Water-cooled PC goes quietly about its work
A cool customer
This PC from Chillblast is fairly unique among models available for around the £1,000 mark, because it uses water instead of air to keep itself cool. Watercooled systems are better than fans at keeping a PC’S internal components cool and this also means it runs more quietly. The cooling system is intended to deal with the heat generated by the 11thgeneration six- core Intel Core i5-11600k processor and does a good job. The PC barely makes a noise when idle, and while it does go up through the gears when the processor is pushed, it never becomes irritatingly loud.
A PC that stays cool and quiet when the heat is on
It proved to be a great general-purpose PC, with excellent results in our Windows tests. As you might expect, it couldn’t match more expensive models with eight-core chips when performing more complex tasks, such as video editing from multiple sources. However, for Windows jobs, when it isn’t having to juggle several tasks at the same time, it performed as well as more expensive models.
This strong performance was not replicated in our gaming tests, however. With so much emphasis on its processor and cooling, Chillblast has had to reign in on the graphics hardware. The supplied
Geforce GTX 1650 is a fine mid-range graphics card, but it’s more comfortable running games at 1080p (1920x1080 pixels) than at 1440p (2560x1440 pixels) or beyond. For example, it managed 38fps at 1080p when playing the game Metro Exodus at High settings, but this dropped to 28fps at 1440p and 16fps at 4K.
The rest of the PC is moderately well equipped, with 16GB of RAM (with two spare slots, so it’s easy to expand if you need to) and a 500GB M.2 SSD. If you want more storage there’s a second M.2 slot and two drive bays available for adding larger 3.5in hard drives.
The case includes a tempered glass side panel, but it isn’t lit on the inside. Instead Chillblast adds a choice of colour through three front-mounted glowing fans. In the back of the case are all the ports you’ll need, including a USB-C, three USB 3.0, two USB 2.0 and a Gigabit Ethernet. To connect a monitor, you can choose from Displayport, HDMI or DVI-D options.
SPECIFICATIONS
Intel Core i5-11600k processor • 16GB memory • Nvidia Geforce GTX 1650 graphics card • 500GB SSD • Wi-fi 4 • 1x HDMI port • 1x Displayport • 1x DVI-D port • 4x USB 3.0 ports • 2x USB 2.0 ports • Gigabit Ethernet • Windows 10 Home • 400x210x426mm (HXWXD) • Two-year warranty www.snipca. com/39075