Product Reviews

The Fusion Trident has the honour of being the first PC in our Labs to come replete with a three-way SLI graphics setup. Yes, that's right: three graphics cards crammed into one machine, sharing the 3D load for gaming. The cards in question are Nvidia 8800 GTX models, each of which is double-height, so if you're interested in width over quality the Trident won't disappoint.

With all three cards in place, there's barely enough room to squeeze a playing card in the remaining gaps, let alone another card of any description. The only space for expansion is in the drive bays, and here there's a generous allowance: if you wanted to go to town, you could fit an extra four 5.25in front-panel devices. There's also room for three extra hard disks mounted on hot-swap-style sliders for easy insertion and removal. It isn't true hot-swap, though - extra drives still need to be manually wired in with power and SATA cables.

With the huge power requirements of even one 8800-based graphics card, the Trident needs a power supply to suit. Lurking in the bottom of the chassis is a massive Thermaltake Toughpower unit, rated at 1kW. With such a demand for power comes a lot of heat, and with so little space for airflow between the graphics cards they get hot enough to feel the heat on your face from about 15cm away; it's vital to keep the side panel attached with its extra 120mm fan.

Despite the chassis being full almost to bursting with chunky hardware, Chillblast has done a good job of keeping things neat. Power supply to the graphics cards is via a tidily bundled loom of cabling, and the selection of top-mounted ports - including two USB and an eSATA connector - is wired in to the motherboard without their associated cables getting in the way.

Mass storage is simple but ample: there's a single Samsung HD103UJ hard disk, but it offers a nominal 1TB of storage with 931GB of formatted capacity. That's plenty for as many games as you want, as well as a hefty music and video library. Plus it has an impressive 32MB cache - double that of most high-performance

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drives. On the RAM front, all four slots in the Asus P5N-T Deluxe motherboard are occupied by Geil 1GB PC2-6400 modules, giving 4GB in total.

A quad-core CPU is now essential on a high-end PC; Chillblast obliges with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 processor. It's sufficient for any current game - the graphics subsystem is the bottleneck there - but it isn't at the bleeding edge. It's a 65nm-part with an 8MB L2 cache in total, in comparison with the latest 45nm QX9650 and QX9770 Extreme Edition parts, both of which are higher clocked and come with 12MB of cache. In concert with the Samsung hard disk, our application benchmarks gave a result of 1.55 - good but no longer a super-fast score if hefty 2D tasks such as video editing or rendering are your main aim.

When it comes to the performance of three-way SLI, first impressions are that despite SLI standing for "scalable link interface", three cards don't scale linearly over two. The only current justification for such a lavish setup isto play Crytek's Crysis because it's oneof the few games that demands more graphics power than the highest-end single graphics cards can provide. But even with the very latest Nvidia beta drivers, three cards give a hugely diminished return over standard dualSLI. In fact, at lower resolutions, three cards are slightly slower than two; not entirely surprising given the extra communication overhead needed forthe three cards to stay in sync.

Chillblast itself claims that the benefits of three-way SLI only start to kick in at very high resolutions. To put it through its paces, we hooked the Fusion Trident up to a 30in Eizo FlexScan SX3031W monitor (web ID: 137331) and saw just a few frames per second extra in Crysis at 1,920 x 1,200. At 2,560 x 1,600 and very high detail settings, the game still crawled along at 8fps.

The most useful boost came at 2,560 x 1,600 with medium detail, giving an average of 45fps with three-way SLI, 40fps with dual SLI and just 28fps witha single card.

Multiple graphics cards have never managed to convince us of their worth, and three-way SLI doesn't do much to dispel the notion of it being more expensive and more trouble than it's worth. The Fusion Trident does give the highest 3D graphics scores we've seen, but for a system nudging £2,000 without keyboard, mouse or monitor, it isn't the best value for money.