Chillblast Fusion Stealth review

The Chillblast Fusion Stealth is a powerful gaming system with all the features you’d expect to see on a high-end PC, such as an SSD, a large Nvidia graphics card with 2GB of memory and an overclocked Core i5 processor. More unusual, though, is the Stealth’s near-silent performance.

Most users will find a PC with an Intel Core i5-3570K processor running at 4.3GHz more than powerful enough for their needs, regardless of whether it’s overclocked or not. Although we appreciate extra speed and performance, many performance systems can be noisy, but not the Fusion Stealth.

The Stealth is built into a Fractal Design Define R4, one of our favourite cases. It has heavy-duty sound proofing on the side panels, on the front panel’s lid and on the removable covers that cover the fan mounts at the top of the case. Another nice touch, which has nothing to do with soundproofing, is an extra bracket mounting slot at the back of the PC. You could use it to provide extra USB ports without blocking any of your PC’s valuable expansion slots, for example.

The case fans are also engineered for quiet operation and the neatly designed drive trays use rubber grommets to mute any vibrations from HDDs. There are eight 3 1/2in bays, but one cage can be removed, leaving you with three slots and extra space in case you want to install an unusually long graphics card such as the AMD Radeon HD 6690. 3 1/2in bays are occupied by a 120GB SSD system drive and a 2TB HDD storage disk, while one of the case’s two 5 1/4in bays holds a Blu-ray re-writer. The CPU cooler is also a silent model, a Gelid Tranquillo Rev.2, while a 680W Be Quiet! PSU completes the specification.

Even the graphics card, a 2GB Nvidia-based Asus GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II, is virtually inaudible unless you open the case and put your ear to it. The card has a pair of DVI outputs, an HDMI port and a DisplayPort output, and it can handle up four simultaneous displays for desktop use and three for gaming. Using a single 1,920×1,080 monitor we got brilliant frame-rates of 61.4fps in Dirt Showdown and 45.1fps in Crysis 2, both at Ultra quality.

The Fusion Stealth’s processor is an Intel Core i5-3570K that has been modestly overclocked to 4.3GHz, producing an overall score of 110 in our benchmark tests. Although it’s by no means the highest score we’ve ever seen from this processor, it’s more than powerful enough for gaming and desktop use. The system has 16GB of RAM in the form of two 8GB modules, so it’ll easily handle memory-intensive tasks such as high-level graphics and video editing, and there are two vacant slots that will let you upgrade it to the motherboard’s maximum 32GB of RAM.