Chillblast Fusion Commando 3060Ti Gaming PC
Quite simply a brilliant PC that keeps the noise down while delivering some of the best results we’ve ever seen
SCORE
PRICE £1,250 (£1,500 inc VAT) from chillblast.com
One of the advantages of a single manufacturer supplying a £500, £1,000 and £1,500 PC is that you can see the evolution of a great PC. The Fusion Commando started from humble beginnings in the Versato ( see p82), with its handful of basic components rattling around a case. It grew into a proper mid-range gaming system in the Fusion Marine ( see p86), before blossoming into this: a well-rounded, high-quality PC that can turn its hand to anything.
It helps that Chillblast effectively uses the same case design for all three systems, with the dimensions staying the same but the quality of the materials increasing at every step. Here, we reach the top of the line with tempered glass not only on the lefthand side of the system but also at the front: Chillblast takes advantage by fitting three 100mm RGB fans, with one further RGB fan mounted at the top and a 120mm fan at the rear. The result is a constant hum, but unlike other powerful systems on test the fans don’t ramp up and down in an irritating fashion; once you start working or playing games, the noise fades into the background.
The 120mm fan we mention above is part of the Chillblast 120 liquid cooler system, which is there to keep the Ryzen 7 5800X operating at its maximum potential. And it succeeds: the Fusion Commando lived up to its aggressive name with top scores in several of our tests, including our benchmarks, where it was the only system to break the 400 barrier. This lift was due in part to the 32GB of memory whilst its rivals only supplied 16GB, but there’s still room to add more via two empty DIMM sockets.
While it’s true that 32GB of RAM is overkill for most applications, and certainly not necessary for games, if you’re manipulating huge files (think 4K video editing, for example), it does make a difference. It’s no coincidence that the Chillblast topped the singlecore Cinebench R23 rendering test, and only narrowly fell behind the 16-core-equipped Alienware in the multicore version of that same task.
If you’re after all-out gaming power, the noisier PC Specialist
Fusion X has the upper hand courtesy of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 card, but we think few people will complain about the RTX 3060 Ti that Chillblast chooses. Remarkably, this mid-range card (it costs just under £400) is as fast as an RTX 2080 Super, which underlines yet again what an amazing job Nvidia has done with the RTX 3000 series. Our one concern is about availability as this is a new card and it’s in scarce supply at the moment.
So, how fast is it? The first glimpse of its power comes in 3DMark Time Spy, with a stunning result of 11,577. Our weighted graphs on p92 further develop the story, which is that this card is brilliant at 1440p – averaging 127fps – and that it’s no slouch in 4K with an average of 84fps. However, you may need to tone down settings at 4K for smooth running.
Take Shadow of the Tomb Raider. At 1440p (High settings), it averaged 112fps without DLSS, and still hit an average of 65fps at 4K. Activating DLSS lifted that to 74fps. In Metro Exodus at
High presets, it
managed 82fps at 1440p and 50fps at 4K, while
Hitman 2 (with super sampling set to 2x and our usual mix of high/ strong settings) struggled to 42fps at 1440p and 18fps at 4K.
But Hitman 2 is made instantly playable by changing super sampling to 1x, with 4K jumping to 68fps and 1440p to 121fps.
As we explain in the PC Specialist Fusion X review, the RTX 3070 is notably faster – typically giving you 10fps more – and that can be the difference between playable and nonplayable games. But you have to make a decision at some point; after all, the RTX 3080 is faster still, delivering 125fps in
Shadow of the Tomb
Raider at 4K with DLSS. For the vast majority of people, even ardent gamers, we think the RTX 3060 Ti delivers an excellent balance between value, speed and power consumption. Its 200W thermal design power means Chillblast can include a 700W power supply in this PC without fear of overload, and an idle 60W consumption and 395W peak are surprisingly reasonable considering all the speed this PC packs.
Nor do we think you’ll need to make any upgrades in the near future. Yes, a 1TB SSD would have been more roomy than the 500GB FireCuda PCIe 4 drive that Chillblast provides, but this proved to be a top performer in AS SSD with 4,035MB/sec sequential reads and 2,565MB/sec writes. Plus there’s 4TB of hard disk storage when you need it, and a spare M.2 slot on the Asus Prime B550M-A motherboard. The only features we miss are Bluetooth and USB-C, but the former is easy enough to add via a USB dongle and the latter via the spare PCIe x1 slot.
With Chillblast backing up this PC with a far more generous warranty than its rivals – including two years of collect-andreturn cover that also includes the cost of parts – the Commando is nothing short of a bargain. Place your order early to avoid disappointment.