HOMEOFFICEPCs
74 MAY2020|COMPUTER SHOPPER|ISSUE387
HERE’SANOTHERPCthat’sonthe smaller
side –exactly as small as the Aria Gladiator
Paradigm,infact, thanks to both systems
usingFractal Design’s short-staturedFractal
1100 chassis. There’ssome shared DNA on
the inside,too,asboth PCs useNvidia’s 2GB
GT 1030 graphics processor.
Otherwise, these two desktopstake
remarkablydifferent routes in approachof
home office success. The GladiatorParadigm
is based on acurrent-generation Intel CPU
with an SSD/harddisk combo forstorage, but
the Fusion Dauntless goes back in time with
the 2018AMD Ryzen 72700X,plus asingle,
unaccompanied 500GB SSD.
GOLDENOLDIE
There’sagood reason to go forthischip,
mind. TheRyzen 72700Xwas AMD’s top-end
mainstream chip at thetime, and since then
it’s dropped in price to thepoint where it can
be fitted to systems costing £600 instead of
£1,600. As long as budget and mid-range
CPUs haven’tcaught up on performance–
which, forthe mostpart,theyhaven’t –then
the lackofpride you might have in owning
the latest andgreatest hardwareis
counterweightedbybeing able to getsucha
potent chip at such an affordable price.
As astrategy,itworks splendidly,especially
with ahealthy16GBofDDR4 RAM. TheFusion
Dauntlessput in asuperlativeperformance in
our benchmarks, scoring 153inthe imagetest,
291 in the video test and –best of all–348 in
the multitasking test. That works outtoan
overall scoreof296, comfortably the highest
of allsix PCs here.
Compared to thePCs thatimmediately
follow it, such as theWired2Fire Ultima
WS (whichscored 258overall), the
FusionDauntless’smultitasking
advantage is clear: it’s theonlyone with
an octa-core processor,and thanks to
SimultaneousMultithreading it has
another eight virtual cores on topofthat.
This hasn’t hurt clockspeeds much,
either: the3.7GHzbase speed and
4.3GHz maximum boost clockare
both respectably high.
It should be noted, however,thatits
enormous multithreading advantageisn’t
matched on single-core performance:its
image test score,whilehigh, is beaten by
both theUltimaWSand the Palicomp
Intel i5 Mercury.That mainly represents
basic workloads, however –for editing,
encodingand other forms of content
CHILLBLAST Fusion
DauntlessFamilyPC
★★★★★
£600•From http://www.chillblast.com
VERDICT
The Fusion Dauntless is incredibly powerful forthe
price,thoughitcomes at the cost of storage space
creation, more cores are generally better,and
so is the FusionDauntless.
On that note, this PC alsodemonstrates
the limits of graphical hardwareacceleration,
at least in lower-end builds. ThePCSpecialist
Magma S1 has amuch morepowerful GPU,
the GeForceGTX 1650, than Chillblast’s
choiceofaGT1030, butbecause it’salso
runningaweaker Ryzen5CPU, its video and
multitaskingtestresults aren’t nearly as high.
COMING UP SHORT
There’s oneareawhere theFusion Dauntless
disappoints: storage. Having a500GB SSD
sounds great untilyou realisethere’s no
additional capacityinthe form of asecond
hard disk, and not only that, butit’s also
connected to the M.2 motherboard socket via
the SATA interface rather than NVMe.
Theresult is adrive that’s slower than the
competition andwill requirereplacing or
complementingmuchsooner. First, the speed
issue:asequential readspeed of 501MB/s is
decent by SATA standards but well behind any
capable NVMe SSD, whilethe sequential write
speed of 272MB/s is just poor.
It could be argued that 500GB of SATA
storage is betterthan 250GB of NVMe,
provided you have relatively modest storage
needs, but saving alot of images, videos or
music files –not to mentionapplications –can
fillupspace faster than you might think.
At least you canadd driveswithout much
trouble.This, naturally,has the samerange of
storage possibilities as the GladiatorParadigm,
but all the potential spaces arefree to begin
with. That’s room, then,for up to three 2.5in
drives or two 3.5in drives.The Fusion
Dauntless also leaves its5.25in tray
unobstructed, so youcould add aBlu-ray or
DVD-RWdrive,orpossiblyamulticard reader.
There are certainlyenough SATA ports to
go around fordevices like these –six in total,
all free –and upgrading the RAM is easy
thanks to the twoemptyslots. Furtherdown
the motherboard, theonly M.2connector is
taken by theSSD,but there are single spare
PCI-Ex16 andx1slots forexpansion cards.
There’snoWi-Fi, but awirelesscardcould
quicklybeadded in the future.
Alternatively,you could useaUSB dongle,
as there’s plenty of USB connectivitytomake
use of.The rear panel is wellequipped with
two USB2, four USB3 and two USB3.1ports,
the latter of which are great forhigher-spec
external storagedrives. ApairofUSB ports –
one USB2, oneUSB3 –also sitonthe front
foreasieraccess.
THE MUSICALTYPE
Thehighlight of connectivityis, without a
doubt, the extra audio outputs. Besidesthe
standardline out,there arealso 3.5mm
side speaker,rear speaker and C/SUB
jacks; manyuserswon’t need these,but if
you have amore advanced surround-
sound system instead of standard
desktopspeakers, it’s aperfect fit.
Roundingthingsoffare asingle PS/2
port and,via the GPU, singleHDMI and
DVI-D outputs.Again, DisplayPort would
have beenbetter,but this willsuffice for
one or two Full HD monitors.
It’sgoodtosee that the Fusion
Dauntless isn’tjustaboutits powerful
CPU, though that is very welcome.
Versatile connectivity and high upgrade
potential (in spiteofits short dimensions)
further help make this is avery good
home office PC,although youcan do
better than that lonely little SSD.
