Ginger6 G6 Fusion GTX 460i review

Ginger6’s G6 Fusion GTX 460i looks, feels and sounds far better than many similarly priced PCs. The matt-black case is well made, enamelled inside and out, and the CPU cooler can barely be heard. There’s plenty of space for extra storage and enough room to do so without scraping your knuckles when trying to fit new components.

The Asus P7H55-M microATX board doesn’t provide quite as much room for expansion as the case, but there’s one spare PCI slot and one spare PCI-E x1 slot. A second is blocked by the chunky cooler attached to the 768MB Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 graphics card. This is one of our favourite graphics cards and it takes pride of place in this PC. Its scores in our game tests are among the best we’ve seen from a PC at this price. Even our hugely challenging Stalker test at 1,920×1,080 with 4x AA comes very close to smooth gameplay with a frame rate of 26.7fps. Crysis raced along at 38.5fps at 1,680×1,050.

The BenQ V2220 monitor is also a cut above average. It’s a 21.5in display with a Full HD resolution of 1,920×1,080, and analogue VGA and digital DVI inputs. It’s light, slim and should look good on your desk. We appreciated its non-reflective screen and even backlighting. Although colours aren’t as intense as those of some more expensive monitors, we were very happy working and playing on this display.

Unfortunately, if a large chunk of the budget goes on one or two components, something else has to give. In this case, it’s the processor. Ginger6 has opted for a Core i3-540, overclocking it to 4.2GHz. It’s still fantastically powerful compared to processors from a couple of years ago, but it’s left standing by Intel’s latest Core i5 processors and may not stand up to the future Sandy Bridge Core i3s set to replace it. That said, it’s hard to argue with a great overall score of 152.

The back panel of the PC is a little sparse. There are just three analogue audio outputs, which can be used for 5.1 surround sound, as well as a headphone and mic connections on the front panel. There also an optical S/PDIF output on the back for digital sound, alongside six USB ports and not much else. At least there’s 4GB of RAM and a 1TB hard disk inside.

If gaming is your main priority, then this is the PC for you. Both its monitor and its graphics card are a cut above the opposition. Its Core i3 processor might not sound that impressive, but a hefty overclock makes it a serious contender. We certainly don’t expect it to struggle with any games in the near future. If you want a better-balanced PC with a bit more processor power, we recommend buying the Chillblast Fusion Aurora instead.