Razer Blade Stealth review: An unusual gaming laptop to which you can attach an external PCI-e graphics card

Not your usual gaming laptop: the Blade Stealth doesn't pack a high-spec graphics card. Instead you provide your own and pop it into that Core housing that connects via USB-C. Here's our Razer Blade Stealth review.

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PRICE WHEN REVIEWED

From £999 inc VAT

RAZER BLADE STEALTH REVIEW

The Razer Blade Stealth is an unusual laptop. It’s aimed at gamers and isn’t cheap, but does not include a graphics card required to make high-end games run quickly. See also: Best gaming laptops

Instead, this is a normal MacBook-style laptop if you want it to be, but the styling has a gamer flavour. However, it can also plug into a Razer Core module when you’re at home, turning it into a proper gaming PC with the sort of power most laptops can only dream of.

RAZER BLADE STEALTH REVIEW: PRICE

The Razer Blade Stealth is priced like one of the latest-generation ultra-stylish portable laptops, but is cheaper than most. It’s far cheaper than a MacBook Pro with OLED keyboard display, and also costs less than the HP Spectre 13 or Dell XPS 13. Not bad.

It starts at £999 (or $999) with a 128GB SSD and QHD screen. The 256GB is £1249 and the 512GB £1349.

There are also 4K versions at £1549 (512GB) and £1949 (1TB). Razer has sent us the top-end model, but a lot of the observations in this review will apply to all versions.

• Buy the Razer Blade Stealth for £999

If you’re just after a slim laptop and already have a gaming PC, it’s rather competitive. The lead reason to buy one of these over an alternative other than price, though, is that it can hook up to a Razer Core - an external graphics card. 

This is like a small desktop PC unit, but one that only houses a PCI-e graphics card. It costs £499 (£399 when bought with the laptop), and that price doesn’t even include a graphics card. So this is not a cheap option. For reference, you’d probably want to look at a £190-ish Nvidia GTX 1060 or £210 on an AMD RX480 as a good minimum spec.

RAZER BLADE STEALTH REVIEW: DESIGN

Most high-end portable laptops do not come in plain moody black, the idea being you want to get away from a traditional or boring-looking machine these days. As a gaming computer, it’s no wonder the Razer Blade Stealth embraces it, though.

The entire shell is black apart from the writing on the keys and the tentacle-like light-up Razer logo on the lid. To our eyes at least, it works.

The Razer Blade Stealth seems much more “stealth bomber” than plain black box, and unlike a lot of gaming laptops, you could take it out in public without looking silly. Sure, the logo on the back looks like a sticker a teenager might put on their laptop, but it’s otherwise a super-sharp machine.

It weighs 1.2kg and is 13mm thick. While not the slimmest or lightest laptop in the world, it’s not far off either. This is a great laptop to take around with you 24/7.

Its frame feels great too. The Razer Blade Stealth is all-aluminium: the lid, the underside and the keyboard surround. It’s cool to the touch and has the hard feel you only tend to get with metal.

RAZER BLADE STEALTH REVIEW: CONNECTIVITY

Unlike a MacBook Pro or HP Spectre 13, the Razer Blade Stealth makes it sure caters for current peripherals as well as future ones. There are two full-size USB ports, a USB-C (also used as the power socket) and a full-size HDMI, so connecting to a TV or monitor is extremely simple.

There’s no memory card slot, though, so photographers will want to get hold of a USB SD reader.

Like every laptop this thin, there’s also no optical drive. If you think Razer could have crammed one in we’d like to know how.

RAZER BLADE STEALTH REVIEW: KEYBOARD AND TRACKPAD

The quality of the Razer Blade Stealth’s shell continues in the keyboard and trackpad: both are beyond reproach. However, those expecting chunky keys with a lot of travel are going to be disappointed.

These are classic ultrabook slimline chiclet keys. Their action and feedback is great, but they don’t depress massively. Still, this is nothing like the click eggshell feel of a MacBook. The keys do move a millimetre or so. 

The gamer sauce comes instead from the neat backlight, which cycles through all colours of the rainbow and can be set to 12 different intensity levels. Standing out next to the all-black keyboard it looks great.

You don’t just have too leave it cycling through colours like a show room model either. Using the Razer Synapse app you can set it to display a single colour, or apply whole bunch of other profiles.

