A mid-range gamer falling prey to its big brother
The release of Nvidia’s GTX 960 should in theory have brought about some well-priced gaming rigs using the latest Maxwell-based mid-ranger. So, we wanted to lure into the PCF testing lab a sub-£1,000 machine rocking the green team’s latest graphics card, with its super-chilled GPU and 1080p gaming prowess. Step forward the Chillblast with its Fusion Mantis and a retail price of around £850.
And it’s certainly a neatly built mid-range machine. Aside from the MSI-branded GTX 960, with its Twin Frozr cooler, you get a Devil’s Canyon i5 tripping along merrily at 4.3GHz in easily overclocked trim. There’s a 120mm Corsair water cooler keeping the temperature and noise down, 8GB DDR3 memory and a 1TB Seagate SSHD, all plugged into a slimline Gigabyte Z97-HD3 motherboard. That seems like pretty standard, mid-range gaming fare, and at the traditional 1080p resolution the Mantis nails smooth, high frame rates in the latest games running at their highest settings.
We even saw the bundled GTX 960 offering some relatively decent numbers when we pushed things up a level to 1600p. The limited memory bus and frame buffer on offer with this Maxwell mid-ranger though precludes us from really recommending such a card for anything above 1080p, if you’ve got any thought to the future of PC gaming. At that resolution you can be pretty confident the card will keep on trucking for a good few years of game releases. Anything higher and you’re likely to run into some memory issues pretty soon.
This means that there’s a pretty simple answer. If you can spare the extra cash, you should go for the recently maligned GTX 970 in config options. It may not have full access to all of its 4GB frame buffer, as was initially thought, or have the total ROP count we were originally told it housed, but it’s still an excellent GPU for the money. That configuration does though push the price of the Fusion Mantis up to over the £1,000 mark.
But so far, all pretty standard stuff. A nice and tidy PC build, basically sacrificing SSD speed for a decent gaming GPU and an overclocked processor. But that’s not the whole story. The M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end is one of a ghostly older brother looming spookily over proceedings.
That ghoulish sibling is Chillblast’s own Fusion Trigger, the spectre of which still haunts the benchmark spreadsheet in which we entered the Mantis’s performance numbers. The original machine that we reviewed also ran to £850, but came with an older Haswell i5 – still clocked to 4.3GHz – and a GTX 770. It was that beefier GPU which gave the older machine the edge across our benchmark suite.
So we checked to see if it was still available at that price. It’s not. It’s now crept up to £899. The kicker though is that it’s now specced out with a GTX 970 instead. The rest of the spec is almost identical when compared to the Mantis, except it uses a different chassis and cooler.
That means you also get Chillblast’s excellent two-year collect and return warranty, along with a further threeyear labour cover. This seems part of the problem of system integrators offering so many different machines and so many configuration options – choice is great, but when they can’t keep track of the relative pricing of their builds, how can the consumer be expected to?
The choice then is a relatively simple one. With only £50 between the two machines, and the GTX 970 costing at least £100 more than the GTX 960 in retail, we would have to recommend the Fusion Trigger over the Mantis. Putting the two machines side-by-side makes this GTX 960-toting machine suddenly look a little lacking in the value department. – Dave James
Specifications
CPU Intel Core i5-4690K @ 4.3GHz
Motherboard Gigabyte Z97-HD3
Memory 8GB DDR3 @ 1,600MHz
Graphics MSI GTX 960
Storage 1TB Seagate SSHD
Warranty Two-year collect and return, plus three-year labour