Chillblast Nautilus review

A 120GB SSD serves as the Nautilus’ boot and operating system partition, which means you get fast performance in disk-intensive tasks and very quick boot times. There’s also a 1TB hard disk, which gives you plenty of room to store multimedia content. As you’d expect from a media centre PC, there’s also a Blu-ray re-writer.

Inside, there’s a total of six SATA ports, but only two are SATA3 and both are in use. If you want to connect external storage, though, you’re in luck, with one eSATA2 port and two USB3 ports at the front of the case and two eSATA3 ports, four USB3 and two USB2 ports on the back. There’s also a PS/2 port and the obligatory Gigabit Ethernet port – there’s no built-in Wi-Fi, but you’re best off using Ethernet or powerline networking for high definition media streaming, anyway. Audio is provided by an optical S/PDIF output and 3.5mm analogue audio outputs, which allow the on-board Realtek audio to output up to 7.1 surround sound. There are also 3.5mm mic and headphone ports on the front of the system. A removable mesh panel covers the system’s rear ports, helping to keep your cables tidy.

This is a brilliant PC, in terms of both looks and functionality, although its relatively large size means that it’s arguably not so much a media centre system as just a really pretty desktop. At £1,599, it’s very expensive, too. However, if you want a massively powerful system that’s not simply unobtrusive but genuinely attractive, as well as very quiet, this is a classy choice.