’t quite a match for the Wired2Fire Hellspawn Xtreme, whose pair of AMD Radeon HD 6850 cards produced a result 10fps faster in the 1,920 x 1,080 Very High quality test.

As usual, Chillblast’s machine features an overclocked processor, with the 3.07GHz Intel Core i7-950 boosted to a tastier 4GHz. The overclock yields impressive benchmark results, with an overall score of 2.8. Only the Yoyotech XDNA 760, which extracted 2.87 from its Core i5-760 chip running at 4.2GHz, has proved faster.

Pushing a processor to its limits, though, isn’t without risks. The Chillblast’s overclocked i7-950 hit a maximum temperature of 91 degrees during our stress tests. While that’s short of the chip’s maximum thermal envelope, it’s a bit too close to the crucial 100-degree figure for our liking.

Noise levels under load are noticeable too. The CPU and graphics cards coolers emit a noticeable whirr, and while the result isn’t disastrous, the system isn’t as quiet as the Yoyotech XDNA. This also somewhat negates the use of the fan controller: while you can dial the case fans right down so they’re nearly silent, you can’t do this with the other coolers.

That noise undoubtedly causes a slight disturbance in the force, and ultimately it undermines the Storm Trooper’s challenge. It’s impressive, but isn’t as strong as our A List favourite.