At £869.99 it sits in a competitive area of your average system buyers budget. To Chillblasts credit they have done a good job not to cut corners with this build, keeping everything fairly well rounded on the scale of price to performance. There is a premium paid for the form factor here, and although it’s not much it is there. You could build a normal-size rig yourself with slightly better specs, but that would probably defeat the point of going for a rig as portable and compact as this. The 5 year warranty is pretty much as good as it gets and reflects that this is a system that is as easy as plug and play with peace of mind that it’ll last a fair few years. The Chillblast Fusion Nano 960 can be purchased here.
Overview
The case is a great little eye catcher in my opinion and is a good compromise between style and subtleness. Although there is a window as you can see from the photos apart from an odd motherboard LED there was no extra lighting on our review unit. The only main LED that you notice is the white power LED which sits behind the power button, worth mentioning that the red HDD activity LED also sits behind this switch too.
Our i5 4690k was overclocked to 4.3GHz which is nice to see as it means more bang for your buck, which always sits nicely with me. In my opinion, if you are paying for an unlocked processor you should really be taking advantage of the unlock, and although not difficult to do yourself it’s nice to see Chillblast have done this for us.
Although naturally with cramped conditions such as this you would expect cooling to take a hit, but I’m pleased to report it actually wasn’t bad at all. The Corsair Hydro H55 AIO CPU Cooler does a sterling job in dissipating the heat away from the CPU and down to the radiator. The top blow-hole allows for ample GPU cooling and this was reflected in our thermal benches for the GPU.
With the blow-hole being directly on top of the case, in the same way that it allows direct cooling to the GPU it also provides a direct route to the sound of the GPU fan. Fortunately, the GTX 960 is a pretty quiet card, though after a few hours of intensive gaming it does spin up a bit – still not what we’d call noisy though.
When I looked around the insides of the case although it was all bundled in tightly, everything was still accessible in terms of upgrades. Those of you with large hands might have an awkward time upgrading the RAM slots but it is certainly possible for the dexterous amongst you or those with smaller hands. The PSU/CPU here would probably be the last components needing upgraded from what I could see, and with GPU, RAM and SSHD all easily accessible so future upgrades should be relatively painless. Although the SSHD is not as fast as a traditional SSD, it is a good compromise as you can fit only one laptop sized hard drive in this tiny case. The Windows 8.1 installation was pleasantly un-bloated, with only a full set of drivers being the addition to the vanilla install.
Using the mid-range GTX960 meant that we had good results at 1080p but you will struggle when you start pushing above this resolution. Sticking to the range of 1080p though it delivered a great gaming experience, with fps counter almost always being in the mid-high 50’s if not 60. 8GB of RAM is still the sweet spot for most, as most games will not utilize all of this and it helps keep costs down. It handled the GTA 5 benchmark pretty well, sitting at 54 frames per second on high settings at 1080p. As some of you will know there are a huge amount of visual settings to GTA 5, so you could probably turn the visuals up even more and still have a perfectly acceptable frame rate. To be expected it sits below our GTX 970 systems in terms of like for like performance but it showed the 960 is perfectly adequate for a decent 1080p gaming experience. With regards to Metro and Tomb Raider we saw FPS’ higher than 60 so we were perfectly happy with that.
PCs of this size usually have a reason for being this form factor, be it small bedrooms, frequently moved to friends’ houses or as a LAN party rig. For any of the reasons above I would consider this a contender for its price/performance ratio aren’t bad at all. It looks the part and plays just as well. Some would say that if you had the budget then you should possibly stretch to a GTX 970 for the extra juice, but if you can’t I wouldn’t be losing any sleep over it as the GTX 960 is no slouch.
Pros
Great choice of CPU and overclock
Case is gorgeous
5 Year Warranty
Cons
Limited to 1080p gaming
“As a portable LAN rig or 1080p gaming PC, the Chillblast Fusion Nano 960 ticks all the right boxes”
Thanks to Chillblast for providing this review sample.