Chillblast Fusion Mustang in Desktop PCs

The Fusion Mustang comes in Cooler Master's new Sileo chassis. The name gives a clue as to its purpose, with quietness at the top of the agenda – and the case has a few tricks up its sleeve to make sure excess noise is kept to a minimum.

Both sides of the case, as well as the top and bottom, are coated in sound-absorbing foam, and the Mustang’s pair of 500GB hard disks is silenced by vibration-absorbing pads. Even the power supply, often a major culprit in a loud system, is hushed with noise-reduction pads that absorb many of the 600W unit’s vibrations.

The result is an extremely quiet systems, with barely a peep of noise escaping the sides of the case while running. Crucially, it’s quieter than several recently A-Listed systems that use Antec’s popular Nine Hundred Two chassis – so if silent operation is vital, the Chillblast could be a wise investment.

The Sileo succeeds on a practical level, too, offering room for more hard disks and optical drives, and empty PCI Express sockets and DIMM slots could cater for a future SLI graphics card setup and more triple-channel memory. Most of the Mustang’s spare cabling is kept tucked behind the motherboard, too, which makes working inside the Sileo simple.

Chillblast’s focus on silence doesn’t mean performance has been compromised. Intel’s Core i7-920 processor has had its 2.66GHz core clock speed boosted to a massive 3.8GHz. The result is one of the fastest systems we've tested, with the Mustang’s benchmark score of 2.53 only narrowly beaten by a smattering of the best competitors.

Less conventional is Chillblast’s choice of an Nvidia graphics card amid a market that’s currently dominated by AMD. The GeForce GTX 275 is still a potent GPU, returning a score of 26fps in our very high quality 1,920 x 1,200 Crysis test but, at least until Nvidia's new cards arrive, we'd lean towards ATI setups if gaming is a priority.

Elsewhere, two 500GB hard disks arranged in RAID 0 array and 6GB of RAM keep Windows 7 Home Premium feeling responsive, while LG’s popular GGC-H20L Blu-ray reader will endear this quiet machine to movie fans, too.

The included BenQ monitor is a good budget choice, although the design can’t match the glossy style favoured by the likes of LG Samsung. Colours are reasonably bright, detail is sharp, and backlight bleeding is kept to a minimum.

Our only minor quibble is that, despite the Full HD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, the panel is only 22in across; a quick search reveals plenty of similarly priced systems, and even some cheaper ones, with 24in panels. Chillblast does include a decent set of 5.1 speakers, though.

The Fusion Mustang is a strong system in almost every area, boasting fantastic application performance, a superb chassis and good peripherals – even if the gaming performance could be better. It's kept off the A List only by Wired2Fire squeezing that little extra from its budget.

Author: Mike Jennings