Chillblast Fusion Juggernaut gaming PC
A wolf in sheep’s clothing
Review UK-based gaming PC specialist Chillblast is a master in the art of overclocking, producing systems that perform blisteringly fast - yet entirely stable: its latest desktop creation is the Fusion Juggernaut.
The plain case gives nothing away about what’s been built inside it, namely an overclocked quad-core processor, 4GB of overclocked DDR 2 memory and a fast high-end graphics card.
Chillblast's Fusion Juggernaut: plain styling hides exciting internals
At the heart of the Fusion Juggernaut sits one of Intel’s latest 45nm CPUs, the Core 2 Quad Q9450 with a 1333MHz frontside bus (FSB) speed, a standard clock speed of 2.66GHz and 12MB of L2 cache. So even out of the box it doesn’t hang about. But Chillblast isn't in the ‘out of the box’ game, so it's tweaked the 9450 so the processor runs stably at an impressive 3.4GHz.
Keeping things cool is the name of the game when it comes to over-the-top overclocking, and Chillblast has ditched the standard Intel fan for a more efficient Artic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro cooler.
The CPU sits in one of the best overclocking motherboards around right now: Asus' Rampage Formula, which is based on Intel’s latest high-end chipset, the X48. Not only is this board well featured, the Bios offers more overclocking options than you can shake a stick at. You can adjust the FSB from 200MHz all the way up to 800MHz, and the PCI Express bus from 100MHz to 180MHz. You can make adjustments to the CPU, northbridge, southbridge and memory voltages, and a whole lot more. Talking of memory, there are 20 - yes, 20 - adjustments for the primary memory timings alone.
COMMENTS
Comparisons
The text seems to suggest this is fastest machine reviewed to date, but the Alienware Area 51 ALX scores better results across the board. That review compares it with the Mesh Q8, please can we always have closest equivalent system's figures shown on any performance graph, as otherwise its just a bunch of fairly meaningless numbers.
Re: Re: FSB
Specified by Intel for 200-400MHz, sure... but then Asus have always ignored such trival matters.
I have this case myself as the basis for my home-built. Lovely thing, except that because the whole thing is porous, the sound containment isn't the best, and airflow isn't quite as controllable as it could be. Dust is also a bit of an issue. It looks better than you think though... nice black block, quite sleek-looking and understated. I don't want something that looks like it came from the set of Dr. Who. Also very cheap for what it is.
Not a bad price, no... depends on the warranty care though, otherwise may as well build yourself.
FSB?
Maybe I'm being a divvy, but why do you need a cpu with an FSB speed of 1333 MHz when your mobo can only tackle up to 800 MHz?
And surely half the fun of overclocked gear is building / breaking and overclocking it your self?
HDD cache helping transfer large files?
If you are transferring a file larger than 32MB, I'd have thought the cache would be useless, better to stream straight through. The cache is there because often the data you want is the same as you got before, or very close to it. If you are reading a lot of small files all the time, or at least the same blocks, better to keep them in a buffer of fast memory and read that fast buffer instead of the relatively slow HDD.
