Two of the Fusion Juggernaut's four memory slots are filled with 4GB of Corsair XMS PC2-6400 (800MHz) DDR2 memory in the form of two modules. These too have been overclocked, so they run at 850MHz but you could squeeze a little more out of them if you wanted to. If you fancy adding more memory, the board supports a maximum of 8GB - just make sure you're running a operating system that can make use of it all. The Juggernaut comes with Windows Vista Home Premium SP1.
As you can imagine all this little lot packs quite some punch, something borne out by its PCMark05 score of 11,000 – the fastest we have seen.
PCMark05 Results
Longer bars are better
The motherboard is built into a CoolerMaster CM690 case, which may not win anything in the looks department, but does have plenty of space inside to work around and plenty of drive bays for hard disk and optical units. Although there's a lot going on inside, Chillblast has made sure that all the cabling is arranged as tidily as possible, which as well as looking nice, more importantly helps the air flow around the components, reducing the number of damaging thermal hotspots.
PCMark Vantage Results
Longer bars are better
Sitting in the base of the case is a Thermaltake 750W modular power supply. Modular power supplies also help in keeping the internals tidy as you only plug in the cables you need. A 120mm case fan sitting high up in the rear panel ducts the hot air generated by the PSU and components out of rear of the machine.
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.
