Chillblast Fusion Dimension review

Mike Jennings Read more December 21, 2010

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The advent of 3D has been hugely hyped, but it’s not yet taken off. That’s evidenced by the paltry number of 3D-enabled machines that have arrived in the PC Pro Labs, with Chillblast’s Fusion Dimension the first desktop we’ve seen to incorporate the technology.

Part of the problem has been the lack of compatible games and mature drivers but it looks to be finally settling down if this system is anything to go by. It uses Nvidia’s 3DVision system, and when we loaded up Call of Duty: Black Ops, Just Cause 2 and the racing title GRiD they looked excellent on the Asus monitor.

It helps that the screen offers good general quality to go with the 120MHz refresh rate needed for 3D. Colours were bright and vivid, blacks deep, and detail sharp, and there was little sign of backlight bleed. We were pleased to see a fully adjustable stand too.

The Chillblast’s other stand-out feature is, undoubtedly, its chassis – a Silverstone FT02. Its matte black and glossy red finish and clean curves make it one of the most visually striking enclosures we’ve seen, and build quality is simply superb.

Pop open the side panel – released by a pair of thumbscrews along the top edge – and a rather unusual layout is revealed. The motherboard is orientated vertically, rather than horizontally, with its backplate accessible via a removable mesh cover at the top of the case. It’s a useful system that offers easier access to the system’s ports and sockets than on a standard case – and under that panel are two USB 3 ports, six USB 2 ports and two eSATA sockets alongside FireWire, PS/2 and more.

To keep things cool, a trio of 200mm fans occupies the bottom of the chassis, with a further single 120mm fan at the top, but despite all this, the Chillblast remained impressively quiet throughout our tests. When idling, the Fusion Dimension was barely audible, and the machine barely got louder during our stress tests. It’s far quieter than most of the expensive systems we’ve seen recently.

For upgrades, meanwhile, there are pairs of PCI Express x16 and x1 sockets lying free alongside four easy-access hard disk bays, and Chillblast has utilised the FT02’s motherboard tray to hide most of the system’s cables. It isn’t quite perfect, however, with a DIMM socket blocked by a bulky CPU cooler and the SATA 6Gb/sec ports difficult to access because of the motherboard’s orientation.

As befits a monster PC such as this, the graphics card is a bit of a beast. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 580 gives the Fusion Dimension enough grunt to gain 56fps in our 1,920 x 1,080 Very High quality Crysis test, trumping the 36fps of the Yoyotech XDNA 760.

Indeed, it’s only beaten by the Wired2Fire Hellspawn Xtreme, a system equipped with two AMD Radeon HD 6850 cards. And the processor – an Intel Core i7-950 overclocked from 3.07GHz to 4GHz – impressed us too, with an outstanding benchmark score of 2.75, although here both the Yoyotech and the Wired2Fire beat it to the punch.

All this is backed up by a generous 6GB of DDR3 RAM, a Blu-ray combo drive and a 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 hard disk, with the operating system installed on an 80GB Corsair SSD. And as for extras, there’s little to criticise, with Creative’s A500 5.1 speakers, a Razer keyboard with backlit keys, and a Razer mouse – all fine choices.

In fact there’s little wrong with this stunning machine. It’s unique, clever and tough chassis provides a superb foundation, the components give blistering performance, and the peripherals are among the best we’ve seen. The inclusion of 3D might not be to everyone’s taste (and it bumps up the price noticeably), but you can order it with a standard 24in and no 3DVision and cut £169 from the price.