Chillblast Fusion Tranquillity review

If you need evidence of the appeal of quiet computing, just look at the wealth of products available that claim to stifle the sound emerging from your PC. This kit isn’t just a boon for home tinkerers, though: Chillblast has also taken advantage of the growth in noise reduction kit to produce its latest PC – the Fusion Tranquility.

The Fractal Design Define R3 is a solid start. It’s a new case to the PC Pro Labs, but it’s a favourite with our sister title Bit-tech thanks to its excellent build-quality and superb acoustic dampening properties. Fractal Design has achieved this by using the most sound-absorbing material we’ve seen: it can be found lining the monolithic door, attached to both side panels, on the roof of the chassis and even occupying three of the system’s unused case fan mounts.

Quiet, please

Neat, noise-reducing touches abound elsewhere. The hard disk bays sport rubber pads to absorb vibration, and the PSU is mounted on similar disks. The bottom PCI blanker at the rear of the chassis includes a fan control that’s linked to the front and rear 120mm case fans to ensure they rotate at the slowest possible speeds.

Sitting atop the overclocked Intel Core i5-2500K processor is a Gelid Tranquillo heatsink – another part built with minimal noise in mind. Its 120mm fan is attached to the heatsink by clasps that are more forgiving than screws, and its fan rotates at lower speeds than rivals: its peak speed of 1,500rpm is 1,000rpm lower than the popular Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev. 2.

The graphics card hasn’t escaped the attention of the noise police either: the Tranquility’s Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 is a Gainward-produced “Phantom” edition design with a three-slot cooler to accommodate a larger heatsink, six heatpipes and a trio of fans – a huge improvement over the dual-slot, single-fan models we’re used to seeing. Despite this, it’s still been tweaked, with its stock speed of 732MHz upped to 750MHz and the base memory clock of 3,800MHz improved by 100MHz.

A Scythe Quiet Drive case surrounds the hard disk with rubber, to absorb the whoosh of spinning platters and the chatter of heads accessing data. An SSD is used as the system drive, to further reduce noise, and Chillblast’s final tweak involves the PSU: a BeQuiet Straight Power CM unit running at 680W that claims to be semi-passive, with a 120mm fan that only spins up when the system’s stressed.

Does it work?

We’re pleased to report that the Tranquility lives up to its name. The system was barely audible when idle, with the faintest hum only detected when our ears were pressed close to the chassis’ matte panels. And, while the Chillblast did become louder when stressed, it was still very quiet: this system is quieter when pushed to its limits than most rivals are standing still.

Noise-reducing features aside, the R3 is extremely impressive. The motherboard tray and rubber-ringed cable-routing holes have been used to create an extremely tidy rig, and build quality is top-notch. Our only real qualm concerns the lack of upgrade room: the optical drive and hard disk cage leave no 5.25in bays empty, and the large graphics card, fan control blanker and an eSATA expansion card mean only single PCI Express x1 and PCI slots are vacant.

The Tranquillity’s lack of noise is all the more impressive when the specification is considered. The system’s Core i5-2500K processor has been boosted from 3.3GHz to 4.2GHz and, while it’s not the biggest overclock we’ve seen from this processor – a more ambitious tweak would have compromised the low noise levels – it’s still no slouch, gaining 1.08 in our benchmarks. That’s a fine result.

For gaming it’s good too, with the GeForce GTX 570 grahics card helping the Tranquility to a score of 51fps with the resolution set at 1,920 x 1,080 and Very High settings enabled, dropping to 42fps with 8x anti-aliasing added. It’s a fine score.

Too hot to handle?

The one thing we were worried about were that all the layers of foam and overclocked components would result in overheating, but these concerns proved unfounded. The processor peak at 73°C, with the graphics card reaching a maximum temperature just two degrees higher – both perfectly acceptable. And little has been compromised elsewhere in the specification, with 8GB of RAM, a 120GB SSD, a 1TB hard disk, and a Blu-ray reader making up the numbers.

Chillblast has priced the Fusion Tranquility at £1,199 inc VAT – in line with plenty of strong competition. The A-Listed Yoyotech Fi7epower 4.8 costs exactly the same amount, is faster, and includes peripherals, while the Palicomp Phoenix i5 Sniper includes peripherals and a comparable specification for £959.

If you’re searching for a full PC package, those machines are better options. If you see silence as a virtue, though, the Chillblast is extremely impressive; quieter at peak than rivals are when idle, with little compromise on performance.

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