Chillblast Poseidon: Ryzen 9 RTX 5090 Water Cooled Gaming PC

The most spectacular PC we've ever tested and, while it's totally over the top, we can't help but love it

- TIM DANTON

Back in the day, we used to invite manufacturers to send in their wackiest, most expensive designs as part of our Ultimate PCs group tests. Go wild, we said. Create a work of art. Well, Chillblast - a Warrington-based manufacturer that has appeared in PC Pro on 44 previous occasions - listened to the echoes of that call and created something truly spectacular.

The aptly named Poseidon is simply magnificent to behold, a whirl of transparent pipes and futuristic curves that combine function with form. The function being simple: keep the components cool so that you can extract the maximum performance from them for the longest possible period. It does so with barely a murmur and only the occasional gurgle, but I daresay that if viewed from afar you might spot a heat haze from its top after hours of gaming: pop a cafetière on it and your coffee will stay lovely and warm.

Weight and wait

I also strongly recommend that two of you lift this PC into place. I tend to be of the “oh, it'll be fine” persuasion, take a deep breath and heave even the heaviest of PCs onto my desk. This one made me pause and grab my son for help: it wasn't so much the weight, around 20kg, but the density packed into the compact body. And the Poseidon really is compact considering everything inside; smaller than many regular PCs I test.

Perhaps another reason for my caution was that with all this glass, and the knowledge of the precision engineering that's gone into it, I didn't want to risk any damage or disturbance. Chillblast told me that each unit is “built meticulously by hand, and pressure-tested by our most experienced builders”. On top of all the usual quality checking, it’s then put through a soak/leak test.