Chillblast Fusion Cruiser Gaming PC
A gaming PC with added panache thanks to the case, even if its £1,500 PC rivals land heavier punches
If you put the Fusion Cruiser Gaming PC in a boxing ring next to the PCSpecialist Opal R then the crowd would pick the latter as the winner. It looms over its similarly priced opposition in a way that isn’t at all obvious from their respective on-paper dimensions, and if we were the promoters of the match we’d call it “the Bruiser vs the Cruiser”.
For the Chillblast does look refined by comparison. With tempered glass at both the front and the left, you can set an even more demure tone by choosing your own colour scheme for the three front-mounted 120mm RGB fans: for example, white rather than the pulsing rainbow effect Chillblast opted for. As with the Fusion Frigate, we aren’t fans of the stickers in the middle of the fans, which were a bit off-centre and created a wobble effect.
We have only praise for the view through the side window, where you still benefit from the trio of RGB fans, but the central action comes from the two most important components: the CPU with its Chillblast 120 water cooler (complete with subtle white backlighting) and the stonkingly huge RTX 3060 graphics card.
Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first: yes, it’s an RTX 3060 card rather than the RTX 3070 in the £1,500 PCSpecialist and Acer PCs. And it’s slower in games. As a blanket statement, we’d say the RTX 3060 is a great choice for 1440p games but will struggle at 4K in demanding titles.
To put that into precise detail, consider the Fusion Cruiser’s scores in the four toughest games in our tests. At 1440p, it averaged 64fps in Metro Exodus, 94fps in Shadow of
the Tomb Raider, 31fps in Hitman 2
(101fps with 1x super sampling) and 117fps in Wolfenstein: Youngblood
(with DLSS and RTX on). That compares to the Opal R’s 94fps, 131pfs, 50fps (136fps) and 168fps. So playable results for both systems.
Switch to 4K and, in the same games, the Fusion Cruiser stammers. We’re happy with 87fps in Wolfenstein: Youngblood and can cope with 51fps in Shadow of the
Tomb Raider, but 39fps in Metro Exodus is only just playable and even with 1x super sampling it only hit 53fps in Hitman 2. Again, the Opal provided more comfortable results: 129fps, 86fps, 57fps and 79fps.
Chillblast wrests control in tasks that don’t rely on the graphics card. Once again we tip our hat in the direction of the water cooler, which not only helps to keep the Ryzen 7 5800X running coolly at peak frequencies but does so with little noise. And it helps that Chillblast includes a generous 32GB of 3,200MHz memory. That’s split over two DIMMs too, so you can easily double it to 64GB.
With such a potent mix of core components, it was no surprise to see the Fusion Cruiser at the top of the speed charts. Its 432 beat all-comers in PC Pro’s own benchmarks, and it carried that form into the multicore section of Geekbench 5 (10,745). It only lost one round: to the Opal R in the Cinebench R23 tests.
Chillblast supplies 1TB of storage via an M.2 SSD. Its Seagate Barracuda 510 proved a mite faster than the
Intel 670p SSD inside the Opal R, but both are supremely quick. Our bigger concern is whether 1TB will be enough for these gaming systems, but there’s space on the Asus Prime B550M-A motherboard for a second M.2 SSD – you’ll need to remove the graphics card to access it. Naturally, there’s room for yet more storage via a SATA SSD (one mounting slot) and 3.5in hard disks (two bays). It’s just a shame that you’ll need to rip up the tidy cabling to get to the connectors.
This is yet another fine PC from the Chillblast stable – and it’s backed up by a five-year warranty, including two years of collectand-return cover that is much longer than the one month offered by PCSpecialist.
The Opal R is still our top pick for gamers, but it isn’t a knockout victory. If you prefer the Chillblast’s sleeker case and longer support – and you’re happy with 1440p gaming – you may decide to give your ringside vote to the Cruiser over the Bruiser.