Chillblast Fusion Insight
A chunky but flexible desktop, with a good dose of power and plenty of accessories
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪
PRICE from chillblast.com
I£583 (£700 inc VAT) t’s a good job we don’t believe in love at first sight, because Chillblast’s Fusion Insight system isn’t what we call an attractive PC. It’s housed in a boxy Game Max Silent chassis with tall 468mm sides and a wide 230mm footprint.
Yet closer inspection reveals plenty to like. The Asus B150M-A motherboard offers a decent range of external connectivity options, with two USB 3 ports at the front and another pair at the rear. There are four USB 2 ports as well, plus a USB Type-C connector. Right now, that might seem pointless; once the new standard becomes widespread it could prove very useful, since Type-C can deliver up to six times the juice of a standard USB 2 socket. (In theory, USB Type-C can also support super-fast 10Gbits/ sec data transfers, but Intel’s B150 chipset is limited to 5Gbits/sec.)
Chillblast has also installed an 802.11n wireless card, and hooked up an SD card reader at the front panel. For those who still use optical media, a 24x DVD writer is fitted too. It’s a welcome set of conveniences, which can’t be taken for granted at this price.
The big news is the inclusion of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 graphics card. This isn’t a top-tier GPU, but it’s pretty powerful. Playing Dirt Showdown at 1080p resolution and maximum detail, it kept up a very creditable average of 83fps. Only when we switched to 4K did the card begin to struggle: here the average frame rate fell to 32fps, with the occasional dip down to a choppy 23fps.
When it comes to desktop performance, the Chillblast Fusion Insight is a strong performer, but not exceptional. Naturally, its Core i5-6600 CPU couldn’t keep up with other retailers’ overclocked systems and Core i7 chips, but an overall benchmark score of 110 still represents plenty of power for everyday computing. Only those with very unusual workloads will find it limiting.
The 240GB SanDisk SSD delivered read and write speeds of 513MB/sec and 394MB/sec respectively. These aren’t bad scores for a SATA drive: there’s a gulf between this and the M.2 drives chosen by Palicomp and Wired2Fire, which deliver four times the read speed, but Windows 10 Home felt perfectly snappy, and applications sprung up quickly. For bulk data storage you also get a 2TB Seagate Barracuda hard disk – twice the capacity of several other systems.
If the Fusion Insight has a weakness, it’s limited internal expansion options. The motherboard offers no conventional PCI slots for legacy devices, and with the graphics and wireless cards in place, there’s only a single PCI Express x1 slot available for onward expansion. If you were hoping to upgrade to an M.2 SSD, note that PCI Express x1 provides a theoretical maximum bandwidth of just under 1GB/sec, so you won’t get the full performance benefit.
That’s frustrating, since the sizeable case was evidently designed to allow room for all sorts of upgrades. On the plus side, it lives up to the “Silent” name: noise levels were so low that we couldn’t hear a hum at any point during our tests, even with the CPU and graphics card running under full load.
The Chillblast Fusion Insight might not be for everyone. If you really need top-tier desktop performance, or if space is tight, then one of the other fine systems on test this month might suit you better. As an all-rounder, though, Chillblast’s plus-sized baby is hard to beat. With so many boxes ticked, it doesn’t feel at all like a budget system – and it’s all wrapped up with a generous five-year warranty, including carriage and return for the first two years. Proof, if any were needed, that looks aren’t everything.