Chillblast Fnatic Official Ultimate Ryzen Gaming PC
An AMD 1800X system that truly is for gaming fanatics, with stunning speeds in every area
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £2,125 (£2,550 inc VAT) from chillblast.com
Chillblast’s new Ryzen flagship is advertised as a gaming PC, and is endorsed by professional gaming team Fnatic. This is no ordinary gaming system: with its Fractal Define R5 case measuring 232mm wide and 521mm deep, you could mistake it for a workstation, or even a pedestal server. The price hints in the same direction, too.
Either way, you get a loaded system for your money. That imposing case offers no fewer than 18 USB sockets across the front and rear of the chassis: ten USB 3 ports, two 10Gbits/sec USB 3.1 connectors, and one of them in the USB Type-C format.
RAM and storage provisions are no less extravagant. The Fnatic comes fitted with four 8GB DIMMs, adding up to a massive 32GB of DDR4-2133 RAM. No empty slots remain, but frankly I doubt you will need to upgrade any time soon. Primary storage, meanwhile, comes in the form of a 500GB Samsung 960 Evo SSD sitting in the M.2 slot. In our tests, this delivered terrific read and write scores of 2,976MB/sec and 1,707MB/ sec, making the Fnatic feel as nippy as any PC you’ll try. It’s backed up by a 2TB mechanical hard disk; if you’re somehow worried about running out of space, there are seven free drive bays inside the case, and enough spare SATA sockets to fill them all.
The main event, of course, is the processor. AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X has proved its ability to challenge Intel at the high end ( see p54), and Chillblast has partnered it with a Corsair H110i water cooler to maintain the fastest possible speeds. It works: while our air-cooled Ryzen 7 test rig achieved an overall benchmark score of 215, the Chillblast was almost 30% faster with 278.
Again, this puts us in workstation territory: while we’ve seen Xeon systems achieve higher scores, this sort of computing power is a match for any Core i7 system we’ve ever tested – including specialist Broadwell-E models. That said, it’s worth remembering that AMD’s strengths are balanced differently to Intel’s, with slightly weaker singlecore performance offset by stronger multi-core capabilities. Indeed, Chillblast’s water-cooling efforts seemed to accentuate matters: in our single-threaded image-editing test, the Chillblast was only 5% ahead of our test rig, but the margin grew as more threads came into play, to 28% in the video-editing test, 35% in the multitasking test.
The final part of the puzzle is graphics – and what better partner for that mighty CPU than the most powerful graphics card on the market? The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is Nvidia’s new flagship, an upgraded version of the original (already potent)
GTX 1080. It packs in a ludicrous 3,584 Pascal cores, backed up with 11GB of GDDR5X RAM. Make no mistake, this is a card for serious gamers, with a price tag of around £700 on its own.
Unsurprisingly, then, our gaming benchmarks didn’t represent much of a challenge. The Fnatic cruised through our 1080p very-high-detail Metro: Last Light
Redux benchmark at an average of 113fps. Even quadrupling the pixel count didn’t faze it: we played the game at 4K, still with very high settings, at a perfectly decent average of 30fps.
Clearly, this is a PC that excels in every way. The only lingering question is who really needs it. If you’re genuinely looking for a gaming PC, the top-flight Ryzen 7 processor is overkill for the role: 3D games barely benefit from a massively multi-core architecture. Conversely, if you’re weighing up the Fnatic as a generalpurpose workstation, you probably don’t need to be paying for a worldbeating graphics card – and the choice of Windows 10 Home might stick out a bit too.
But this PC was never intended for the sort of enthusiast who carefully specs up their system for maximum value. It’s for the luxury shopper who demands the latest and greatest components – and when you look at it in that light it’s actually a pretty reasonable proposition, delivering processing grunt that’s on par with systems costing twice as much, along with unbeatable graphical power. The Fnatic branding even adds an element of cool.
So yes, the Ultimate Ryzen Gaming PC may not match your needs, but then that’s not the point. Think of it as an object of sheer technological desire, and you’ll find it ticks every box.