Product Reviews

We'll be a worried bunch if what you can get for a thousand pounds ever ceases to amaze us. Next month, we've lined up a whole bunch of PCs at this price to see exactly what today's market can offer. First off the blocks, though, are PC Specialist with the Fusion 6000GTS.

A grand isn't peanuts, but it doesn't buy you the very latest, fastest components. While Intel's latest PC chips are quad-core, this machine provides a modest two processing cores in the shape of the AMD 64 X2 6000+. But that's hardly a compromise, because the 6000+ has a whacking clock speed of 3GHz, so everyday tasks will run as fast as on a typical quad-core processor, and even in demanding tasks like video encoding you'll struggle to spot a real performance difference. This system is definitely no slouch.

It's when you try to get more than one intensive application running at a time that two cores start to struggle a little more. Extra RAM can help with this, but the 6000GTS comes with a sensible 2GB rather than an extravagant 4GB. On the plus side, this means it doesn't have to run the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, which at the moment could give you headaches with driver software and compatibility. (That's an option if you want it, however.)

In other areas, the specification tends towards the generous. There's an internal wireless adapter: just screw the WiFi antenna into the back panel and you're ready to connect to your wireless router.

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We also appreciated the digital TV tuner. The Fusion 6000GTS may not have the greatest-looking case - we've seen worse, but we wouldn't give it pride of place in our living room - but as a media streamer for a home network it would make a good choice.To emphasise its media credentials, it comes with Microsoft's Starship Enterprise-style home entertainment keyboard. There's also a multi-format memory card reader built in, and with seven USB ports you won't be stumped to plug anything in.

There are two 320GB hard disks, set up in a RAID array to appear as a single 640GB disk. This is plenty of storage, even when you start recording programmes from that TV tuner and building up your collection of music and movies. Then again, it's not all that unusual to see affordable PCs shipping with a terabyte (1,000GB) of hard disk space these days.

Just nineteen

As you may have noticed, PC displays are getting bigger. 22-inch is now the norm in this price bracket. Bucking the trend, PC Specialist have equipped the Fusion with a mere 19-inch I-Inc TFT. It gives a good picture, and we found it easily good enough for a bit of photo editing as well as gaming and everyday use, but the resolution of 1,400 x 900 pixels doesn't give you quite such a roomy desktop.

Talking of gaming, it's here that the Specialist loses just a little bit of its shine. The nVidia 8600 GTS is a fine graphics card, and supports DirectX 10 for the new generation of Windows Vista games. But a PC with an 8800 card, or ATi's Radeon HD 2900 XT, would do considerably more justice to 3D games.

As you'll see in our group test next month, there are many different ways you can spend a kilo of quids on a PC. This one has everything in the box to enable what Microsoft loves to call your 'digital media experience'. If you wanted absolutely killer processing performance and top-of-the-range 3D graphics, you'd have to look elsewhere, or talk to PC Specialist about upgrade options. But what's here is all more than decent.