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Photography News | Issue 67 | photographynews.co.uk
Getting high-end performance for half the price A top-spec photo editing PC for less than £1500 sounds too good to be true – so what’s behind that bottom line?
As a photographer, the work you put in after a shoot is as important as the work you do during the shoot. You might already have a go-to tool that youuse and feel you don’t need anything else. But be honest; is it entirely suited to your needs?Does itprovideanexcellent mix of performance, style and ease of use, while providing value for money? For a trulyperfect photoediting experience, you need something that’s completely tailored to you. After all, a made-to-measure suit is worth its weight in gold, so why shouldn’t you expect a bespoke PC designed completely around your needs? But with prices for the most popular, mainstream machine starting at £3000, do you really need to spend that much money to get the perfect photo editing experience from your computer? Whatareyougettingfor£3000? Spend£3000withoneofthehigh- end computer manufacturers and you’d get yourself a system with a good spec. You’d be looking at a 3.5GHz 6-Core Intel processor, 16GB of 1866MHz DDR3 RAM, a 256GBSSD,andtwoAMDFirepro D500 Graphics Processors. A strong offering, in a small package and one that many photographers, videographers and creatives are happily creating amazing work with. But it’s possible that the premium you’re paying is for the brand, the styling and not the all- out-performance... So, what are your alternatives? Saving yourself half the price For less than half the price at £1380, you could pick up one of Chillblast’s Fusion Photo OC Lite IVs. Whilst the name doesn’t quite flow off the tongue like other brand’s sleek offerings, Chillblast’s system comes in at
half the price and with specs that blow their systems away. In its base configuration, the Fusion Photo OC Lite IV comes with an Intel i7-8700K with six cores and a minimum speed of 3.7MHz making its raw CPU power up to 15% faster for your money. The Intel chip can also boost its own speed toup to4.7MHz, giving it a huge edge in CPU intensive tasks, such as Adobe Lightroom. While it uses the same 16GB, this system provides even more value by using faster RAM than others. The RAM is running at 2666MHz, allowing Lightroom and Photoshop to access program data up to 29% faster than slower 1866MHz sticks. Out of the box, the PC offers a similar 250GB Solid State Hard Drive but puts the cherry on top by giving you an additional 2TB of HDD alongside it – you can store all of your files locally, without forking out for additional storage. For a saving of over 50%, it seems like all signs point to the more impressive PC. How does it perform? It’s all very well having a fancy specification that on paper performs better than competition, but in real-world applications, how does the Chillblast Fusion Photo OC Lite IV compare to its more expensive counterparts? In a standardised, transform, resize, filter and edit batch run inside Adobe’s Photoshop CC, we saw the competitor machine crunch through our photos in just 33 seconds – an impressive time, and hardly a slouch. TheChillblastsystem,however, managed to smash through the stress test in just 26 seconds – an impressive 26% faster. In Blender, our test render was finished in a modest 501 seconds. Once again, it was absolutely dwarfed by Chillblast’s machine
Chillblast PC clearly takes the lead in performance, support and in cost; but where does it stumble? The downsides As with all things that seem to be a little too good to be true, there is a drawback. Primarily, Chillblast makes all its PCs in the UK, by hand and made to order. You can’t just go out and pick up one of these powerhouses from your nearest superstore like you can with other well-known brands. Every Chillblast PC is made to order and then tested rigorously for over at least 24 hours before being shipped to you. This means that if you want to get your hands on a Chillblast system, you can in some instances expect to wait up to two weeks before it’s at your door. If you can live with a small waitingperiod, it seems like it’s not a difficult choice when it comes to choosing a photo editing PC.
You might already have a go-to tool that you use. But be honest; is it entirely suited to your needs?
which completed the same render in just 357 seconds, a cool 40% faster. For the same price It’s worth mentioning that the “Lite” in Chillblast’s Fusion OC Lite IV means it’s the company’s low-tier offering. Chillblast’s top-tier PC, the Fusion Photo OC VIII, costs the same as the competitor’s lowest cost offering (£3000), but has a 150% faster CPU, twice as much RAM, 6TB more storage, a 4X faster graphics card and smashed
the benchmarks at 65% faster in Photoshop and 151% faster in Blender. It’s not just raw power Chillblast prides itself on being a UK based PC manufacturer and they have an incredibly generous support offering to keep you up and running. Their “open box” support and warranty policy means that, if you want to open it up and put in some more storage, additional RAM, or even another graphics card, Chillblast will still support your system. So, the
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