Chillblast Photo OC V review

The Chillblast Fusion Photo OC V is a monster of a high-performance desktop, touted by the manufacturer as built for professional photo editing. The formidable array of hardware rumbling inside the handsome, matte-black Corsair chassis backs up that claim, and offers a whole lot more besides.

The processor is a six-core Intel Core i7-4930K – an Ivy Bridge-E model, overclocked to 4.5GHz and supported by 16GB of RAM. This allowed for a blazing score in our Real World Benchmarks, coming out at 1.43 overall. In our video-rendering test, it achieved a whopping 2.17 score, and an overall Media benchmark score of 1.53. Chillblast’s photo-editing claims clearly aren’t exaggerated, and the Photo OC V has plenty of power for high-level video editing as well.

The SSD is a 250GB Samsung 840 EVO, which transfers data at a comparable clip to its stablemate, the impressive 840 Pro. In the AS SSD sequential read and write benchmarks, the EVO scored a swift 516MB/sec and 503MB/sec respectively; and, while its 4K file-write score was lower than its predecessor’s at 113MB/sec, its 4K file-read score of 40MB/sec was slightly faster.

There’s also a pair of 7,200rpm 2TB hard disks configured in a mirrored RAID array – a reassuring provision for photographic types who anticipate building up a large library of files, and who want to know it isn’t vulnerable to the possibility of hardware failure.

While our review unit came with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 2GB graphics card, it’s possible to order a unit containing the Quadro K600 for the same price. The Quadro’s ten-bit output makes it the logical choice if you’ve invested in a wide-gamut ten-bit monitor. However, if you want the Photo OC V to double up as a gaming platform, the GTX 760 configuration achieved a fantastic score of 66fps on the Very High quality setting and Full HD in our Crysis benchmark.

Indeed, the Photo OC V looks like a gaming desktop, thanks to the Corsair-designed chassis and cooling system. Angular and simple in design, the Carbide 330R Quiet Mid-Tower Case offers twin USB 3 sockets at the front; open the door and an LG Blu-ray rewriter is revealed, along with a multi-card reader supporting CF, SD and microSD, among other formats. There’s a USB 2 port here as well, and four more USB 2 slots can be found around the back of the chassis, as well as six USB 3 ports. There’s twin eSATA, twin Gigabit Ethernet and connectors for the onboard 802.11ac wireless controller.

The guts of the system are easily accessible: the side panel is held on by two screws and slides off smoothly. Inside, everything is neat and economically arranged. The Corsair H100 watercooling unit’s top-mounted radiator and pump alleviates the need for an internal heatsink, so the inside of the Carbide 330R is spacious and ripe for customisation, with two PCI Express slots free below the GPU and an extra four spaces for 3.5in disks – not including those taken up by the Photo OC V’s two data drives, optical drive and card reader.

The case doesn’t really live up to the “quiet” part of its name. While the intake and exhaust fans are unobtrusive, the two top-mounted fans generate a lot of noise, even while the system is idle. They do their job, ensuring the CPU and GPU never reach dangerous levels of heat: under stress testing, we saw them reach maximum temperatures of 71°C and 81°C respectively. However, as a whole, the system draws a lot of power, eating up a huge 254W while idle.

The Chillblast Fusion Photo OC V is undoubtedly an impressive desktop system: with its overclocked six-core processor it manages to outperform even the A-Listed Wired2Fire Hal 4000. At £1,800 inc VAT – not including a monitor – the Photo OC V may be too pricey for the typical consumer. For media-based professionals it’s an unrivalled choice for photo and video editing.