Chillblast Fusion Tranquillity review

If you need evidence of the appeal of quiet computing, just look at the wealth of products available that claim to stifle the sound emerging from your PC. This kit isn’t just a boon for home tinkerers, though: Chillblast has also taken advantage of the growth in noise reduction kit to produce its latest PC – the Fusion Tranquility.

The Fractal Design Define R3 is a solid start. It’s a new case to the PC Pro Labs, but it’s a favourite with our sister title Bit-tech thanks to its excellent build-quality and superb acoustic dampening properties. Fractal Design has achieved this by using the most sound-absorbing material we’ve seen: it can be found lining the monolithic door, attached to both side panels, on the roof of the chassis and even occupying three of the system’s unused case fan mounts.

Quiet, please

Neat, noise-reducing touches abound elsewhere. The hard disk bays sport rubber pads to absorb vibration, and the PSU is mounted on similar disks. The bottom PCI blanker at the rear of the chassis includes a fan control that’s linked to the front and rear 120mm case fans to ensure they rotate at the slowest possible speeds.

Sitting atop the overclocked Intel Core i5-2500K processor is a Gelid Tranquillo heatsink – another part built with minimal noise in mind. Its 120mm fan is attached to the heatsink by clasps that are more forgiving than screws, and its fan rotates at lower speeds than rivals: its peak speed of 1,500rpm is 1,000rpm lower than the popular Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev. 2.

The graphics card hasn't escaped the attention of the noise police either: the Tranquility's Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 is a Gainward-produced "Phantom" edition design with a three-slot cooler to accommodate a larger heatsink, six heatpipes and a trio of fans – a huge improvement over the dual-slot, single-fan models we’re used to seeing. Despite this, it’s still been tweaked, with its stock speed of 732MHz upped to 750MHz and the base memory clock of 3,800MHz improved by 100MHz.

A Scythe Quiet Drive case surrounds the hard disk with rubber, to absorb the whoosh of spinning platters and the chatter of heads accessing data. An SSD is used as the system drive, to further reduce noise, and Chillblast’s final tweak involves the PSU: a BeQuiet Straight Power CM unit running at 680W that claims to be semi-passive, with a 120mm fan that only spins up when the system’s stressed.