Chillblast Fusion Nano Fury review

If giant PCs such as the Wired2Fire Diablo Elite aren’t your thing, perhaps the Chillblast Fusion Nano Fury is the right PC for you. In fact, if you were to remove the graphics card from the Diablo Elite, the Fusion Nano Fury would very nearly fit snugly inside its larger rival.

The Raijintek Metis chassis measures just 190mm wide, 277mm deep and 254mm high and is made of brushed aluminium. The PC is also available in black, green, red, blue, grey and gold finishes. Chillblast has made a modification to the case in order to make the compact design work: the firm’s engineers have machined an exhaust hole in the top of the chassis that allows the AMD R9 Fury Nano graphics card, which is mounted upside down inside the case, access to a decent amount of ventilation.

The Fusion Nano Fury takes its name from this card; a tiny graphics adaptor that can match some of the most powerful full-size models. It’s just 152mm long, 110mm wide and 39mm thick, but you pay for the size; the card costs £500 on its own.

For such a tiny component, the AMD R9 Fury Nano managed truly astonishing performance. In Dirt Showdown at 1,920×1,080 with High detail and 4x anti-aliasing, the card managed a huge 136fps, and we even saw 58fps in the demanding Metro: Last Light benchmark. This Full HD performance is in line with what a full-size Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 can achieve. Ramp things up to 3,840×2,160, and it’s still a capable performer, managing 67fps in Dirt and 30fps in Metro. It’s not quite as monstrously quick as the GeForce 980 Ti inside the Wired2Fire PC, and you will have to start tweaking graphics settings on the latest games if you want to play them in Ultra HD, but it’s seriously impressive for such a small card.

There’s a problem, though. The card produces a significant amount of electrical coil whine in the form of a high-pitched buzzing. This is a known problem with R9 Fury Nano cards and is only audible under specific circumstances. For example, it was loudest when running Dirt Showdown and significantly quieter in Metro: Last Light. The whine is even audible when the case is completely sealed and is far louder than any fan noise the card produces. As AMD’s production process gets more refined, the card may get quieter, but it’s a pretty big drawback on current cards.

The PC’s processor is an overclocked quad-core Intel Core i5-6600K, although instead of air cooling, Chillblast has opted for a Corsair Hydro H75 closed circuit water cooling system. The PC’s processing performance is strong, although with a maximum Turbo Boost speed of 4.4GHz, it isn’t clocked as high as some of the larger Core i5-6600K-based builds we’ve seen. In our 4K application benchmarks the Fusion Nano Fury managed an overall score of 124, which is a fair way short of the 182 achieved by the 4.7GHz Core i7-6700K in the Wired2Fire PC.

Chillblast supplies 16GB of 2400MHz DDR4 RAM, which should be enough for almost any application and game. You get a 250GB Samsung PCI-E M.2 SSD for Windows and your applications. M.2 SSDs are particularly quick; this one has a maximum claimed read speed of 2.1GB/s and 1.2GB/s sequential write speeds, which is more than double the claimed throughput of the Samsung Evo 850 SATA SSD found in the Wired2Fire. It may have half the capacity, but if speed is key, there’s no competition. The SSD is backed up by a 2.5in 1TB Seagate hybrid hard disk, which has 8GB of solid state storage to boost performance for the files and programs you use the most. This is a PC with some seriously snappy storage.

^ The motherboard is mounted upside-down, vertically; we’ve rotated the image for clarity

As you might expect, expansion is limited. In reality, the only way you could ever add components to this PC would be to remove others first. Both RAM slots on the Asus Z170I Pro Gaming motherboard are filled by 8GB 2133MHz DDR4 memory modules, and while you could in theory expand this to two 16GB modules, this will cost you more than £200. There’s also a free SATA3 connector, but finding a space for another drive is impossible as there are no free mounting points. Forget adding extra kit to the motherboard, as there aren’t any PCI-E slots beyond the single x16 slot occupied by the graphics card. The motherboard does at least come with 802.11ac Wi-Fi, so you won’t need to worry about finding space for a fast wireless card.

The Chillblast Fusion Nano Fury is the most powerful small-form-factor PC we’ve ever tested. Although you certainly don’t get the extreme power of a larger desktop PC, its graphical prowess is still very impressive. The audible coil whine from the graphics card is a drawback, and not something that can be easily forgiven in a £1,500 PC, however. It might be worth seeing if quieter R9 Fury Nano cards are produced before splashing out on a tiny gaming PC such as this.