Keys can light up as they’re pressed, there’s a Fire preset that mimics the tones of a bonfire and Wave, which fires a swift rainbow gradient across the keyboard. There are others too.

There are no dedicated macro keys, as there’s just no space for them, but there’s no mistaking this for anything but a gamer keyboard.

Below, the trackpad is very tightly hemmed-in and nowhere near the size of a MacBook pad, but it feels great. Just a single touch tells you this is a very nicely textured glass panel rather than a plastic one. It’s extremely smooth, to the extent it is soft to the touch. Fresh out of the box its sensitivity was a little low, but this may have something to do with our review model having a 4K screen. That’s a lot of desktop pixels to traverse.

The pad’s click feels great and is relatively quiet too. Razer has also used a very sensible button layout. Only a square in the bottom-right of the pad acts as a right-button press, making accidental taps a rarity.

You may find your hand accidentally touching the pad on occasion for the first few days, but that’s largely because there’s so little spare space here. Not much is wasted.

RAZER BLADE STEALTH REVIEW: SCREEN

This only applies to the keyboard part though. Look at the fat bezels around the 12.5-inch display: compared to the Dell XPS 13 the screen to size ratio isn’t all that hot. There’s a lot of empty black space around the display.

However, aside from making us wish it stretched out a bit more, this is an excellent screen. A reminder: we’re using the higher-end 4K version of the Razer Blade Stealth, but there’s also a cheaper QHD version that should still look very sharp.

Both versions sail ahead of the competition in several respects, mainly thanks to the fact they use IGZO panels rather than IPS or TN. On our test sample, contrast was excellent at up to 1350:1 (depending on brightness), making the black parts of the screen almost fade into the pure black of the surround at the sort of backlight level you’d use indoors.

This doesn’t come at the expense of brightness either. With the backlight maxed, the Razer Blade Stealth outputs a searing 405cd/m2. We’re perfectly happy for a high-end laptop to have 350cd/m2, but this one goes the extra mile.

Colour performance too is remarkable. Our colorimeter says it covers 99.9 percent of sRGB, 98.2 percent of Adobe RGB and 87.6 percent of DCI P3 colour standards. It can also render colours outside of all three, with 147.7 percent of sRGB and 101.8 percent of Adobe RGB.

The Razer Blade Stealth is the sort of laptop that makes us much less bothered about OLED models. Who needs one with LCDs like this?

Right out of the box the Razer Blade Stealth looks every bit an Adobe RGB display, meaning colours appear intensely bold. We had some trouble getting the display to revert to an sRGB calibration for a more relaxed look, so it would have been handy if Razer had baked this into its own software, though. 

The 3840x2160 pixel resolution appears extremely sharp, although given the QHD model will also appear sharp and is significantly cheaper, many of you may be more comfortable with that version. Still, it’s hard not to be impressed by this 4K screen. It’s a touch display too, a feature missing from the HP Spectre 13 and Dell XPS 13.

While we haven’t used the QHD version ourselves, we do know it doesn’t quite have the amazing colour depth of the 4K one. Razer says it hits 70 per cent of Adobe RGB, though, a figure suggesting it should cover 100 percentper cent of sRGB or very close to that. We’d likely still be very happy with the lower-spec display day-to-day, much as it’s clearly less impressive than the 4K one.

RAZER BLADE STEALTH REVIEW: PERFORMANCE

Most Razer laptops use discrete graphics cards to get you far better gaming performance than the average laptop. However, the Razer Blade Stealth is more conventional in this respect.

It uses integrated Intel HD 620 graphics, baked into the Intel Core i7-7500U chip. This is the first laptop we’ve reviewed with a seventh-generation Kaby Lake processor though, so it’s still cutting-edge.

This is a dual-core low voltage CPU, typical of those normally used in laptops like this, which need to maintain good stamina as well as decent performance.

One of the great aspects of the Razer Blade Stealth is that all the models have this higher-end Core i7 CPU, where many £1000-or-more ultrabooks still have Core i5 CPUs.

Performance is not a huge leap ahead of Skylake’s chipsets, though. The Razer Blade Stealth scores 2044 points in PC Mark 8 (Home) and 7393 (3620 per core) in Geekbench 3, 7894 (4070 per core) in Geekbench 4.

