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The Chillblast Fusion Vacuum Mini 3 is the largest mini PC we’ve tested, but its bigger case does give you the advantage of an optical drive and an awful lot of power. Its quad-core Intel Core i7-4770T processor can increase its clock speed from 2.5GHz to a huge 3.7GHz when there’s enough thermal headroom, and its 16GB of RAM ensures it has plenty of space to multitask. This was reflected in its excellent score of 98 in our multimedia benchmarks, putting it just two points behind our reference desktop 3.4GHz Core i5-3570K processor for raw performance.
This is very impressive for such a compact system, and it’s doubly impressive considering the PC is very nearly silent, thanks to its Streacom FC8 Evo Fanless Home Theatre chassis. This cools the processor using a pair of heatpipes screwed to the chassis, and fins help disperse the processor’s heat. The PC has no fans and is completely silent.
The Vacuum Mini 3’s wide range of ports make it very suitable for use as a media centre. Video outputs include two HDMI ports and a DVI port, and both its HDMI ports are version 1.4, so support 4K resolutions; we had no problems playing 4K video footage. The Vacuum Mini 3 also has a built-in dual Freeview HD TV tuner, which you’ll be able to use with Windows 7’s Media Center application to record and play back TV. The PC’s media center credentials are rounded out with a Blu-ray drive, but the PC doesn’t come with Blu-ray playback software; you can buy PowerDVD 13 for £23 inc VAT from Chillblast to plug the gap.
There’s a healthy supply of USB ports as well, with two USB2 ports on the front, and two USB2 and four USB3 ports on the rear. There are also two PS/2 ports for older mice and keyboards, two Wi-Fi antennas, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, an IR receiver port, an optical S/PDIF audio output and 7.1 surround sound.
If you’d rather operate the PC from a distance, you have plenty of options. Its Bluetooth support will be welcome news for those hoping to use a wireless mouse and keyboard and the BIOS also has options for waking the PC from Sleep mode via LAN, so you’ll be able to wake it up with a smartphone or tablet app. The PC also comes with a Xebec Bluetooth Micro Keyboard and Trackpad unit for wireless control.
The Vacuum Mini 3 has to make do with its processor’s integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600 for playing games, but this chipset is more capable than most integrated graphics. It won’t be able to play heavy-duty games like Crysis 3, but we were able to run the laptop version of our Dirt Showdown test, which we run at 1,280×720 with High quality and 4x anti-aliasing, with no problem at all, producing a smooth 30.1fps at these settings. This is an impressive result for integrated graphics.
We were also impressed with the frame rates we saw at 1,920×1,080. We had to set the quality to Low to get a playable frame rate in Dirt Showdown, but at 1,920×1,080 with 4x anti-aliasing we saw a respectable 32.9fps and 48.3fps when we turned the anti-aliasing off. Platform game Trine 2 looked stunning at 1,920×1,080, as we were able to set the graphics to High at this resolution and still get a smooth frame rate of 30.5fps, as long as we switched off anti-aliasing. The Vacuum Mini is also capable of handling 4K resolutions, and it was able to play our 4K video test footage with ease.
The Fusion Vacuum Mini 3 is a silent, powerful and versatile media PC. Our main concern is the price. At £1,105, it’s one of the most expensive mini PCs we’ve tested. Its great range of ports and games console-sized case make it a very attractive system if you want a neat PC you can tuck away in your home AV system, but if you don’t need quite this much power you’d be better off with a cheaper model such as the Zotac ZBox IQ01 Plus.
