PC Specialist Fusion HD 9950 review

These days you can get a reasonably capable PC for under £500. But what if you want more than just reasonably capable? The Fusion HD 9950 costs a grand, so it isn't cheap, but it's a great example of why it can be worth paying more for a system.

One of the most eye-catching features is the 24 inch LG display. The screen is very bright, so videos and photos look sharp and vivid. We found colour accuracy did tend to suffer unless we were sitting directly in front, which can be annoying. But with a huge resolution of 1920x1200 pixels, it gives you plenty of room to work on several documents at once - you can see two A4 pages at actual size - and watch high definition video.

With that in mind, there's an extra optical drive built in that reads both Blu-ray and HD DVD high definition movie discs. Sony's Blu-ray may have triumphed over HD DVD as the new HD format, but if you already have HD DVD discs, or fancy snapping up the remaining stock at knock-down prices, the dual capability is handy. You can't write your own Blu-ray discs with this unit, but it caters for all the usual CD and DVD burning tasks.

This PC is also ready to record your favourite TV shows. There's a dual TV tuner built in, so it can record one channel while you watch another, or record two simultaneously. The 640GB hard disk isn't quite as big as we might have hoped in a system at this price, but provides plenty of room for storing recorded shows alongside your other files and programs. A full remote control isalso included, although it doesn't have dedicated buttons for Windows Vista's Media Center.

Gamers will be pleased by the Radeon HD4850 graphics card. It handled the latest games with ease, achieving 77 frames per second in our Call of Duty 2 test - well beyond the performance needed for smooth gameplay - to score 263%, well ahead of the best of the cheaper PCs we rounded up last month. The only disappointment on the entertainment front is the pair of Creative stereo speakers: they sound OK, but you'll want a good surround set.

Four on the floor

The Fusion is ready for serious work as well. It's one of the first PCs we've seen to use AMD's new Phenom X4 9950 processor. The 'X4' means it's a quad core unit, with the potential for even better performance than dual core chips, although not all programs can take advantage. In practice, Intel's processors tend to beat AMD's in our tests, and sure enough the Fusion fell behind cheaper Intel Core 2 Duo systems in our 2D (general) benchmark, but it was very fast in the video encoding section. Overall, it's more than fast enough for all but the most highly demanding professional tasks.

The supplied 4GB of RAM is plenty for running several programs at once. By installing the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, PC Specialist enables you to use all of that memory, but some older software won't work with this operating system, including drivers necessary to make some peripherals work, so check before you buy.

With so many features already included (a memory card reader also comes built in), upgrading may not be a big issue, but if you do want to add to the Fusion later there's plenty of room inside: you can add up to three more hard disks and another two optical drives.

PC Specialist's Fusion HD 9950 is a great PC. Although its display and Windows performance have room for improvement, they're better than adequate, and in most other respects the system is exceptionally capable and highly specified. It's well worth the asking price.

Author: Alan Lu