While this is excellent for a very slim and light productivity laptop, it’s totally different to the performance of a true gaming laptop, which would use a quad-core CPU and discrete graphics card.

The Intel 620 GPU is also only marginally better than the HD 520 of last-gen laptops. In Thief, it manages 21.9fps with the resolution set to 720p and graphics set to low, dipping to a painful 6.5fps at 1080p with visual effects maxed-out. That’s only around 1fps and 0.5fps (respectively) better than the Skylake-powered Acer Aspire S13 we reviewed recently.

On its own, this is no gaming laptop. To get anything like Razer’s usual gaming cred, you need to buy the Core attachment. In case you skipped over our intro, this is a desktop-bound unit that plugs into the laptop via Thunderbolt USB-C, and houses its own graphics card. You can buy one with a Stealth for £399, although this does not include the graphics card itself. Both Nvidia and AMD cards are supported, including full-size PCI-e models.

As these laptops only have dual-core CPUs, it’s likely they’ll become a bottleneck with certaingames when paired with, for example, an Nvidia GTX 1080. However, you can still create a pretty fearsome setup with a Razer Blade Stealth. It just won’t be cheap.

We’re also slightly disappointed by the style of fan used here. There are two to each side of the Razer Blade Stealth’s underside, but their relatively small diameter means they produce quite an obvious high-pitch whine under pressure. More so than a Dell XPS 13. If you’re going to use this laptop as the brain of a home gaming setup, you might want to find a nice sound-insulating cupboard into which you can dump the thing.

For the first few hours of testing, the fans seemed to yo-yo all over the place in terms of their revs, sounding like they were preparing for take off with no justification. However, this seems to have settled down and the Razer Blade Stealth is largely near-silent with normal light use.

RAZER BLADE STEALTH REVIEW: BATTERY LIFE

 To see how long the Razer Blade Stealth lasts with fairly light use, we set it to play a 720p video on loop until the battery died. It lasted six hours 42 minutes at 120cd/m screen brightness.

It’s not mammoth stamina, but should be enough to get your through most of a work day. And is certainly better longevity than that of a great big gaming laptop.

You will likely get better battery life from the QHD version too, thanks to the sheer number of pixels our Razer Blade Stealth has to drive in our 4K version.

RAZER BLADE STEALTH REVIEW: SOUND QUALITY

You get no prizes for guessing how the Razer Blade Stealth’s speakers work. They pipe out from the grilles to the left and right of the keyboard, getting you a very clear stereo effect and dispersal that doesn’t depend on how the laptop sits on the table/floor/your lap.

We had a chance to listen to the Stealth alongside the new MacBook Pro, the HP Spectre 13 and Microsoft Surface Book. It’s one of the loudest and beefiest-sounding of the bunch, only beaten by the MacBook, which has quite alarmingly powerful speakers for its size.

The tone of the sound is rather nice too, without the clear skews some laptops suffer form when they try to sound bassier. We could happily watch a film on the Blade Stealth without wishing we had a speaker to plug in.

RAZER BLADE STEALTH: SPECS

• 12.5in (3840 x 2160) 352dpi IGZO LCD glossy
• 2.7 GHz, up to 3.5 GHz Turbo Intel Core i7-7500U, two cores four threads
• Intel HD 620
• 16GB RAM DDR3-1866
• 512GB SSD
• 802.11b/g/n/ac 2x2
• Bluetooth 4.1
• 2 USB 3.0 port
• 1 USB-C 3.1 port
• HDMI
• stereo speakers
• HD webcam
• Digital array mic
• 3.5mm headset jack
• UK tiled keyboard
• 52.6 Wh lithium-ion battery non-removable
• 321 x 206 x 13 mm
• 1.29 kg

OUR VERDICT

The Razer Blade Stealth is an accomplished little laptop that can sidle up to the flashiest ultraportable laptops without seeming like the weird gamer kid in the corner. It’s slim, it’s moody, and you can tweak its personality with the multi-colour keyboard backlight: pink on black is a strong look. Its 4K screen is stunning if you don’t mind ultra-energetic Adobe RGB-style colours and while battery stamina isn’t amazing, it roughly matches the new MacBook with OLED touch panel. It’s a shame the cost of making this a home gaming laptop with the Core attachment is quite so high, but the Razer Blade Stealth convinces as a pure and simple ultra-light style laptop too. Black is back for everyone tired of brushed aluminium and “rose gold”. We’d recommend buying the cheaper version than we’re actually reviewing unless you absolutely need loads of ultra-fast storage and a 4K display. While the Quad-HD version loses the immense colour saturation, it’ll still look sharp across 12.5 inches and at £999 is a solid deal.

