Chillblast Fusion Wraith review

Most desktop PCs are fairly noisy beasts that make a racket whenever they're turned on, even if they're not doing anything, which can be very annoying. All-in-one PCs and laptops are usually much quieter, but they're not as flexible as a traditional desktop PC. Chillblast aims to provide the best of both worlds with the Fusion Wraith, a powerful, flexible PC that's also very quiet.

The Wraith's plain black appearance may not be very distinctive, but what matters is how loud it is. When used in a quiet room, the Wraith can only just be heard as a slight whirring sound when handling simple tasks such as browsing the web and carrying out office work. Under a heavier load, such as editing videos, the Wraith is more audible, producing a low humming noise but it's still far quieter than any other desktop PC we've seen recently.

Removing the side panel reveals the secrets behind the Wraith's quietness. The interior of the case is lined with sound dampening foam, while many of the components have been carefully chosen. The processor is fitted with a very large cooler designed to work as quietly as possible, while the graphics card is passively cooled using large heatpipes and heatsinks instead of a loud fan. The power supply, not often thought of as a noisy component, is designed to hum as little as possible and has a quiet cooling fan.

The downside to this low noise design is that any future upgrades will have to be carefully chosen to preserve the PC's quietness. There's not that much room for upgrades anyway inside the small case. There's no room for extra optical drives and barely enough room for a second graphics card, but there is space for a memory card reader and four more hard disks in addition to the large 2TB disk already present. Any extra hard disks or graphics cards should be chosen and installed carefully as they can generate a lot of heat and there's no room for fitting more cooling fans, silent models or otherwise.

The Wraith's quietness is all the more surprising given how fast it is. Chillblast has increased the speed of the quad core Intel Core i5 2500K processor from its standard 3.3GHz to 4GHz. Paired with the 8GB of RAM, this is one of the fastest PCs we've seen to date. The passively cooled Radeon 7750 graphics card is fast enough to play the latest games if you're happy with less detailed graphics – this might seem disappointing but it's the fastest passively cooled (and therefore quiet) graphics card currently available. It's also possible to connect up to three monitors to this graphics card, but bear in mind no monitor is included so you'll have to supply your own.