Chillblast Fusion Eyefinity review

It’s not every day a new technology promises to run games at a resolution of 5,760 x 2,160 and across six screens, but that’s the aim of ATI’s Eyefinity. The process is surprisingly simple: multiple monitors are automatically grouped together by ATI’s Catalyst driver so the GPU sees them as a single, continuous desktop.

For its Fusion Eyefinity PC, Chillblast has picked an ATI Radeon HD 5870 card and, while this may not be the rare (we suspect non-existent) Eyefinity 6 Edition that can power six screens, it can still output 5,760 x 1,080 across three Full HD displays.
ATI claims Eyefinity’s increased resolution makes games more immersive and the average PC far more versatile; at first glance, it’s hard to disagree. Burnout Paradise’s palpable sense of speed is heightened with two extra monitors to show the world whizzing past, while the jungles of Crysis impose themselves far more when you’re hemmed in by them.

Potential problems are tackled at the driver level. The left- and right-hand images are very slightly blurred and stretched in the style of a fisheye lens, with the effect more pronounced towards the far edge of the image. It’s a neat trick that does a decent job of replicating our peripheral vision.
The 18mm side bezels on the monitors weren’t as irritating as we expected, either. While it’s impossible not to notice them, especially when fast-moving images jump across the divide, we found our eyes merely adjusted and filtered them out, much as they do with a car’s A-pillars.

However, several niggling issues can’t be ignored. Heads-up displays in games were stretched across the full resolution of the screen, with mini-maps and gauges shunted to the furthest reaches of our peripheral vision. It’s possible to glance at these comfortably only if you’re sitting a fair distance back from the screen, which is both impractical and rather defeats the point of the surround experience.

In fact, we found that, while huddled up at a desk, we couldn’t concentrate on such a vast area at once. Where that’s the intention – such as Burnout’s blurred sense of speed – it’s not an issue, but details on those side screens can feel dislocated from the core experience.

ATI also claims Office applications benefit from Eyefinity, with the vast desktop space lending itself to multitasking. However, the extra video outputs are the only tangible benefit here over a traditional dual-monitor setup.

Eyefinity aside, the three 22in Dell Professional P2210H panels offer Full HD 1,920 x 1,080 resolutions, so three together makes for a long, narrow viewing area. With good image quality and accurate colours, they’re more than good enough for everyday use, even if the darkest black shades expose slight backlight bleeding at the bottom of the screens.

The PC itself, meanwhile, is more than capable of coping with Eyefinity’s increased demands. The Intel Core i7-920 is overclocked from 2.66GHz to 4GHz, which was enough to deliver a result of 2.8 in our application benchmarks. It’s the highest score we’ve ever seen, easily eclipsing the 2.58 scored by the Wired2Fire Hellspawn.

The ATI Radeon HD 5870 surged through our standard benchmarks with one monitor, delivering scores of 70fps and 44fps in our High and Very High quality Crysis tests. It remained impressive after adding the other two displays, coasting through the most demanding settings in Fallout 3, Burnout Paradise and Batman: Arkham Asylum at the mammoth resolution of 5,760 x 1,080.

It only began to struggle with Crysis on three TFTs and at its highest settings. An average of 15fps in our Very High benchmark at 5,760 x 1,080 almost exactly corresponds to a tripling of the workload over the single TFT setup. We had to lower Crysis to Medium settings to achieve a playable framerate, with the High quality test just falling short at 26fps.

Chillblast hasn’t skimped on the luxuries elsewhere. The 80GB SSD comes with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit installed, and the additional 1TB hard disk, Asus Sonar sound card and Blu-ray drive are welcome additions.
The Silverstone Raven RV02 chassis has its motherboard mounted vertically, allowing easier access to the ports on top of the system. There’s room to expand, with three DIMM sockets, two PCI-Express 16x slots and space for additional optical drives and hard disks, even if the water cooling and vertical orientation of the motherboard make the Chillblast’s interior a little awkward.

Domino ALC water-cooling is used to chill the CPU but, when confronted with an overclocked Core i7, it wasn’t particularly efficient. The processor idled at a reasonable 42 degrees with the Domino on its lowest efficiency setting, but quickly rose to 90 degrees when we stress-tested the machine – ten degrees below the CPU’s maximum safe temperature, but hardly ideal.

We turned the Domino up to its medium and high efficiency settings and saw the CPU’s peak temperature drop by around 5 degrees – a poor result, given that this also increased the system’s noise output to an uncomfortable level. It’s worth noting that Chillblast offers the Akasa Nero HSF on its website, which is quieter than the Domino and £15 exc VAT cheaper, although the CPU is only overclocked to 3.8GHz with this option.

The Fusion Eyefinity also gobbles up plenty of power: at peak usage the system needed 354W from the mains, with each of the three monitors using an additional 19W.

Of course, an over-the-top system such as this doesn’t come cheap. The entire package will set you back £1,999 exc VAT, whereas the A-Listed Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire will perform much the same job, albeit without the luxury of three monitors, for £800 less – not a saving to be sniffed at. It’s also expensive when you price up the system without the trio of screens, which retail for around £150 exc VAT each. This still leaves Chillblast’s base unit alone at a little over £1,500.

The PC may be superb, then, but a few niggles and the sheer excess involved with Eyefinity mean we’re not entirely sold on the idea. For certain game types, the technology allows for a heightened, immersive experience – whether that’s via sensory tricks in your peripheral vision or just tripling the onscreen environment. But you’d have to be something of a gaming addict to even come close to justifying the expense or the space it’ll occupy in your home.
 
Price when reviewed: £1,999 (£2,299 inc VAT)