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Hands on: Lenovo Ideacentre Y710 Cube review

A LAN-friendly gaming PC with native Xbox One controller support

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Gaming PCs that are both crazy powerful and portable enough to carry to LAN parties are growing in numbers. And no, we're not counting luxuries like the8pack Asteroid, which come with their own flight cases, among them. Like theAlienware Aurora R5, Lenovo's new Ideacentre Y710 Cube has a handle built into its case that makes lugging it to gaming halls, your friend's bedroom, or the room next door much less of a hassle.

So, pricing: the VR-ready Ideacentre Y710 Cube starts at $1,300 (around £1,000, AU$1,700) for the version with a GTX 1070 graphics card. You can, of course, expect the cost for the full-fat GTX 1080 version to be north of that. Both configurations go on sale from October.

Wherever you take the Y710 Cube, which was on show at IFA 2016, its design is bound to catch eyes. Its front edge houses the main attraction - a three-pronged glowing red light that lends this box-shaped offering the appearance of a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica. The case is decked in various shades of matte grey plastic that's chopped up with red and black, borrowing design language from the company's Ideacentre Y900 desktop from last year. It looks clean, modern and menacing to boot.

Lenovo has built ports into the Y710's top edge, alongside its rear. On the top are two USB 3.0 ports, in addition to headphone and microphone connections. Flip the machine around and you'll find DisplayPort, HDMI, VGA and DVI-D ports, alongside ones for USB and a power cord.

PC gaming isn't purely a bedroom activity any more, and Lenovo has gone to some lengths to make the Y710 Cube as TV-friendly as possible. Running a finger alongside the bottom edge of the PC's case locates a button that switches on a built-in Xbox Wireless controller adapter.

Lenovo is bundling a Wireless Xbox One controller for Windows 10 with the Y710, so you'll be able to dive into controller-friendly titles without having an unsightly dongle sticking out the back of it. Nor will there be any wires trailing across the room to trip you up.

There's enough power inside to run the latest titles in all their glory. The Y710 can be configured with Nvidia's GTX 1080 Founder's Edition graphics card, which has huge overclock potential and places 4K gaming squarely in reach. That's twinned with up to a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor clocked at 3.4GHz and up to 32GB of DDR4 memory.

It's not clear what scope there is for upgradability here, but it's possible to gain entry to the machine's components via a window on the right-hand side that's unlocked by removing two screws. The display unit on show was being used to host a session of Hearthstone, which wasn't something we dared (or were allowed) to interrupt.

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Cyberpower Infinity X55 SE review: Skylake processor + AMD graphics = one power-hungry gaming rig

We put CyberPower's latest Skylake-based PC through its paces. Here's our Cyberpower Infinity X55 SE review

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PRICE WHEN REVIEWED

£999 inc VAT and delivery

CYBERPOWER INFINITY X55 SE REVIEW

The Infinity X55 SE is a rugged-looking desktop PC with chopped off corners and a protruding front grill, which give it an industrial, almost military look marking it out immediately as a gaming PC. You also get a full-size transparent side panel, through which you can see the internal components illuminated by blue LEDs which also shine through the grille at the front. This is the Corsair Carbide SPEC-01 system case we’ve seen housing gaming PCs for some time now. You’ll either love it or hate it.

Visible through the window are the large heat pipes of the graphics card, and the black tubing of the Corsair Hydro H55 liquid-based CPU cooler keeping the Intel Core i5-6600K in check. In this system, the CPU has been pre-overclocked from 3.5GHz to 4.2GHz. This is a significant increase in speed, albeit somewhat unambitious alongside the 4.4GHz and even 4.5GHz systems challenging it in our Skylake gaming PC group test.

