2nd Dream PC unveiled - Chillblast Fusion

The Chillblast Fusion Artisan unveiled

Every year Custom PC challenges the world's leading professional PC builders to craft the most technologically advanced, innovative, eye-catching PCs they can. We call this competition Dream PCs, and here is the second entry - the water-cooled Chillblast Fusion Artisan.

In Chillblast 's own words 'For Chillblast’s Dream PC we wanted to produce a machine that’s a little different from the systems featured in previous years. Rather than exclusively targeting the extreme-gaming audience with brash, aggressive styling, we wanted to produce something that would also appeal to clients looking for something a little more subtle.

'So we chose a classically-styled aluminium case, and laser-etched a Leonardo da Vinci-inspired design on the side and front panels. It’s our aim to offer our customers whichever design they’d like for their particular Artisan, and we’re offering a design service as part of the package.'

Here's a teaser video of the Fusion Artisan for you to feast your eyes upon.


Chillblast continues 'In addition to the aesthetics, we wanted to keep the price under control, as in the current climate we don’t feel that machines costing over £8,000 are necessarily appropriate. We’re therefore offering the Artisan in two different flavours – the first option with a single 256GB solid state drive costs £3,999.99 including VAT and a second with two P256 drives in RAID is £4,499.99 including VAT.

'We also wanted to make sensible choices regarding value, which is why our Dream PC uses a Core i7-920 CPU rather than a 975 Extreme Edition. During our extensive testing with the 975, the flagship chips didn’t consistently out-perform the 920, so we didn’t feel that the extra £500-plus of expenditure was justifiable. Likewise, we chose the P6T Deluxe V2 over options such as the Rampage II Extreme and the EVGA Classified motherboards, as we feel it offers more in the way of features, as well as competitive overclocking performance.

'We wanted our Dream PC to be perfectly usable as an everyday system, which is why we chose to forego exotic cooling systems such as phase-change and peltiers. Although the choice of traditional water cooling limits us to a clock speed of 4.2GHz, we feel this choice is justified by the fact that our customers can simply turn on their machine each morning without having to wait for compressors to chill for several minutes, or worry about condensation problems developing.

'Our choice of memory is born from practicality. Ultra-fast memory that would have added significantly to the cost of our system is, of course, available, but in a bandwidth-saturated platform such as the triple-channel i7, we focused on delivering as much RAM as possible without devoting hundreds of pounds to something that provides only a fractional performance gain.

'Overall, we’d like to think of the Artisan as the thinking man’s Dream PC. Performance is still exceptional, but without any compromise on aesthetics, style or practicality.'

The full review of the Chillblast Fusion Artisan, along with this year's four other Dream PCs, will be published in bit-tech's sister magazine, Custom PC, on-sale 22 October. In the meantime, let us know your thoughts in the forums.