Chillblast Captain Flight Sim PC
Beware the quiet ones: this PC packs all the punch you need to get the most out of Microsoft Flight Simulator
“This is one of the quietest systems we’ve heard, with the fans only kicking in once
Flight Simulator has been on for a few minutes”
SCORE
PRICE £1,833 (£2,200 inc VAT) from chillblast.com
It’s fair to say that Chillblast is on
Flight Simulator’s case. Head to chillblast.com and you’ll find 14 PCs tailor-made for fl ight sims, ranging from £760 to £4,900, and it’s had early access to Flight Simulator’s alpha and beta code to help fine-tune its offerings.
That said, the ingredients behind a fl ight sim PC are well understood. First, you need as powerful a processor as you can afford, and that honour goes to the eight-core Core i7-10700K here. Next up, the graphics chip: the GeForce RTX 2080 Super shoulders this burden. And to complete the crew, two 16GB sticks of 3,200MHz memory, a fast 1TB PCIe SSD and a
4TB mechanical hard disk – the latter useful when trying to meet Flight
Simulator’s heavy storage demands. This potent combination still isn’t quite enough to earn the PC an “Ultra” quality rating in Flight Simulator, but High is only one step down and looks spectacular on the Chillblast. Most importantly, the game ran smoothly at 4K in a range of environments, so if
fl ight simulation is your primary application for this PC then you should be happy for years to come.
Naturally, it’s a powerful machine outside of virtual flying worlds. It motored to 333 in our benchmarks, which is what we’d expect from an air-cooled Core i7-10700K. There’s room to overclock it should you wish – and note that the Asus TUF Gaming Z490Plus motherboard is primed for such activities – but Chillblast has struck a nice balance between speed and noise that we’d be loathe to disturb. In general use, this is one of the quietest systems we’ve heard, with the fans only kicking in once Flight Simulator has been on for a few minutes.
If value for money is key, consider a system based on an AMD Ryzen 3700X, as it’s equally fast but cheaper. You won’t make enough savings there to upgrade the RTX 2080 Super to the 2080 Ti, which might have been just enough to push this PC into the Ultra category, but this is still a fast gaming system. At 1080p, it averaged 69.8fps in the
Hitman 2 test with our tough settings, and while it struggled to 18.9fps in 4K that increased to 68.4fps once we dropped super sampling from 2x to 1x.
Note that this Asus motherboard doesn’t support SLI, and that you would need a higher-spec power supply to support two graphics cards anyway. Not that we have any complaints about the high-quality Corsair RM650x, nor the Fractal Design Define 7 chassis: it’s a hunky chunk of black metal, with the added bonus of a door that opens to reveal a DVD writer. Useful if you decide to buy Flight Simulator on ten DVDs rather than as a download. Another nice touch: if you need to quickly hook up a joystick, rudder and throttle, you might appreciate the four USB ports on the top of the case.
Working inside is a breeze, with two easy-to-reach DIMM slots and one spare M.2 slot. We’re happy with the storage setup as supplied, though, with the Seagate PCIe SSD returning a speedy 2,847MB/sec for sequential reads and 2,989MB/sec for writes. The hard disk is more pedestrian, with scores of 175MB/sec and 185MB/sec, but that’s hardly surprising.
Is all this power necessary to run
Flight Simulator? No, just take a look at the Cyberpower overleaf, which will run it at Medium settings for half the price – and still looks great and runs smoothly. Will you appreciate the Captain’s smooth air, extra reserves of power and staggering amount of storage? Absolutely. We’d go so far as to say that it’s First Class.
TIM DANTON
SPECIFICATIONS
8-core 3.8GHz/5.1GHz Intel Core i7-10700K processor Asus TUF Gaming Z490-Plus (Wi-Fi) motherboard 32GB 3,200MHz DDR4 RAM 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics Noctua NH-U12S CPU cooler
1TB Seagate Barracuda 510 M.2 PCIe SSD 4TB Seagate Barracuda hard disk 24x DVD writer Fractal Design Define 7 chassis Corsair RM650x 80 Plus Gold 650W PSU Windows 10 Home 240 x 547 x 475mm (WDH) 5yr warranty (2yr C&R, 3yr labouronly RTB)