The CPU is teamed up with 8GB of 2133MHz DDR4 RAM and installed in a Gigabyte Z170-HD3 motherboard, where it’s supported by a 120GB Kingston V300 SSD and a 1TB Seagate hard drive.

This motherboard does the job, but is a little short on features. It supports 2-Way AMD CrossFire technology to allow the installation of a second graphics card, but the second PCI Express x16 slot is limited to x4 speed which will hamper performance. It doesn't support USB 3.1 either. By contrast, Mesh’s Elite Skylake PCA features the GA-Z170X-Gaming 3 motherboard which rectifies both of these omissions in a system costing the same price as the CyberPower Infinity X55SE.

This PC is unusual since it's the only Skylake PC we've seen so far that uses an AMD graphics card, rather than the more popular choice of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970. In this case CyberPower has selected an AMD Radeon R9 390 card from VTX3D. These cards are matched price-wise with the Nvidia GTX 970 cards, but oofer double the RAM, at 8GB, and offer rather different performance characteristics depending on which games you choose to play.

In our tests, the Cyberpower Infinity X55 SE trades places with Nvidia-based PCs depending on which game test we’re running, but generally performs well, especially at Alien Vs Predator. It does come in behind the Nvidia boards at several other tests, but its extra RAM capabilities also allow for larger textures to be used and will require slightly different tweaking of game settings to achieve optimal performance.

Future games are also likely to make much more use of video RAM, which also plays to the Radeon’s strengths. One disadvantage of this card, however, is power consumption. When running flat out, this system consumed 520W of power – somewhere in the region of double that of competing PCs built with Nvidia graphics cards. Thankfully, Cyberpower has included a beefy 750W Corsair Builder Series PSU to make sure it gets all the juice it needs. Unfortunately, the Infinity X55 SE is also the loudest PCs of the group – often the consequence of high power consumption which leads to increased heat output and faster fan speeds.

See also: Best gaming PCs roundup

SPECS

CyberPower Infinity X55 SE: Specs

• 3.5GHz Intel Core i5-6600K (4.2GHz OC) processor
• Corsair Hydro H55 cooler
• 16GB DDR4 3000MHz RAM
• Kingston V300 120GB SSD and Seagate 1TB Sata III HDD
• Corsair 750W Builder Series PSU
• Gigabyte GA-Z170-HD3 Motherboard
• Windows 10 Home 64-bit
• VTX3D Radeon R9 390 8GB
• gigabit ethernet
• 5x USB 3.0, 3x USB 2.0
• 2x DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort
• Corsair Carbide case
• Coolermaster Devastator keyboard and mouse
• 3-year labour, 2-year parts and labour RTB warranty (30 days collect & return)
• Power consumption: 73W (idle), 520W (load)

OUR VERDICT

The Infinity X55 SE performs well, but not as well as much of the competition thanks largely to its unambitious 4.2GHz maximum clock speed. It also boots from a rather small SSD without the large performance advantage of an M.2 model. Some will love the AMD graphics card with its huge video RAM capacity, but overall the price seems a little high for what you’re getting.

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Chillblast Fusion Nano Fury review: A tiny but immensely powerful gaming PC

As the flagship of Chillblast’s diminutive “Nano” rage, this ultra-compact gaming PC delivers full-sized performance far in excess of what has been previously available in such a small package. Here's our Chillblast Fusion Nano Fury review.

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PRICE WHEN REVIEWED

£1379.99 inc VAT

CHILLBLAST FUSION NANO FURY REVIEW

Powerful gaming PCs commonly come with big, beefy graphics cards requiring correspondingly cumbersome and unwieldy system cases which really don’t look good in a typical living room. If you want something closer to the size and convenience of a console system, you will usually have to make large sacrifices when it comes to graphics power - which would probably negate one of the main reasons to go with a PC system in the first place.

Chillblast’s Nano PCs have for a long time offered a good balance of size and performance, by making use of small form factor Mini ITX components: The system case, motherboard and graphics card are all considerably smaller in size than in a desktop PC, making them easier to transport to LAN parties, or to tuck away next your living room TV.

