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Chillblast Fusion Whisper review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £839
inc VAT

Quiet, quick and with plenty of room for expansion. An excellent low-noise PC

Specifications

4.2GHz Intel Core i5-2500K, 8GB RAM, N/A display, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

http://www.chillblast.com

Chillblast’s Fusion Whisper is designed to crunch through demanding tasks while still being as quiet as possible, so is chock-full of noise-reducing components.

Chillblast Fusion Whisper

The case is a Fractal Design R3, which gained a Best Buy award in our case Labs in issue 279 of Shopper. The case’s roof and side panel are covered in sound-deadening material, the eight 3.5″ drive bays have vibration-dampening rubber grommets, and the front and rear fans are quiet.

Chillblast Fusion Whisper inside

The PC’s power supply is a 680W ‘be quiet!’ model, and the Tranquillo processor cooler makes very little noise. Even its Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card is a low-noise Gainward ‘Phantom’ model – and the GTX 560 Ti is known for being quiet even in its stock configuration. At idle, the PC makes a very low hum which is only just noticeable in a quiet room – it’s significantly quieter than most PCs, and about the same as a laptop at idle. The noise level didn’t increase during our processor-intensive video-encoding test, but when playing games the graphics card added a low hum, which we could just about hear with our ear next to the case. Even though the hard disk is a standard model rather than an SSD, you can only just about hear it clicking if you really try.

Chillblast Fusion Whisper side off

The lack of processor cooler noise is all the more surprising when you consider the PC’s Intel Core i5-2500K processor is overclocked from 3.3GHz to 4GHz. This gave it a 15% overall advantage in our multimedia benchmarks over our reference PC, which also contains a Core i5-2500K. The PC has a huge 8GB RAM, which you’ll struggle to use even in intensive tasks. The system is available with 4GB RAM, but you’ll only save £26 with the downgrade due to current low memory prices.

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Basic Specifications

Rating *****
Processor Intel Core i5-2500K
Processor external bus 100MHz (Sandy Bridge DMI)
Processor multiplier x42
Processor clock speed 4.2GHz
Processor socket LGA1155
Memory 8
Memory type PC3-10700H
Maximum memory 32GB
Motherboard Asus P8P67
Motherboard chipset Intel P67

Ports

USB2 ports (front/rear) 2/10
Firewire ports (front/rear) 0/1
eSATA ports (front/rear) 1/1
Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Wireless networking support Bluetooth

Internal Expansion

Case midi tower
PCI-E x1 slots (free) 2 (1)
PCI-E x16 slots (free) 2 (1)
Free Serial ATA ports 4
Free memory slots 2
Free 3.5in drive bays 7

Hard Disk

Hard disk model(s) Samsung HD103SJ
Interface SATA2
Total storage capacity 1,024GB

Graphics

Graphics card(s) Gainward GeForce GTX 560 Ti Phantom
Graphics/video ports 2x DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x VGA

Sound

Sound Realtek ALC892
Sound outputs 7.1 line out, optical S/PDIF out, stereo line out, mic in
Speakers none

Removable Drives

Supported memory cards none
Optical drive type(s) DVD+/-RW +/-DL BD-ROM

Display

Screen model none
Native resolution N/A
Screen inputs N/A

Other Hardware

Keyboard N/A
Mouse N/A

Software

Software included none
Operating system Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Buying Information

Warranty two years collect and return
Price £839
Supplier http://www.chillblast.com
Details www.chillblast.com

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