Chillblast Fusion Master Intel Skylake Gaming PC Review

1. Introduction2. Chillblast Fusion Master System3. Testing Methodology and Configuration4. 3DMark115. 3DMark6. SiSoft Sandra7. Cinebench R11.5 64 bit8. Cinebench R159. SSD & HDD Performance10. Tomb Raider (1440p & 4K)11. Grand Theft Auto 5 (1440p & 4K)12. Metro Last Light Redux (1440p & 4K)13. Shadow of Mordor (1440p & 4K)14. Acoustics Performance15. Power Consumption16. Closing Thoughts17. View All Pages

As a first show for Skylake, Chillblast’s Fusion Master is an extremely powerful gaming PC. It offers superb performance and is capable of great frame rates in games. If you’re using a 1440p monitor, you’ll have absolutely no problem with any game you try at even the highest detail setting, as we found great frame rates from this resolution in all out tests.

The Samsung SM951 PCIe SSD is as fast as Samsung says it is, making even SATA SSDs look slow in comparison. It’s worth noting these results are in synthetic benchmarks only. In the real world, you won’t see such massive improvements to boot times or application load times as the results in Crystal Disk Mark suggest, but we still like the performance offered by this drive

With the GTX 980, 4K gaming is a bit of a mixed bag. The Chillblast Fusion Master is absolutely capable of playing games in 4K, but unfortunately not at the highest possible detail settings. For that, a GTX 980Ti would be a sensible upgrade to make, adding £150 to the price, or you could add a Superclocked+ EVGA GTX 980 Ti for an extra £350. Both of these are available in Chillblast’s customisation page.

This isn’t Chillblast’s fault though as it only goes to show how tough 4K gaming is. However, given the already-high cost of this system, an upgrade to the GTX 980Ti is a relatively small additional outlay for better 4K performance.

It’s worth mentioning Chillblast’s after-sales support. The five years warranty includes two years collect and return, so if you run into any problems, they’ll pick it up from you, repair it and return it free of charge. You’re covered for another three years after that where you’re responsible for returning the PC to them. The collect-and-return period can be extended by another year for an additional £99.

Looking at our benchmark results, the scores are a definite gain over current PC gaming technology, but the difference isn’t huge. If you bought a new high-end PC this year, Skylake doesn’t offer a huge improvement and it’s probably not worth upgrading.

But if your gaming PC is looking a bit long in the tooth, and you want to upgrade it to the fastest possible performance on the planet, there’s no reason not to go with Skylake, a high end Nvidia card and now an SSD that can reach 2GB/sec transfer speeds. Chillblast’s Fusion Master offers exactly that.

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Pros:

• Skylake offers the best per-core CPU performance we’ve ever seen.
• The Samsung SM951 offers some of the best storage performance we’ve recorded.
• Very well built, Windows 10 is supplied free from bloatware and Chillblast offers a good warranty period.
• Plenty of room to expand and upgrade the system.

Cons:

• It’s not clear there’s a huge leap over current gaming systems (especially on the processor/platform side).
• Even this mighty specification can’t quite manage over 30fps in all games at 4K resolution, without reducing the detail settings a bit.

KitGuru says: Chillblast’s Fusion Master is well-built, incredibly powerful and filled with next-generation technology. If you’re shopping for a pre-built, powerful gaming PC, this is currently one of the fastest machines money can buy.

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