Chillblast Fusion Thrust review

Chillblast’s Fusion Thrust is a powerful PC that’s designed for image editing. A key feature is the 23in 1,920×1,080 LG Flatron IPS231 monitor, a stunning matt flatscreen display that reproduces images with perfect detail and shading, deep blacks and beautifully natural colour. Even our magazine’s art department were impressed. The monitor lacks the intensely vibrant colours of many gloss displays, but as it uses IPS rather than the cheaper TN technology colours are accurate and viewing angles wide. Its 23in diagonal widescreen span and 1080p resolution also provides plenty of space for both editing at high zoom levels and keeping multiple images and toolbars open at once.

8GB of RAM qualifies this PC for heavy duty batch processing of huge images, such as those produced by a camera shooting in raw mode. Chillblast has used two 4GB modules of 1,333MHz DDR3 and there are two spare slots, but these are blocked by one of the CPU cooler’s fans. Along with a 1TB hard disk, there’s a 40GB Corsair Fusion Power F40 SSD, which is set up as a cache for the hard disk using the Smart Response Technology (SRT) features built into Intel’s Z68 motherboard chipset. This can help to improve application performance, as your most frequently used data will be cached for fast access.

In terms of performance, the Fusion Thrust is, if anything, overqualified as a graphics editing rig. With a powerful Intel Core i5-2500K processor that’s been overclocked to a huge 4.8GHz, it’s hardly surprising that the PC scored 138 overall in our benchmarks – 38% faster than our reference PC, which pairs a Core i5-2500K running at its stock speed with 4GB RAM. Its score in our image batch processing test was a fantastic 150, possibly thanks to the PC’s fast storage.

The Fusion Thrust’s graphics card is a 1GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti, which is a powerful gaming card and seems like overkill for the system. Adobe Photoshop uses some hardware graphics card features, but as long as your graphics chipset supports OpenGL 2.0 and Shader Model 3.0 you’ll be fine – and both of these are supported by the Intel Core i5-2500K processor’s built-in graphics. Nevertheless, having a discrete card with dedicated graphics memory is useful so you don’t take up system RAM with graphics information and, as 57fps in our Dirt 3 benchmark shows, you’ll be able to play the latest games.

The PC has surprisingly few USB ports – just eight in total – but two of those are USB3, which is great if you want to connect fast external storage. There’s also an eSATA port at the front. Inside, there are one free SATA2 port and an unused SATA3 port, along with enough room for six more 3 1/2in drives and one additional 5 1/4in drive. The other 5 1/4in bay is occupied by a Blu-ray reader and DVD writer combo drive. If you want to add any expansion cards, there are three free PCI slots, an available PCI-E x1 slot (a second is blocked by the graphics card) and a second PCI-E x16 slot.

The system is rounded out with a wireless Microsoft Optical Desktop 700 mouse and keyboard set. The mouse is a little small and the keyboard is somewhat spongy, but both work well enough. There’s also a pair of basic 2.1 Logitech S220 speakers. They sound good for budget speakers, with some bass and plenty of volume.

The Fusion Thrust’s great specification means that it’s up to almost any task, including image editing, but its processor and graphics card are in fact more powerful than most 2D artists are likely to need. Instead we’d have liked to see a few more dedicated features for the keen photographer or artist provided with the system, such as a memory card reader to make it easy to get photos off your camera or even a basic graphics tablet. Also, although graphics pros will doubtless have their own software, newbies would welcome the addition of some pre-installed image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop Elements or even the free GIMP image editor. Fortunately, Chillblast provides various Adobe packages at competitive prices for those who require them.

The Fusion Thrust is an excellent PC, combining brute power with carefully selected components. However, the lack of a better selection of peripherals for image editing means it misses out on top marks.