Chillblast Fusion Iris
Bags of power for a mere £800, but rivals offer a moremo refined experience that’s worth paying extra for
PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT) from chillblast.com
There is only one reason to choose the Fusion Iris, and that’s if your top priority is bang-per-buck. With a Core i7-1165G7 processor and 16GB of RAM, it rivalled far more expensive machines in our non-gaming benchmarks. Our only caveat is that Acer’s Swift 3 more than lived up to its name thanks to a six-core Ryzen chip inside, and that machine costs £101 less than the Fusion Iris.
Those looking for a gaming system would be far better served by the £899 MSI Pulse GL66, which offers a major upgrade in the form of the discrete Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti chip versus Intel’s integrated Xe graphics. For example, the MSI scored 170fps in Metro: Last Light compared to the Chillblast’s 43fps.
But the biggest problem for the Fusion Iris is its screen. We didn’t need the technical tests to see that this is a deeply mediocre panel, with washed-out colours and poor viewing angles immediately marring its appeal. It actually outperforms some rivals for colour coverage and accuracy, but a peak brightness of 239cd/m2 is low and a colour temperature of 8429K far away from the 6500K we hoped for.
The keyboard is more acceptable. If we were being picky we might ask for more separation between the slimline numberpad and the main keys, s, but there’s a handy backlight and the action is fine unless you land with h force: hitting with a heavier touch ch makes it loud and clicky. It’s always ays good to see a large trackpad as well, l, but a cheap-sounding click will be a constant reminder of this laptop’s op’s budget origins.
This isn’t a machine designed for life on the road either, with the 54Wh battery ery proving enough for only between ween six and seven hours in our tests. s. Nor can you charge via the USB-C SB-C port, but at least it provides fast 10Gbits/sec data transfers and connects to a monitor. There’s also an HDMI output and three USB-A ports, making a physical Ethernet port the only obvious omission in terms of connectivity.
This price includes a 500GB SSD – the Acer Swift 3 doubles that – but it’s simple to access the Fusion Iris’s innards if you want to upgrade the Samsung unit that Chillblast supplies. Notably, this proved to be one of the fastest in our tests.
Ultimately, it’s the screen that lets this laptop down. If you want screaming performance then choose the MSI Pulse GL66 or the Acer Swift 3. And if you’re looking for a bigscreen laptop on a budget, the PCSpecialist Lafité Pro opposite is a more sensible choice.