Eclipse Fusion A925R575 review

With a 24in monitor and a powerful graphics card capable of playing Crysis, the Eclipse Fusion A925R575 should appeal to gamers that want to play the latest 3D titles. A quad-core AMD processor gives it enough power to chew through most applications as well, and there’s also plenty of expansion potential, as it’s one of the first PCs we’ve seen with both USB3 and SATA III support.

There are plenty of free drive bays and four free SATA III ports. Current mechanical hard disks aren’t fast enough to take full advantage of SATA III, but you could upgrade to a solid-state disk (SSD). The 4GB of RAM takes up two slots, leaving two more free for an easy upgrade to 8GB. A rare PCI-E x4 slot is free along with two PCI slots and a second PCI-E x16 graphics card slot.

On the outside, there are two USB3 ports, but with eight USB2 ports available you can keep these free for fast external drives. There’s also an optical S/PDIF output to complement the analogue 5.1 outputs, and audio can also be sent via the graphics card’s HDMI output to a compatible AV amplifier.

A 24in Hanns.G HH241DPB is a welcome step up from the 22in monitors we tend to see at this price, and the extra screen space is worth having. Some people find that a 22in screen with a 1,920×1,080 resolution makes text too small, whereas on the HH241DPB it looks just right. Image quality was good, and although colours weren’t as vibrant as some this is partly due to the screen’s matt finish, which reduces the glare from reflections.

Results from our benchmarks showed the Fusion’s AMD processor neck-and-neck with our reference CPU overall, although it scored slightly better in the image-editing and multi-tasking tests. At 2.8GHz, it’s not as fast as some £700 PCs, but the four cores make up for the lack of raw horsepower.

More impressive was the ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics card, which managed 62.4fps in Call of Duty 4 and a playable 30fps in Crysis, making the Fusion ideal for gaming. It will also speed up some applications, such as the latest Photoshop, that support GPU acceleration, and there’s plenty of room for photos and video on the 640GB hard disk.

The one weakness is the paltry one-year RTB warranty – we’d expect longer at this price – but otherwise the Fusion A925R575 is superb value, and wins a Best Buy award.