Wednesday 11 November 2015

Chillblast Fusion Drone

Chillblast Fusion Drone

Is it an unmanned aerial vehicle? Is it a fish tank? No...

Everyone knows the ‘Intel Inside’ jingle. It sounds like a particularly annoying doorbell. You’d probably imagine someone got paid millions of dollars to spend weeks honing the five-note chime for maximum chip-selling effect. You’d be roughly correct. It was an Austrian musician called Walter Werzowa, who also had a number five UK hit in 1988 with the techno-pop band Edelweiss.


Mr Werzowa probably didn’t make millions, because he didn’t retain the copyright to the riff, which is now played somewhere in the world every five minutes, according to a popular made-up statistic. But he did a good job. In 1999, five years after it was composed from ‘instruments’ including a tambourine, an anvil, an electric spark, a xylophone, bells and a hammer, the jingle was praised by Business Marketing magazine as having ‘created a preference for computer chips’.

Before Intel Inside, in other words, we didn’t much care who made the processors in our PCs. Now we do. That can’t have helped Intel’s struggling rival AMD, whose chips have in recent years declined in popularity despite the ‘AMD in the middle’ campaign, with its instantly recognisable arpeggio played by a New Zealander on three banjos and an electric whisk.

OK, we made that last bit up. But here’s a Windows 10 PC that does have AMD in the middle: the company’s Athlon X4 860K processor, to be precise. With four cores running at 3.7GHz, it’s not quite as powerful as an Intel Core i5 chip, but it is a lot cheaper. The trade-off is that it becomes very hot, so it makes sense to put it in a tower system, like this one, where there’s plenty of room for air to circulate.

However, during its development, Chillblast evidently found that air wasn’t enough. So, just like your car, this PC is water-cooled. Yes, there are actual pipes and a pump. Occasionally, you can hear a bubbling reminiscent of a tropical aquarium. It’s a closed system, so it shouldn’t require maintenance, and it does seem to work, even if it’s a Heath Robinson arrangement more commonly associated with extremeperformance computers.

That’s not what the Fusion Drone is. The Athlon can multitask a few apps and web pages without any trouble, and photo editing is manageable, but HD video production would be pushing it, let alone 4K. The Radeon R7 370 graphics card (also made by AMD) is another budget choice, but it did surprisingly well in our
tests, running older 3D games in Full HD and even coping with the most advanced games once we’d fiddled with the quality settings. That’s impressive for a £500 PC.

Chillblast Fusion Drone inside

A reasonable 8GB of memory is included, which you could upgrade to 16GB when ordering or by swapping the RAM modules yourself at a later date. Storage is provided by a hybrid drive which pairs 8GB of flash memory with a 1TB mechanical hard drive, giving you lots of space with slightly quicker response than a standard drive. There are plenty of ports, including three USB 3.0 connections for fast storage.

The case, Zalman’s Mini T4 V2, looks understated and takes up an unusually small area for a tower PC, but has room for five extra drives, including DVD or Blu-ray if you want, and one PCI-Express – handy for adding Wi-Fi. There’s also an old-style PCI slot for more basic add-ons. The combination of capable components, a quality case and a five-year warranty (labour-only for the last three years) makes the Fusion Drone a great option.

VERDICT
A water-cooled budget PC that delivers good performance at an affordable price.

SPECIFICATIONS
3.7GHz quad-core AMD Athlon X4 860K processor • 8GB memory • 1TB hybrid drive • AMD Radeon R7 370 graphics • 3x USB 3.0 ports • 5x USB 2.0 ports • Gigabit Ethernet • HDMI port • DisplayPort • 2x DVI ports • WIndows 10 • 427x348x170mm (HxWxD) • Two-year warranty