Chillblast Fusion Thrust review

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.