OP3 Fury review

OP3’s Fury is designed to be a budget PC that’s capable of playing 3D games – as well as handling the usual home multimedia and web browsing tasks. This is a tight brief, so it’s not surprising that the Azza-branded case looks a little cheap; though it’s reasonably sturdy and doesn’t have any unfinished edges inside – so you won’t cut your hands if you decide to make upgrades later.

It’s worth noting at this point that if you wish to upgrade the PC without voiding the generous three-year RTB warranty, OP3 requires you to contact a support representative before opening the case for the first time.

Thankfully, it should be some time before you’re thinking of such work. The Fury’s performance and selection of components are generally good. The weakest point is undoubtedly the AMD Athlon X3 445 processor, which suffers due to a small 1.5MB memory cache. It has been overclocked from 3.1GHz to 3.3GHz, though clock speed was never the big issue with this chip. The Fury scored 97 overall in our application tests, this doesn’t sound too bad, but even budget PCs regularly score 20 points more these days.

Using a cheaper processor has left OP3 with plenty of budget to invest in other components. Although most low-cost PCs rely on integrated graphics, the Fury has a 512MB ATI Radeon HD 5670, which is powerful enough to handle current games, producing a frame rate of 40.5fps in Call of Duty 4. Admittedly, you might have to lower the resolution and turn down some of the quality settings on the most graphically-intensive titles; it only produced a jerky 18.3fps in Crysis at our usual test settings of 1,680×1,050, 4x anti-aliasing and High quality. It took a reduction to 1,280×720 and 2x anti-aliasing before we achieved playable speeds of over 30fps.

The rest of the specification includes everything you’d expect: 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 500GB hard disk, DVD-RW drive and a handy memory card reader with slots for every common card format. The Asus M4N68T motherboard has only one PCI-E x16 slot, which is occupied by the graphics card, but that still leaves four PCI slots and one PCI-E x1 slot – a second x1 slot is blocked by the graphics card’s cooler. The motherboard isn’t bustling with free ports; with two free SATA ports and only four rear USB ports. 5.1 surround sound is the best you’ll get out of the on-board audio processor’s three re-configurable stereo ports, with no S/PDIF outputs provided.

Despite these limitations, the Fury is a good little PC, capable of playing most games and running any application you need. It only costs £400, but we’d rather spend £50 more to get a system with one of AMD’s faster Athlon II or Phenom II CPUs, or even an Intel Core i3 processor.