Chillblast Fusion Defiant Mini review

The Defiant Mini has a good selection of connection ports for such a small laptop, including one USB2 and three USB3 ports. It also has HDMI and VGA video outputs, an SD and MMC card reader, a Gigabit Ethernet port and separate headphone and microphone jacks.

We liked the 13.3in screen, too. With a measured sRGB colour gamut coverage of 85.5 per cent, reds, greens and blues looked rich and vibrant, and whites were bright and clean with no traces of grey. Blacks were deep and inky, too, despite its somewhat average black level reading of 0.37cd/m2, and we didn’t see any signs of backlight bleeding.

The screen’s contrast levels were a little less impressive. Even though we measured a promising contrast ratio of 914:1, its deep blacks made it difficult to see finer detail in our high contrast test photos. Night scenes suffered the most, with areas of shadow appearing as simple areas of solid black, so you’ll have to make sure you adjust the in-game contrast settings if you want to help illuminate darkly lit environments when playing games.

Battery life was also fairly average for a gaming laptop, as the Defiant Mini’s battery lasted just 3 hours and 52 minutes in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness. This is to be expected from such a power-hungry system, but it’s a shame the Defiant Mini doesn’t last a little bit longer away from the mains because its small size and reasonable 2.1Kg weight make it pretty portable.

CONCLUSION

With its powerful hardware and highly capable graphics processor, the Chillblast Defiant Mini is a superb gaming laptop. It not only manages to combine all the speed and power of larger gaming systems into a smaller 13in chassis, but it does so at a competitive price without any compromises in performance. The Defiant Mini is a great value laptop that deserves its Best Buy award.