Chillblast Fusion Demon review

Chillblast’s Fusion Demon is one of the first PCs we’ve reviewed to use AMD’s new Radeon HD 7870 graphics card, and the system is firmly oriented towards gaming performance. The processor is an Intel Core i5-2500K, overclocked to 4.8GHz to give it impressive performance in our benchmarks, where it managed an overall score of 128. It’s air-cooled and there are a couple more fans at the front and rear of the case, all of which produces a whooshing sound. It’s clearly audible through the case, which lacks soundproofing and has plenty of ventilation holes, but the noise isn’t too obtrusive.

Inside the sturdy case are two drive cages. The lower one has space for four 3.5in drives, with one bay occupied by the PC’s 2TB hard disk. At the top, there’s a set of three 5.25in bays, the uppermost of which is taken up by a DVD-RW/Blu-ray reader combo drive. Although this means that the case has fewer vacant bays, it also allows plenty of space for extra-long graphics cards.

It makes cable routing a bit easier, but the extra space isn’t actually needed by the AMD Radeon HD 7870, which is the centrepiece of this gaming PC. The graphics card is massively powerful, producing average frame rates of 30fps at Ultra quality in Crysis 2 and 60fps in Dirt 3, so you’ll have no problems with current games or those arriving in the near future. The 7870 has DVI, HDMI and two Mini DisplayPort outputs, so it can handle AMD Eyefinity multi-display gaming across up to three monitors.

The graphics card occupies the main PCI-E x16 slot on the Asus P8Z77-V LX motherboard, blocking the PCI-E x1 slot beneath it. The motherboard is Ivy Bridge ready, should you wish you upgrade to one of Intel’s newer processors in the future. We were surprised to find that there are three PCI slots, which are all easily accessible. One additional PCI-E x1 is wedged between the CPU cooler and graphics card, and there’s another PCI-E x16 slot amid the PCI slots – it only runs at x4 speed, though. There are six SATA ports in total, of which two – currently unused – are SATA3. Only two of the four memory slots are in use, occupied by a couple of 1,333MHz 4GB RAM modules.

At the front of the case are two USB3 ports and the usual mic and headphone connectors. At the rear, you’ll find another two USB3 ports, four USB2 ports, a PS/2 port, a Gigabit Ethernet port and both analogue 5.1 surround sound and optical S/PDIF audio outputs.

Although there’s nothing world-shatteringly exciting here, this is a remarkably capable PC. The combination of graphics card and processor make this system powerful enough to satisfy even the most performance-hungry of gamers. At £899, it’s a rather expensive proposition, but it’s an excellent PC, with gaming and general performance that’ll easily hold their own for the next couple of years.