Superb speed, great cooling and a specification that excels in every department, but the price is vast

Pros

• Looks stunning
• Reasonably quiet and cool
• Superb custom watercooling loop

Cons

• Incredibly expensive
• Accessing buttons and empty slots is tricky

Chillblast’s Fusion Centauri Ryzen Threadripper Ultimate is a £7,500 monster that pushes the envelope in every department. It has an AMD Threadripper processor, more memory and storage than we’ve ever seen in a review PC, and two overclocked GTX 1080 Ti cards. All that, and we haven’t even mentioned the bespoke watercooling loop with rigid tubing.

It’s a monster specification, but it will only be useful for a select few users. Chillblast is aiming this machine at people who work in video production, content creation streaming and gaming, and also people who want their PC to look good. The hardware is formidable. The Threadripper 1950X has 16 cores, with 32 threads via SMT, and it runs at its 3.4GHz stock speed with a 4GHz turbo peak.

Meanwhile, the two overclocked graphics cards run at 1,630MHz rather than their 1,480MHz stock speed, and they provide a total of 22GB of GDDR5X memory and 7,168 stream processors. The DDR4 memory only runs at 2,666MHz, but that’s the top speed the motherboard will handle with 64GB installed, and the 1TB Samsung 960 Pro NVMe SSD is paired with a whopping 10TB hard disk.

These components need a muscular motherboard, and the Asus ROG Zenith Extreme certainly delivers – it costs £500 on its own. It ticks every conventional feature box, of course, while adding support for up to four GPUs.

Its rear I/O panel also offers ten USB 3.1 ports, a USB Type-C connection, plus clear-CMOS and BIOS flashback buttons. You also get 802.11ac Wi-Fi and SupremeFX audio.

Get beyond those basics, and the Zenith lives up to its name. The shroud and heatsink around the rear I/O has a built-in fan, and a display that provides temperatures and frequencies, while the eight DIMM slots are supplemented by a ninth slot that can be used to connect two M.2 SSDs. The board also comes with an Asus ROG Areion 10G networking card, which enables wired networking at speeds of up to 10Gbits/sec, if you have the right networking gear to accompany it.

The top of the board has power and reset buttons, and a POST display, and the bottom has more buttons, including a safe mode and PCI-E slot switches. Those buttons at the bottom highlight the one issue, though – it’s a busy PCB, and there’s loads of hardware in front of it, so accessing the buttons and empty slots can be tricky.

The Fusion needs a powerful PSU, so it’s no wonder that Chillblast has installed a superb Corsair AX1500i unit. It has an 80 Plus Titanium rating, a fully modular design and a vast 1,500W power peak. It’s all built inside a stunning-looking enclosure as well. Chillblast has used the Phanteks Enthoo Luxe as a base, which is huge, sturdy and tidy, with a hinged, tempered glass side panel. The interior is superb, too. An XSPC EX360 watercooling radiator is hidden in the roof, along with another EX240 radiator and an EKWC X3 250 reservoir hidden behind the metal column at the front.

Users only see the headline hardware, though: the CPU’s Phanteks Glacier waterblock, with its clear Perspex, and the two Glacier blocks used to chill the GPUs. The solid acrylic tubing courses with orange Mayhems coolant, and the RGB LEDs used throughout share that orange colour. There are also LEDs running around the exterior of the case, lending the panels an orange glow. The orange lights combine with the black interior to create a system that looks fantastic.

The Chillblast is protected by a solid warranty. It’s the usual deal, which is a five-year labour warranty with two years of collect and return parts coverage.

Chillblast Fusion Centauri Ryzen Threadripper Ultimate review: Performance

As expected, the Threadripper chip excelled in our heavily multithreaded video encoding task, where it scored an incredible result of 782,557 using the Creator mode. Its overall result score of 265,354 is huge. However, its 3.4GHz speed meant a middling image editing score of 47,314 in Creator mode, increasing to 49,659 in its default mode. The single-threaded performance is the 1950X’s only issue, though, and even then it’s hardly slow. The Samsung 960 Pro SSD helps too, thanks to read and write speeds of 3,487MB/sec and 2,024MB/sec.

Meanwhile, the two overclocked GPUs managed a minimum of 45fps in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’s 4K benchmark, and it zoomed past 70fps in our other 4K tests. The overclock sees the Chillblast machine outpace other dual GTX 1080 Ti systems we’ve tested, delivering enough power to handle any gaming task. Don’t expect much from Threadripper’s Game mode, though. It only added a handful of extra frames per second in our 4K tests. It’s worth using, but it’s hardly transformative.

Thanks to its carefully tuned custom watercooling loop, the Chillblast is also reasonably quiet when its components are pushed. Even in games, it only pumps out a low rumble that’s easy to obscure.

The Chillblast only became louder when running a CPU stress test, and even then it wasn’t any noisier than many conventional gaming rigs. It’s not too hot either; the GPU’s Delta T of 22°C is positively chilly, and the processor’s peak Delta T of 69°C is also acceptable, considering the low noise and colossal count of 16 CPU cores.

Chillblast Fusion Centauri Ryzen Threadripper Ultimate review: Verdict

The Fusion Centauri Ryzen Threadripper Ultimate is incredible, but it’s also incredibly expensive. That’s no surprise, given the superb custom watercooling loop, Threadripper CPU, two overclocked Asus GTX 1080 Ti cards, massive memory allocation and storage setup, not to mention the hugely expensive PSU and motherboard.

Those attributes put it beyond the requirements – and reach – of most gamers and content creators. It’s possible to save thousands by making sensible compromises – less cooling, one GPU, half as much memory, or a cheaper Threadripper CPU.

However, this PC isn’t aimed at the frugal – it’s for people who want the very best. If you want unrivalled power for gaming and content creation in a machine that really looks the part, the Chillblast is absolutely superb.

Source: expertreviews.co.uk