Intel's Core i7 920 may be the slowest of the trio of new processors that the company launched late in 2008, but it has a neat trick up its sleeve. It's highly overclockable, able to reach 4GHz from its 2.66GHz standard speed on just air cooling alone, which has made it an ideal basis for system builders to build fast, relatively affordable systems.

One of the first overclocked i7 920 systems we have seen is the Fusion Stinger from Chillblast and it's ideal if all you want to do is upgrade your system box with the latest processor technology.

The i7 920 is a great tool for those masters of overclocking, Chillblast, to work their magic on, but in the case of the Fusion Stinger the company has erred on the side of caution, only tweaking the CPU to run at 3.4GHz. Although that's getting on for 800MHz over its stock clock speed, it is capable of being pushed further. But if you go down that road it would be advisable to replace the CPU cooler with something a bit more powerful.

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To keep the cost of the Fusion Stinger down to a manageable level, Chillblast has chosen one of the more basic i7 motherboards available, namely MSI's X58 Pro, to sit the processor in.

Backing up the CPU is 3GB of PC3-10666 Corsair XMS memory in the form of three 1GB modules, the minimum amount of memory required to support the i7's triple channel memory architecture. It should come as no real surprise to find that the Fusion Stinger is one of the fastest systems we have tested, scoring 11,800 in PCMark05 and 6,340 overall in the more demanding PCMark Vantage.

Chillblast has also held back in the graphics department to keep the price down. Instead of a frame-crunching high-end card there is a mid-range ATI Radeon HD4850. That said, this is one of the best bangs-for-your-buck graphic cards around and it's more than enough to play the latest games at comfortable frame rates; 70fps average in World in Conflict and 36fps in Crysis.

For storage Chillblast supplies a 7,200rpm, 500GB hard drive with 32-bit Windows Vista Home Premium pre-loaded on it and there is also a 22x DVD burner to back up applications and data.

All this hardware is neatly built into a pretty uninspiring case (a CoolerMaster Elite 330) but the case does offer plenty of space for adding more hard or optical drives, and it also uses case fans that are pretty quiet.

A CoolerMaster 460W power supply provides power for all the hardware, which is plenty for the Fusion Stinger as it stands but you will have to think about replacing it with a more powerful one if you upgrade the graphics card to a CrossFire setup at a later date.

Chillblast's Fusion Stinger is a well built system and an ideal introduction to the new Intel i7 technology at a good price. It's easy to see where corners have been cut to get to its price point, but that makes an ideal base for future upgrading. Adding a high-end graphics card and more memory would get you a killer gaming system.