9 On Test $1500 GA: Ming PCs (Part 3) - Chillblast Fusion Thunderbird, Cyberpower Infinity Apollo

Super test: Chillblast Fusion Thunderbird

The chillblast machine is one big, fat beastie. The chunky Zalman chassis gives it a real sense of presence on your desk, and the internal goodies match that sense of scale, with a heftily overclocked i5 CPU and similarly overclocked GTX 670 doing the graphical grunt work.

Sadly though, it’s in the overclocking department that the Fusion Thunderbird gets a serious black mark. The Core i5 3570K gets a headline-grabbing 4.8GHz clock speed – easily the highest clocked chip in the speed, we’d be all over this rig like a cheap LED strip. Unfortunately, while it boots happily with these settings and will allow you to navigate around Windows with impunity, as soon as you start stressing the chip it begins to through either Cinebench or X2664 encoding test without it crashing.

All it took was a quick trip to BIOS land, knocking the multiplier down a notch, to hit a rock-solid 4.7GHz. if the CPU couldn’t run under load at that clock speed, the rig shouldn’t have arrived with those settings. It’s a shame, because we’ve only had good experiences with Chillblast machines in the past, but if you’ve just spent $1.5k on a machine, the last thing you want it to do is fail under load.

That aside, things are decidedly rosy for the Fusion thunderbird. This rig has one of the most balanced spec sheets out there, weighing up straight-line gaming performance with general PC functionality. Part of the reason the machine functions at all at 4.8GHz is because Chillblast has used a very strong Asus motherboard where others have used more budget-oriented options. It has also opted for an overclocked Palit GTX 670 Jetstream in the graphics slot, which delivers frame rates practically on par with those posted by the two machines with GTX 680 cards inside. It’s still short of performance compared with the overclocked HD 7970 of the AdvanceTec rig, but then you also get the added loveliness of things like PhysX and TXAA with the Nvidia cards.

A fit state

One of the big bonuses of this rig is that it’s one of only two PCs in the test with a chunky 240GB SSD as a main OS drive. It’s also got a 1TB HDD backing it up for all your data needs, but with that decent SSD installed you could get a large chunk of your current gaming library on those solid state memory chips without things getting too crowded. The Scan machine, the other PC with a 240 GB SSD, has a weaker graphics card, and therefore falls well short in the gaming benchmarks. That Mushkin SSD also helps the Fusion Thunderbird get the fastest boot time of the lot.

If it wasn’t for the major black mark around the overclock, this review would be sickeningly glowing. Chillblast has found an excellent balance between the speedy GTX 670, i5 CPU and 240GB SSD. It’s not the fastest rig in the test, but it has been intelligently specced-out, despite the Blu-ray drive, and no mistake. You can’t argue with that impressive two-year warranty either; good work, Chillblast.

Super test: Cyberpower Infinity Apollo

Fans of the big green graphics company rejoice, Cyberpower is showing its love of all things Nvidia here with a rig that’s ripe for the fanboys. The SI has put some decent parts together for your pleasure, all of which are bathed in the eerie, mushypea glow of the Cooler Master 690’s LEDs.

We say ‘decent’, because we’re not entirely enamoured with Cyberpower’s choice of components. It’s the choice of graphics card that really has us stumped. We know that it’s a new graphics card, but the GTX 660 Ti really isn’t the sort of component we’d want in a rig we’d just paid a grand for. That’s especially true when we’re seeing overclocked GTX 670s, GTX 680s and an overclocked HD 7970 in the other machines.

Scan was the only other system integrator to opt for Nvidia’s mid-range make-weight, and together they prop up our list of gaming benchmarks. Up against the superior GPUs of the other rigs in the test, the GTX 660 Ti loojs very, very weak.

Still, it means Cyberpower has been able to stick a Blu ray drive in the rig, and we all know how useful they are for gamers. To be fair though, the cost of a Blu-ray ODD is probably not that much more than a DVD drive these days, so we can’t be too harsh on it.

Strong SSD

The cash frees up by going for a weaker GPU has arguably gone into the choice of solid state drive. At 128GB, the Crucial M4 boot drive certainly isn’t vast, and will only let you install a few of your most frequently played games, but it’s nevertheless one of the strongest SSDs in the test. It offers fantastic 4K random read/writes in the AS SSD benchmark, and delivers excellent boot times.

Along with the AdvanceTec rig, it’s also one of only two in this test to use water-cooling on its overclocked processor, and like the AdvanceTec, it actually has a relatively conservative overclock applied to it.

At 4.5GHz its i5-3570K is certainly no slouch, but 4.6GHz is what we’ve come to expect from even the lowliest Z77 motherboard. This build is hanging out around the bottom of the CPU performance charts, and with a high quality liquid chip chiller installed in that glowy chassis, we were expecting more.

Lack of love

We can’t help but feel a little disappointed by this latest Cyberpower system. With its bold and brash Nvidia branding, we’d have expected graphics to have been one of the components it prioritized above the others. Sadly, by going for the GTX 660 Ti, Cyberpower has left the machine languishing in the benchmark doldrums.

With the slightly conservative overclock on the i5 CPU,combined with the weaker GPU, the Infinity Apollo comes up short almost across the board. Only the decent showing by its choice of SSD gives it any semblance of pride against the competition. This is by no means a poor gaming PC, but if you’re thinking of spending this much money, the majority of the other machines in the test would get our vote.