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The Chillblast is a PC designed for productivity, but it looks fantastic – a big departure from the cheaper Armari machines, which use a smaller enclosure. Those machines were modest on the inside and the exterior, with little extra cash spent on decoration.
Chillblast’s machine is built around the Phanteks Enthoo Luxe, which is a great starting point: it’s huge and has rock-solid build quality, and its hinged, tempered glass side panels made it easy to see the interior and get at the components.
The Phanteks case looks the part, but it’s undeniably huge at 560mm tall and 550mm deep, while the entire machine weighs around 25kg. Armari’s machines aren’t as eye-catching, but they’re far smaller: just 430mm tall and 420mm deep.
The real hard work can be seen through the tempered glass. Chillblast has hidden an XSPC EX360 in the machine’s roof, and a 240mm unit and the EKWC X3 250 reservoir are hidden behind the metal shroud at the front of the machine.
That means your eyes are drawn to the headline hardware. The CPU is topped with a Phanteks Glacier waterblock that uses clear Perspex, and two Phanteks blocks are also used for the GPUs. Solid acrylic tubing flows between all of the components, and Chillblast has used orange Mayhems coolant. The bright liquid can be seen in the tubes and coursing through the waterblocks, and it really stands out against the darker metal found elsewhere on the inside.
The system’s various RGB LEDs are configured in orange, and more orange LEDs run around the exterior of the enclosure.
The wealth of water-cooling means that the Chillblast looks fantastic – but it also makes interior access a little tricky when compared to the Armari machines. Adding more storage down the line would also be a challenge.
At £7500, too, this machine is obviously not cheap. Of course, anyone buying this machine will know that the custom water-cooling will increase the cost – and many people will be willing to pay extra for a machine that looks this brilliant.
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