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Chillblast’s Fusion Whisper is designed to crunch through demanding tasks while still being as quiet as possible, so is chock-full of noise-reducing components.
The case is a Fractal Design R3, which gained a Best Buy award in our case Labs in issue 279 of Shopper. The case’s roof and side panel are covered in sound-deadening material, the eight 3.5″ drive bays have vibration-dampening rubber grommets, and the front and rear fans are quiet.
The PC’s power supply is a 680W ‘be quiet!’ model, and the Tranquillo processor cooler makes very little noise. Even its Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card is a low-noise Gainward ‘Phantom’ model – and the GTX 560 Ti is known for being quiet even in its stock configuration. At idle, the PC makes a very low hum which is only just noticeable in a quiet room – it’s significantly quieter than most PCs, and about the same as a laptop at idle. The noise level didn’t increase during our processor-intensive video-encoding test, but when playing games the graphics card added a low hum, which we could just about hear with our ear next to the case. Even though the hard disk is a standard model rather than an SSD, you can only just about hear it clicking if you really try.
The lack of processor cooler noise is all the more surprising when you consider the PC’s Intel Core i5-2500K processor is overclocked from 3.3GHz to 4GHz. This gave it a 15% overall advantage in our multimedia benchmarks over our reference PC, which also contains a Core i5-2500K. The PC has a huge 8GB RAM, which you’ll struggle to use even in intensive tasks. The system is available with 4GB RAM, but you’ll only save £26 with the downgrade due to current low memory prices.
The PC can’t match the Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire in our benchmarks, with its monstrous overclock to 4.8GHz, but it is significantly quieter. You’d be able to edit high-definition video all day on the Fusion Whisper without even noticing it was under your desk. It also can’t match the XFire in games – 53.6fps in Crysis at 1,920 x 1,080 and High detail is 20fps slower than the XFire’s AMD Radeon HD 6970 could manage, but the Fusion Whisper will still shrug off any games you throw at it unless you decide to game on three monitors. The HD 6970 is also a noisier card than the GeForce 560 Ti, so probably wouldn’t fit with the Fusion Whisper’s ethos.
Inside the PC all is tidy, and you have some room for expansion, with spare PCI Express x16 and x1 slots, and a couple of free PCI slots. Storage-wise you have a 1TB Samsung hard disk and a Blu-ray ROM and DVD writer combo drive, and if you need more space you can take advantage of some of the seven spare 3.5″ drive bays and four free SATA3 ports on the motherboard. There are also two free memory slots should you wish to fit yet more RAM – the motherboard can take up to 32GB.
Chillblast will supply the Fusion Whisper with a 24″ HDMI Asus monitor for £143, which would take the price up to £982 including VAT. This makes it around the same price as the Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire (and almost exactly the same price once you’ve thrown in a basic keyboard and mouse). It’s not quite as quick in 2D applications or games, but has the advantage of being very nearly silent. If you want performance without whoosing noises, the Fusion Whisper is a great buy.