What you gain in compactness, you often lose in terms of reduced internal expansion room, fewer motherboard slots, and crucially for a gaming system, a limit on the size of the graphics card you can fit in the case. Previous high-end models have used the popular GeForce GTX 970 from Nvidia (see last year's Chillblast Fusion Nano review), which optionally comes in a Mini ITX format, but the GTX 970 is a few steps down from the top of the ladder when it comes to performance.

CHILLBLAST FUSION NANO FURY REVIEW: PRICE

With the new Fusion Nano Fury, Chillblast has replaced the GTX 970 with the R9 Nano from AMD - a graphics card packed with AMD’s top tier R9 Fury graphics technology, but specially re-engineered to fit into small form factor PCs. The result is a Mini ITX PC capable of previously unheard-of gaming performance, although it does come with a 38 percent price premium of the Nvidia-based model. That means it will cost you £1379.99 from Chillblast's website.

That sort of money can buy you a lot of traditional desktop PC, or a gaming laptop. So you really need a good reason to want a compact gaming PC, as you'll get better value from a full-size machine.  Don't forget that the Fusion Nano Fury is backed by Chillblast’s five year collect and return warranty, the first two years of which cover both parts and labour.

It's also available in various colours: red, blue, black, green, gold and silver/grey.

CHILLBLAST FUSION NANO FURY REVIEW: THE AMD RADEON R9 NANO

AMD’s R9 Nano is a curious graphics card which might not make much sense at first glance. Priced and specified as a top-tier graphic card, it’s based on the same “Fiji” chipset as the company’s flagship R9 Fury, but its stricter power limits prevent it from running flat out at the highest possible speeds.

Based on a 28nm manufacturing process and featuring 4GB of AMD’s ultra-fast 4096-bit High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), the R9 Nano offers all the same features as its full-sized stablemates. These include Virtual Super Resolution (VSR) for squeezing 4K-like quality onto lower-resolution screens and genuine 4K support on UHD displays. It also delivers enough performance to play several games at these ultra-high resolutions. It comes with the same 4096 stream processing units found in the flagship R9 Fury X, but uses only a single 8-pin power connector rather than two - limiting the total power available to the board. This causes the card to throttle back on performance to stay within its reduced power consumption parameters and is the main reason why the R9 Nano is slower than the R9 Fury X with such similar internal hardware.

The R9 Nano therefore isn’t the right choice for a standard-sized PC where better performance can be had without the power and cooling constraints imposed on the smaller model. This means when buying a compact system such as this, your first priority has to be size, with performance coming a close second.

Put one in a Mini-ITX case, however, and you have a card which thoroughly outclasses anything else in its category.

CHILLBLAST FUSION NANO FURY REVIEW: DESIGN

If you’ve not used a Mini ITX PC before, then you may be surprised at just how much smaller they can be than a standard desktop model. The Chillblast Fusion Nano Fury is housed in a Raijintek Metis system case and looks undeniably cute, with a clean, minimalist design and expensive brushed metal texture.

The case has been modified by Chillblast to include a ‘blowhole’ (actually a suckhole) in the roof. This allows external airflow directly onto the graphics card. It can also provide a bit of a hazard for any small items which may fall onto the case, as there’s no dust filter or mesh protecting it. There is however, a fan guard in place which will prevent the same happening with larger objects.

A pair of USB 3.0 sockets is also provided on the top of the case, installed either side of the usual headphone and mic ports. The right hand side of the case consists mostly of a window, through which the internal components can be seen - although much of the view is obscured by the power supply.

Space is at a premium here, so there’s no optical drive bay and no room for any additional externally-facing card slots one the graphics card is in place. Our review sample come in black, but you’ll be spoilt for choice from a range of colours including red, green, silver, blue and gold. Overall we were very impressed with the external build quality and design of the system.

CHILLBLAST FUSION NANO FURY REVIEW: FEATURES

Inside the case, we find a highly-specified system, featuring an Asus Z170I Pro Gaming Mini ITX motherboard with a 3.5GHz Intel Core-i5 6600K processor installed, overclocked to 4.4GHz. The CPU is cooled by a Corsair Hydro H75 liquid cooler and the system comes with 16GB of Crucial 2133MHz DDR4 RAM.

High speed storage comes in the form of a 250GB Samsung SM951 PCI Express SSD, with a 1TB Seagate SSHD hybrid drive providing additional capacity.

