Review: Chillblast Atlantis Fusion water-cooled PC

It only takes a brief glance at the specs to see why Chillblast is asking well over £3,000 for this monster.

We expected to see a dual-graphics card setup and a fast processor, but we didn’t anticipate that the whole system would be water-cooled. To highlight this, Chillblast has mounted the water reservoir at the front of the PC for all to see.

Three fans sit at the top of the case, but that doesn't mean you have to worry about noise levels. Each measures in at 120mm, allowing for the spin speed to be lower.

A smart-looking Akasa Fan Control Pro panel on the front of the system lets you monitor temperature levels and adjust fan speeds accordingly. Take a closer look at this in our image gallery.

The Atlantis Crossfire runs off an Athlon64 FX-60. When AMD released this processor, many were disappointed that it only had a core clock of 2.6GHz (200MHz slower than the FX-57).

Indeed, Chillblast decided to whack the core up to 2.9GHz with a 233MHz front-side bus and multiplier of 13x. Chillblast tells us it tried pushing the FX-60 further, but stability became an issue.

ATI Radeon X1900 XTX and X1900 XT Crossfire Edition graphics cards link up to provide staggeringly powerful graphics. Both have a massive 512MB of Ram at their disposal.

Two ultra-fast Raptor 150GB drives (each 10,000rpm models) sit in a striped Raid array while another 500GB drive pushes the total storage to a massive 800GB.

The end result of these high-spec components is a ludicrously fast PC. In Sysmark 2004 SE it scored an astonishing 320, while 3Dmark05 caused it no problems at all with a result of 14,279.

To put this in to context, one of the fastest PCs to visit out labs in terms of Sysmark was the Mesh Xtreme FX60, which clocked up a score of 263. As far as 3Dmark05 goes, Vadim Computers held the crown with a score of 13,010 on its Fusion CS system.

Both of these scores are totally eclipsed by this Chillblast PC. You’ll find full performance scores for all these PCs at ReportLabs on our Test Bed blog.

The CPU and graphics cards make use of the same Nexxxos Alphacool water-cooling system, which provides quiet and efficient cooling.

Two separate water-cooling systems for the processor and graphics would have provided better cooling, but Chillblast was clearly going for a less cluttered system.

There really appears to be very little Chillblast hasn't thought of with this system. Lightning-fast performance and whisper quiet, this is a gamer’s dream machine.

View full performance results for Chillblast Atlantis Fusion desktop PC
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