To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more

Chillblast Fusion Blaze review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £799
inc VAT

This expertly overclocked system strikes the perfect balance between raw power, good-quality peripherals and gaming performance

Specifications

4.5GHz Intel Core i5-3570K, 8GB RAM, 23in 1,920×1,080 display, Windows 8

The Fusion Blaze from Chillblast is a powerful and well-built Windows 8 system. At £800, it occupies the middle ground between high performance and realistic pricing for a family PC. Chillblast has equipped it accordingly, with more modest components than you’d find in a full-on enthusiast PC. The Intel Core i5-3570K processor is the same powerful CPU that you’ll find in many of our favourite performance systems. It has a significant overclock, too, bringing it up to a speed of 4.5GHz from the stock 3.4GHz. This helped the PC to an excellent overall score of 144 in our application benchmarks.

Chillblast Fusion Blaze

The graphics card is an overclocked 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 OC from Palit. The GTX 660 is an unassuming-looking card which isn’t as powerful as the GTX 660 Ti version, but it’s still no slouch; we saw a smooth 30fps in Crysis 2 at 1,920×1,080 and Ultra detail, demonstrating that it’s easily able to handle all the latest 3D games. The card has two DVI ports, an HDMI port and DisplayPort, and you can connect monitors to all three for triple-screen gaming; you’ll have to drop the resolution and detail levels, though.

The PC’s 700W power supply is generic rather than branded, but should nonetheless pack enough power to support significant upgrades. There’s certainly plenty of scope to do so. The Asus P8Z77-V LX motherboard is a budget model, but it’s an ATX motherboard with three PCI slots and two PCI-E x1 slots – one of which is blocked by the graphics card’s cooler. There are also two PCI-E x16 slots, but the bottom slot only runs at x4 speed.

Chillblast Fusion Blaze

There are six SATA ports, two of which are SATA3. There are three free SATA2 ports and one free SATA3 port. The PC has a Blu-ray drive and a 2TB hard disk. We were surprised to find that the Fusion Blaze – unlike most similarly priced systems – doesn’t have an SSD. Although this means that its boot speeds aren’t as fast as computers with a solid state system drive, Windows 8’s own improvements to boot times still make it feel fast. You also won’t benefit from the quicker read/write speeds of an SSD, but the 2TB hard disk gives you plenty of room to install software and means that you won’t have to juggle with the install locations of your favourite games and applications, as you do with small SSDs. If you want to upgrade later, there’s lots of room for more drives, with two free 5 1/4in bays, one external 3 1/2in bay and five unused internal 3 1/2in bays. There are two vacant memory slots on the board, too, with the others each holding a 1,333MHz 4GB memory module.

Pages: 1 2

Basic Specifications

Rating *****
Processor Intel Core i5-3570K
Processor external bus 100MHz (DMI)
Processor multiplier x45
Processor clock speed 4.5GHz
Processor socket LGA1155
Memory 8
Memory type PC3-10666
Maximum memory 32GB
Motherboard Asus P8Z77-V LX
Motherboard chipset Intel Z77

Ports

USB2 ports (front/rear) 2/6
Firewire ports (front/rear) 0/0
eSATA ports (front/rear) 0/0
Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Wireless networking support none

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 6

Hard Disk

Hard disk model(s) Seagate Barracuda (ST2000DM001-9YN164)
Interface SATA3
Total storage capacity 2,000GB

Graphics

Graphics card(s) 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 OC
Graphics/video ports 2x DVI, 2x DisplayPort

Sound

Sound outputs 5.1 line out, optical S/PDIF out, line out, mic in
Speakers none

Removable Drives

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

Display

Viewable size 23 in
Screen model Iiyama ProLite X2377HDS
Native resolution 1,920×1,080
Screen inputs HDMI, DVI, VGA

Other Hardware

Keyboard Cherry KU-0556
Mouse Cherry M-5400

Software

Software included none
Operating system Windows 8
Operating system restore option Windows disc

Buying Information

Warranty two years collect and return
Price £799
Details www.chillblast.com

Read more

Reviews