Chillblast Fusion Immortal review

Chillblast’s latest Fusion system is aiming high with its latest Immortal offering, but it’s got the hardware to back up its boasts. The star attraction is a pair of AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards, which is the kind of combination that could deliver record-breaking benchmark results.

The two cards certainly don’t disappoint. Our Very High quality, 1,920 x 1,080 Crysis benchmark was brushed aside at an astonishing 94fps, and this only fell to 90fps when we added 4x anti-aliasing.

To push it harder, we hooked up a 30in, 2,560 x 1,600 screen, but still the Immortal charged on. At this increased resolution and Very High quality settings, the Chillblast scored 81fps, with ten frames shaved off this figure by adding anti-aliasing. That figure destroys other machines efforts: Scan’s 3XS Velocity X79 SLI Extreme could only manage 66fps in the same test.

For a final torture test, we added a pair of screens and bumped the resolution to a massive 5,760 x 1,080, but the pair of graphics cards also handled this with aplomb, scoring 53fps and falling to 46fps with anti-aliasing. That’s the sort of pace we’ve only seen beaten by much more expensive PCs in the past – the £4,488 inc VAT Scan 3XS Carbon, for instance, with its pair of dual-core GeForce GTX 590 cards, managed 49fps in the latter test.

It isn’t only a PC for playing Crysis, though. In our Just Cause 2 benchmark across three screens it averaged 98fps, and Crysis 2 when run at its Ultra quality settings and at 2,560 x 1,600 returned a stunning 55fps – with this figure dropping to a still-playable 33fps at 5,760 x 1,080.

That’s a stonking level of power, but other benchmarks revealed that AMD’s drivers and application profiles aren’t fully mature yet, with some odd-looking results. In Battlefield 3, for instance, the Chillblast returned a 40fps score at 2,560 x 1,600, but this improved to 57fps when we ran the game across three screens.

Chillblast has taken less of a risk with its choice of processor, with the Intel Core i7-2700K overclocked from 3.5GHz to a mighty 5GHz. It’s an impressive number, but the i7-2700K isn’t quite as potent as Sandy Bridge-E chips, with two fewer cores and a smaller cache. The resulting benchmark score of 1.24 in the PC Pro application-based benchmarks is extremely impressive, but machines boasting overclocked Core i7-3930K chips routinely score north of 1.3 in the same tests.