With all of these components in place, there’s very little room to manoeuvre, especially with the twin fans fitted to the radiator of the CPU cooler, so this is definitely not a system designed to be upgraded internally, unless it’s by replacing components. The most you could do would be to fit a second 2.5” drive for some extra storage space.

CHILLBLAST FUSION NANO FURY REVIEW: PERFORMANCE

The Chillblast Fusion Nano Fury performs very well indeed. A PCMark 8 Home result of 5369 points places it among the fastest Core i5-6600K based PCs we’ve tested, despite its small physical size. The PC also runs relatively quietly, although we did notice that the graphics card emits a noticeable whine when under heavy load. It comes not from any fans, but rather from the electrical coils on the board. This seems to be an unfortunate aspect of the R9 Nano’s design and one you’ll just have to live with. Thankfully it only becomes noticeable during flat-out gaming when here are likely to be many other sounds going on to drown it out.

Storage performance (PCMark 8 Storage score: 5084 points) is also particularly good, thanks to that Samsung PCI Express SSD, so if you install your larger games on this drive you should experience reduced loading times.

However, it’s really the gaming performance we’re interested in and here the Fusion Nano Fury doesn’t disappoint. Compared to a similarly specified PC fitted with a GeForce GTX 970, Alien vs Predator frame rates leap from 91fps to 167fps at 1080p. It’s a similar story across the board, with the R9 Nano comprehensively trouncing the GeForce GTX 970 over a wide range of benchmarks and seemingly pulling further ahead the more you throw at it in terms of desired resolution and quality settings.

CHILLBLAST FUSION NANO FURY REVIEW: BOTTOM LINE

The Chillblast Fusion Nano Fury may be expensive, even taking into account AMD’s recent price reduction on the R9 Nano graphics card. However, it’s also one of the fastest gaming PCs you can get in this form factor and capable of delivering high-performance gaming in a living room friendly PC. If you’re going to use it on a 4K TV, then be aware that the lack of HDMI 2.0 support will limit your refresh rates to 30Hz - to get 60Hz, you’ll have to use a DisplayPort output to a PC monitor. There’s no need to have a 4K TV to take advantage of the extra processing power however, as the VSR feature can squeeze much of the 4K goodness into a standard 1080p output - and without the 30Hz limitation.

This PC is excellent value for money for those who need it, but use on a standard desktop, there’s less incentive to buy such a system unless space is really tight, or you envisage frequently moving the system from place to place.

SPECS

Chillblast Fusion Nano Fury: Specs

• Processor: 3.5GHz Intel Core-i5 6600K 4.4GHz OC CPU Cooler: Corsair Hydro H75 Installed memory: 16GB Crucial 2133MHz DDR4 Storage: 250GB Samsung SM951 PCIe SSD, 1TB Seagate SSHD Hybrid Power supply: Corsair CS 650W 80 PLUS Gold Rated PSU Motherboard: Asus Z170I PRO GAMING Operating system: Windows 10 64-bit Display: N/A Graphics card: AMD Radeon Fury Nano 4GB Sound: onboard Networking: Gigabit, 802.11ac Wi-Fi External USB ports: 6 x USB 3.0, 2 x USB 2.0, 2 x USB 3.1 Other ports: HDMI 1.4, 3 x DP, PS2, Optical SPDIF Optical drive: N/A Case: Raijintek Metis (modified) Keyboard & Mouse: N/A Extra items: N/A Warranty: 5 years labour, 2 years parts labour, collect and return

OUR VERDICT

The Chillblast Fusion Nano Fury is not without compromise, but fits into an almost impossibly small case while delivering a huge improvement in gaming performance thanks to AMD’s R9 Nano graphics card.

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Overclockers UK Kinetic VR Gaming PC review: A pint-size PC that's ideal if you're after an entry-level rig for virtual reality

Not everyone needs the fastest possible PC to enjoy virtual reality. This portable PC meets the minimum requirements set out by the headset manufacturers and, while perhaps not as future-proof as some PCs, is at least friendlier to your wallet. Here's our Overclockers UK Kinetic VR gaming PC review.

