Chillblast Fusion Impact review

The best way to appreciate 3D content is on a display that stands a short, fixed distance away from your eyes, so a 3D PC and monitor setup is perfect. It can be a pain to individually buy an appropriate graphics card, 3D monitor and glasses kit, but Chillblast is prepared to do all the hard work for you with the Fusion Impact PC.

No PC that costs £1,200 could ever be described as cheap, but the Fusion Impact is good value for what you get. Asus’s VG236HE 3D monitor – bundled with one pair of shutter glasses – cost £370 when we reviewed it a couple of months ago. The monitor has its problems, the most notable of which is its lack of support for HDMI 1.4, the consumer electronics standard for 3D devices, but its quality is undeniable. First person shooters in particular look amazing.

We ran into a few teething problems with our standard Call of Duty 4 test, when the stereoscopic visual mode wouldn’t resolve properly, but this was easily corrected by setting the resolution to match the 120 hertz refresh rate of the monitor. With that resolved, we got very playable scores of 45.1fps in CoD4 and 30.2fps in Crysis. Our massively demanding STALKER test produced a score of 19.3fps.

The Fusion Impact’s ability impress isn’t limited to shiny graphics that leap out of the screen towards you, either. An overclocked Core i5-2500K processor on an Asus P8P767 LE motherboard produced some of the best benchmark test results we’ve ever seen, with an Overall score of 198. That’s not the best we’ve seen, but it’s pretty close.

The basics are covered by a 1TB hard disk and 4GB of RAM, but there’s also a Blu-ray drive. The case is well laid out and we were pleased by incredibly quiet CPU and case fans. There’s lots of room to upgrade, too. One PCI-E x1 port is blocked by the graphics card, but that still leaves one accessible, plus three PCI slots and a spare PCI-E x16 slot. You’ll also find two free SATA III ports and plenty of space for most disk drives. Meanwhile, the back of the PC has 10 USB slots – two of them USB3 – as well as eSATA and Firewire, plus two more USB ports at the front of the case.

The monitor’s lack of support for HDMI 1.4a means that you won’t be able to use it with future 3D Blu-ray players or digital boxes, which is slightly disappointing. Instead, you’ll have to stick with Nvidia’s graphics. However Nvidia’s system works well and this PC already has a perfectly function 3D-capable graphics card, so the issue is largely academic.If you’re after a hassle-free 3D gaming PC, we can think of little better for the job than the Fusion Impact, with its outstanding combination of power, 3D functionality, upgradability and quiet performance. If you’re after 3D, this is the Ultimate.

NOTE: Our review sample contained an early edition LGA1155 motherboard. These are known to have a fault in their SATA II controllers. Affected motherboards are being replaced by their manufacturers. In the interim, OEMS are building systems using only on-board SATA III or controllers on expansion cards. Chillblast will be happy to help ensure that potential customers will not be negatively affected by the issue and can be contacted on 0845 45678 30.