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Chillblast - Fusion Photo OC II
As the price of digital cameras and HD camcorders continues to fall, many people are now using their home PCs to do video and photo editing - or rather trying to. There is nothing more frustrating than to start encoding your latest home movie only to find that the software is going to hog all your system's resources for the next five hours or so.
Chillblast has tried to address this with the Fusion Photo OC II, an entry level photo workstation / high-end desktop system built around an overclocked Intel quad processor, a large amount of memory, a fast RAID hard drive setup and 64-bit Vista pre-installed.
At the heart of the Fusion Photo OC II is one of Intel's Core 2 Quad Q6600 quad core processors. The Q6600 is probably the best quad core CPU for overclocking currently available, with an excellent blend of price and overclockability; something ably shown by Chillblast in this system.
Out of the box the CPU runs at 2.4GHz but in the Fusion Photo OC it is running stably at 3.2GHz without any need for a fancy water cooling solution. The only thing Chillblast has done cooling-wise is to replace the standard Intel cooler with an Artic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro cooler to keep the CPU nice and stable.
The CPU sits in one of Asus's latest motherboards, the P5E, based around Intel's X38 chipset which provides four DIMM slots: these Chillblast has filled with 8GB of fast OCZ Gold PC2-6400 800MHz DDR2 memory. The reason for so much memory is that professionals working with high resolution RAW images will sometimes hit the limit of the memory with even 4GB of RAM, so doubling this should alleviate any problems. And by using the 64-bit version of Windows Vista Home Premium, the OS as well as any installed software can fully address all the memory.
It goes without saying that the Fusion Photo OC II's performance is pretty special. Its Vista Experience score of 5.9 means that nothing in the system is below top notch, something further proved by its PCM05 score of 10,770, one of the fastest we have seen.
Although the Fusion Photo OC II isn't a gaming machine (Chillblast offers a varied range of PCs that are), it does have a 512MB Nvidia GeForce 8800GT installed in it, so once any encoding is done you can play all of today's games without too many problems: a 3Dmark06 score of 14,465 gives an idea of the potential, while in real game play it gives a maximum fps score of 110 in World in Conflict.
The card outputs to a very nice monitor that Chillblast bundles with the system, namely a Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP-HC, 24-inch TFT with a 1,920 x 1,200 pixel native resolution and a 6ms response time.
The storage side of things is pretty interesting too. For the OS Chillblast has chosen two 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives built into a RAID 0 array. The drives have high density discs and in a striped array are incredibly quick; ideal for dealing with the super large file sizes you get with HD video, etc.
For backing up data or just for secondary storage there is a third drive in the system, again another Seagate product, this time a 500GB Barracuda 7200.10. To allow you to burn your completed videos or photos onto DVD there is also a 20x DVD burner.
All of this is built into a CoolerMaster CM690 case, which may not be the best looking case in the world but makes up for it with a great set of features and plenty of cooling, something you need in a system like this. Powering everything internally is a Thermaltake 500W power supply. Chillblast backs the Fusion Photo OC II with a two-year Collect and Return warranty with lifetime support.
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