Chillblast Fusion Barbarian Gaming PC Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing 

I priced up the components of this system individually and it came to a few pounds over the £1100 mark. When you weigh up that this comes pre-built, overclocked, with windows and drivers installed, with a FIVE-YEAR warranty including 2 years collect and return, it becomes an attractive option. The case may be a budget one but it is perfectly adequate for housing this much hardware, with room for a few extras down the line. It seems Chillblast have focused on cramming as much of the available budget into the hardware and rightly so, although I do love a high-end case with all the bells and whistles, I’d choose speed over looks any day. One more thing to point out, Chillblast took the liberty of installing Classic Shell on the default installation of Windows 8.1 which I was pleased to see; it’s a nice touch.

The Chillblast Fusion Barbarian can be customised and purchased here.

Overview

You will always get those who prefer to DIY and build their own citing that for saving a few quid they would prefer to build their own and tinker, but there are just as many who would rather just switch it on and go, and not have the hassle of a build, and would rather rely on a half-decade system warranty than have to start fault-finding individual components in the event of an issue.

Noise wise the Barbarian is pretty quiet. The gentle hum of the pump is audible and the push-pull fan setup means they can spin slower and shift more air keeping them quieter than a single fan setup. The GTX 970’s Windforce cooling solution does what it says on the tin, though not noticeably quieter than a reference 970. We noticed that after 40 mins of benching the Windforce was 16 degrees Celsius cooler than a reference card with the Windforce sitting at 65 Celsius and our reference at 81 respectively. This is good when we consider that we are not sacrificing any extra noise to achieve this vastly improved GPU temp. For those who like to tweak, it means more overclocking headroom too.

Even though Chillblast have applied a decent 4.3GHz overclock to the system there is still even more headroom available. We were able to get our review sample up to 4.6GHz with everything ticking along nicely and no issues what so ever thanks to the Corsair H75 water cooling. With regards to the GTX 970, we didn’t attempt to overclock this, though with this being the top end Windforce edition there’s bound to be extra juice in there that can be extracted thanks to its upgraded cooling.

The Samsung 850 SSD performs well, though it seemed more of an evolution of the 840 Evo series rather than the revolution that Samsung had touted it as. The Devils Canyon i5 4690k performs brilliantly at its 4.3GHz overclock and even better once cranked to 4.6GHz, giving the user a bit of extra value for money. The GTX 970, as ever, delivers a huge amount of bang for buck. We found that this eats anything at 1080p for breakfast with maxed out graphics settings and would be a great machine for those wanting to dabble in 3D 1080p or perhaps high 100+ fps gaming. We tried a few games at 1440p too and most games were very playable at high settings with a small amount of tweaking here and there in the advanced graphics options. 16GB of RAM meant we always had plenty to spare and with them being in 2 x 8GB sticks we still have 2 slots free should we decide to upgrade to 32GB in the future.

Pros

• Excellent cable management
• Great component selection
• Impressive value for money
• Great overclocking potential

Cons

• Budget case
• Strange choice by Corsair of clear 120mm fan, should have matched the rest of the fans

“The Chillblast Fusion Barbarian represents excellent value for money and should be seriously considered by those who would rather just play on their rig without having to build it first, knowing that they’ve both value and peace of mind to match.”

Thanks to Chillblast for providing this review sample.