Chillblast Fusion Blaze

The Fusion Blaze from Chillblast is a powerful and well-built Windows 8 system. At £800, it occupies the middle ground between high performance and realistic pricing for a family PC. Chillblast has equipped it accordingly, with more modest components than you'd find in a full-on enthusiast PC. The Intel Core i5-3570K processor is the same powerful CPU that you'll find in many of our favourite performance systems. It has a significant overclock, too, bringing it up to a speed of 4.5GHz from the stock 3.4GHz. This helped the PC to an excellent overall score of 144 in our application benchmarks.

The graphics card is an overclocked 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 OC from Palit. The GTX 660 is an unassuming-looking card which isn’t as powerful as the GTX 660 Ti version, but it's still no slouch; we saw a smooth 30fps in Crysis 2 at 1,920x1,080 and Ultra detail, demonstrating that it's easily able to handle all the latest 3D games. The card has two DVI ports, an HDMI port and DisplayPort, and you can connect monitors to all three for triple-screen gaming; you'll have to drop the resolution and detail levels, though.
The PC's 700W power supply is generic rather than branded, but should nonetheless pack enough power to support significant upgrades. There's certainly plenty of scope to do so. The Asus P8Z77-V LX motherboard is a budget model, but it's an ATX motherboard with three PCI slots and two PCI-E x1 slots - one of which is blocked by the graphics card's cooler. There are also two PCI-E x16 slots, but the bottom slot only runs at x4 speed.


There are six SATA ports, two of which are SATA3. There are three free SATA2 ports and one free SATA3 port. The PC has a Blu-ray drive and a 2TB hard disk. We were surprised to find that the Fusion Blaze – unlike most similarly priced systems - doesn’t have an SSD. Although this means that its boot speeds aren’t as fast as computers with a solid state system drive, Windows 8’s own improvements to boot times still make it feel fast. You also won’t benefit from the quicker read/write speeds of an SSD, but the 2TB hard disk gives you plenty of room to install software and means that you won’t have to juggle with the install locations of your favourite games and applications, as you do with small SSDs. If you want to upgrade later, there's lots of room for more drives, with two free 5 1/4in bays, one external 3 1/2in bay and five unused internal 3 1/2in bays. There are two vacant memory slots on the board, too, with the others each holding a 1,333MHz 4GB memory module.
At the front of the case are two USB ports - one USB3 and one USB2, plus 3.5mm mic and headphone ports. At the back are two more USB3 ports and four USB2 ports, as well as a PS/2 port for a keyboard or mouse. There are three 3.5mm stereo ports for 5.1 analogue surround sound, as well as an optical S/PDIF output and a Gigabit Ethernet port. The case itself is sturdy and well made, although not all the air vents have fine mesh covers to keep dust out. The system is remarkably quiet, thanks to high-quality processor and case fans.


The supplied Cherry keyboard is big and ugly, but its keys feel responsive. The mouse looks similarly old-fashioned but also does the job effectively, despite a somewhat loose scroll wheel. The monitor - a matte-finish 23in Iiyama ProLite X2377HDS - has an even backlight and produces natural colours and blacks.
The Fusion Blaze's sole disadvantage is its lack of an SSD. If you feel that you absolutely need the faster boot times and responsiveness an SSD can bring, then Wired2Fire’s excellent Diablo Ultima and PC Specialist’s Vanquish 650Ti both have fast 120GB solid state drives in addition to large hard disks, but this comes at the cost of gaming performance. In the end, in the face of very stiff competition, the Fusion Blaze's great gaming performance, raw processor power and room for expansion earn it a Best Buy award.