Chillblast Fusion Whisper review

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.

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.

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.

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.