Chillblast Fusion X4 review

David Fearon Read more October 7, 2009

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£5699

Price when reviewed

The Fusion X4 is huge. Based around a Lian Li V2000 chassis, it has a dozen 3.5in internal hard disk bays and seven front-panel 5.25in bays. The size isn’t empty posturing, though: this system is fitted with some of the most powerful hardware money can buy.

However, we’re not huge fans of its construction; it’s big but its aluminium frame and side panels are thin. We prefer the more compact, hot-swappable Supermicro chassis of Armari’s Gravistar SR.

Where the Fusion wins by far is its combination of processor and graphics power. While the Armari made do with a single dual-core Opteron 185 processor, the Fusion is fitted with a pair of Opteron 275s; slower in terms of clock speed but you get four cores running at 2.2GHz to the Gravistar’s pair at 2.6GHz.

Supporting the CPU grunt comes a ridiculously powerful graphics setup: two 512MB Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 cards in SLI configuration. The 4500 sits one off the top of Nvidia’s Quadro line-up, and even Nvidia itself calls it ultra high-end and makes no bones about the fact that it’s not for normal markets; it usually sells them to the likes of Ford for industrial-strength design and visualisation work. Consequently, two together could be called overkill, but you don’t have to run them in SLI: running them separately will increase your 2D Desktop to mammoth proportions. In non-SLI, this system is capable of driving four Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP monitors at full 2,560 x 1,600 resolution. That’s 16.4 megapixels of Desktop.

The Fusion’s impressive Tyan Thunder K8WE motherboard has four of its eight memory slots free and allows for a total of 16GB of ECC RAM. Things are crowded when it comes to expansion slots, though, with the huge Quadro 4500s meaning there’s only one PCI slot free next to the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS. Nestling in our test system were a 74GB Western Digital Raptor and two 400GB Seagate Barracuda drives. But you’ll have a job filling the rest of the nine drive bays as the system stands, with no pre-routed power supply cables and only one more SATA channel on the motherboard.

Despite the enormous power of the system, it’s actually remarkably quiet in operation. Chillblast has fitted the best heatsinks available to the processors, in the form of Zalman’s CPNS7700Cu. The huge, finned flower-cooler copper heatsinks are allied to 120mm fans, also made by Zalman. The combination is so effective that the coolers’ manual fan speed controllers as supplied were set to minimum speed, making them exceedingly quiet but causing no overheating whatsoever. Complementing the Zalman are the coolers atop the DFI-branded Quadro cards. These are anything but stock affairs, with 30mm-high heatpipe coolers and 80mm fans. Hit the 3D hard and they start to roar, but otherwise they’re remarkably subdued.

In our benchmarks, the Fusion powered to an overall score of 1.39; this makes it exceptionally quick, but doesn’t quite pip the Armari Gravistar’s best-ever score of 1.44. That’s not the whole story, though: looking at the breakdown of results shows that while the Fusion’s lower-clocked CPUs mean it doesn’t fare as well in applications primarily designed for single-threaded operation, it obliterates previous records in true multithreaded apps. Our 3ds Max test – part of the aggregate 2D graphics results and not shown individually below – returned 1.61 overall, easily the fastest result ever. As you can see, the multitasking score, where all four cores working at once on separate applications, gives a huge 1.94.
So the Fusion manages to muscle in well on the likes of Armari, HP and Fujitsu Siemens when it comes to sheer grunt. However, it doesn’t have quite the finesse of its rivals: just compare the Gravistar’s perfect cable routing to the merely acceptable internal wiring of the Fusion.

Then there’s the price, of course. At just under seven grand, the Fusion is one of the most expensive PCs to arrive in the Labs in the whole of PC Pro’s history. The graphics cards carry a massive premium for performance that most people – and applications – can make no use of: you’d be better off with a pair of cheaper Quadro 3500 cards.

That said, if you understand the level of diminishing returns that kicks in at this price point, you’ll also appreciate the incredible level of performance offered by this PC.