PC Specialist Fusion HD 9950 review

Luxury PCs such as Acer's Predator, reviewed on page 21, are powerful and stylish but also very expensive. PC Specialist's Fusion HD 9950 may not be as eye-catching, but it has a generous specification that offers something for everyone.

The Fusion comes with a keyboard, mouse and monitor. LG's 24in W2452T is a surprisingly large monitor for a PC at this price. It looks stylish and has a resolution of 1,920x1,200 pixels, so it can display 1080p high-definition video. Video and images are sharp and bright, while white areas in images look pure and consistent. Viewing angles weren't very wide, so colours will look their best only when you're sitting directly in front of it. A Blu-ray/HD DVD combo drive is included, so you can watch HD movies on the high-resolution screen. It can't burn Blu-ray discs, though.

You can record one show while watching another using the included dual TV tuner. Disappointingly, the included remote doesn't have Vista Media Center-specific buttons but it's still better suited to channel surfing from your sofa than using the included Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. The 640GB hard disk should be spacious enough for storing hours of recorded programming.

The Fusion is the first PC we've seen to come with AMD's Phenom X4 9950 quad-core processor. Its 4GB of memory helped it perform very well in our video-encoding test and it was also quick in our other application benchmarks. However, it still isn't as fast as some PCs we've seen with Intel Core 2 processors, such as the £700 PCs reviewed in last month's Labs. The 9950 is a Black Edition, though, which means you can overclock it by changing its multiplier in the BIOS.

The Fusion's Radeon HD 4850 graphics card is powerful enough to play current 3D games, as its quick result in our Prey and Call of Duty 2 tests show. It was also capable of running our Crysis benchmark at almost 25fps and Call of Duty 4 at 67fps. What's more, the graphics card's single-slot design doesn't block off access to any adjacent PCI slots.

There's plenty of room inside the Fusion's case for adding peripherals. There are three empty PCI slots and a PCI Express x1 slot for accommodating devices such as wireless adaptors. There's also room for three extra hard disks, although you won't need to add a memory card reader as one is already present. There's also a pair of empty optical drive bays.

The Fusion HD9950 is generously specified and should be able to handle any task you throw at it, whether it's gaming, video editing, recording TV shows or watching high-definition movies. It wasn't quite as fast in all our tests as a Core 2-equipped PC, but this is a minor quibble as the Fusion is still more than quick enough for most tasks. It's a great-value PC.