Chillblast Fusion Juggernaut gaming PC

A wolf in sheep’s clothing

By Fred Sandeman • Get more from this author

2nd July 2008 12:29 GMT

Chillblast Fusion Juggernaut

A little pricey, perhaps, but the Juggernaut is well built and performs magnificently.

Suggested Price:: £1562 ($3104)
More info:: The Juggernaut page on the Chillblast website

Rating

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.