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PRICE WHEN REVIEWED

£709.99 inc VAT

OVERCLOCKERS UK KINETIC VR GAMING PC REVIEW

The compact dimensions of the Kinetic VR immediately sets it apart from the competition. Rather than selecting a standard ATX midi-tower housing, Overclockers has gone for a diminutive and much more portable system, which also happens to be just about the least expensive gaming PC you can buy that's capable of running a VR headset such as the HTC Vive.

See also: The complete guide to virtual reality

OVERCLOCKERS UK KINETIC VR REVIEW: PRICE

If you’re feeling poor after shelling out nearly £700 for an HTC Vive, then this PC may be just what you need. At just over £700 direct from OCUK, it represents what we feel is the true basic entry-level for a VR-ready PC. It’s far from speedy and not exactly feature-rich, but it’ll pass all the VR compatibility tests and deliver an enjoyable VR experience. 

If you'd prefer to spend a bit more and get one of the latest graphics cards, OCUK also offers the PC with a GeForce GTX 1070 for £879.95.

See also: The best gaming PCs you can buy right now.

OVERCLOCKERS UK KINETIC VR REVIEW: DESIGN AND FEATURES

To create a viable VR-ready PC at this price, Overclockers has made some careful component selections, which deliver all the available performance precisely where it’s needed. That means selecting an GeForce GTX 970 graphics card – ticking the first box on the minimum requirements list. The version used here is actually a factory overclocked model, providing a little speed boost, just to make extra sure.

The chosen CPU is a 3.2GHz Intel Core i5 6500. There’s no ‘K’ in the name, so there will be no overclocking going on here (despite the company name). This meets the minimum requirements for VR, passes all our compatibility tests and is shown not to slow down VR performance. It may be a slower CPU than you'll see in more expensive VR PCs, but it does the job just fine. That’s another box ticked for the Kinetic VR Gaming PC.

OVERCLOCKERS UK KINETIC VR REVIEW: COMPONENTS AND UPGRADEABILITY

The aforementioned case comes in the form of the Kolink Satellite Micro-ATX Cube Case, finished in a tasteful black. It’s neither pretty or exciting, but it most certainly is small. That’s great for portability, but not so good for expandability or access to internal components. Taking a look inside we find precious little room for upgrades as everything is packed in so tightly, but that’s to be expected. Somewhere tucked away inside there’s 8GB of system RAM and a 1TB hybrid hard drive (a mechanical disk with a small amount of solid-state storage), while the processor is kept in check by a stock Intel heatsink and fan.

An Asus H110M-A Micro ATX format motherboard sits at the heart of the system, its basic Intel H110 Express chipset offers no frills, but everything that’s required for adequate performance.

OVERCLOCKERS UK KINETIC VR REVIEW: PERFORMANCE

The lack of an SSD causes the Kinetic VR to appear somewhat sluggish when burdened by more intensive disk operations, such as copying huge folders full of game setup files, but this is less apparent once games are up and running.

While the Overclockers Kinetic VR Gaming PC won’t excite power-hungry gamers, it does provide everything you need at and impressively low price, which is exactly what it’s designed to do. On the other hand, maybe you don’t want it for home use: if you need a small PC to take on the road as part of your VR demo kit, the Kinetic VR Gaming PC really comes into its own here as none of the others in this round?up can touch it for portability or price and you can be sure it’ll get the job done.

SPECS

Overclockers UK Kinetic VR Gaming PC: Specs

• 3.2GHz Intel Core i5-6500 (3.6GHz Turbo) processor
• Intel CPU cooler
• 8GB DDR4 2400MHz RAM
• 1TB Seagate SSHD
• Kolink 600W PSU
• Asus H110M-A micro ATC motherboard
• Windows 10 Home 64-bit
• No monitor included
• Asus GeForce GTX 970 Turbo OC 4GB
• gigabit ethernet, 2x USB 3.0, 4x USB 2.0
• 2x dual-link DVI, 1x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI, Kolink Satellite Cube case
• Two-year parts and labour collect-and-return warranty, 3rd year labour-only

OUR VERDICT

The Kinetic VR Gaming PC is one of the least expensive VR-ready PCs you can buy. It doesn't have a lot of power, but delivers performance where it’s really needed in order to provide a good VR experience at a low price. It’s also one of the few gaming PCs which could be considered portable.

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