Chillblast Fusion Ryzen 7 RTX 2070 Custom Gaming PC

VERDICT

An accomplished games machine and potent, extensively connected multitasker, this PC gets almost everything right

- James Archer

THE RELATIVE NEWNESS of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX graphics cards means that there aren’t a great deal of pre-built, RTX-based PCs to compare against each other. Even so, it’s already clear enough that £1,300 for a desktop with the high-end RTX 2070 could be quite the tempting prospect – so long as the rest of it is up to scratch.

The Fusion Ryzen 7 RTX 2070 Custom Gaming PC builds around its GPU with an octa-core, 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 2700 CPU, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, a 250GB WD Black SSD (Shopper 376), a 2TB hard disk and Gigabyte’s B450M Aorus M motherboard. It sticks to the basics in some minor respects – the CPU is air-cooled rather than water-cooled, and that motherboard uses the microATX form factor – but by and large, this is a premium system.

RTX FACTOR

Nowhere else is this proven more convincingly than in gaming performance. In Metro: Last Light Redux, our most demanding test game, Chillblast’s system kept pace with the £1,600 Palicomp Intel i7 Supernova (Shopper 376), averaging a silky 90fps at 1,920x1,080 as well as 54fps at 2,560x1,440. The usual mix of Very High quality and SSAA proved a little too much at 3,840x2,160, judging by the 25fps result, but simply disabling SSAA bumped this up to a very playable 50fps. There’s hardly a drop in visual quality either, as the high resolution naturally makes edges look smoother, something you’d normally need anti-aliasing for.