PC Specialist Fury A10 review

On the surface, the PC Specialist Fury A10 looks like a decent PC. It comes in a Fractal Design Core 1000 Black Case, which looks great thanks to the neat mesh that covers most of the front. On a first inspection of the core components, the quality appears to be carried throughout.

PC Specialist has fitted an AMD A10-7700K processor, which it has overclocked to 3.8GHz. This gave us an overall score of 67 in our benchmarks, with a score of 66 in the multitasking test. We’ve seen this processor overclocked further to get better scores, but the Fury A10 is still capable of any task. It’s a little annoying that the CPU fan is so loud, though, as it’s quite distracting and is clearly audible through the case’s thin walls. It’s a shame, as the 120mm front and 80mm rear fans run quietly.

In our gaming benchmarks, using Dirt Showdown, the Fury A10 did not fare much better than in the application tests. Running the game at 1,280×720, 4xAA and High graphics, we only managed to get 27.54fps which dropped to as low as 21.57fps during graphically intense scenes. This isn’t smooth enough to have an enjoyable gaming experience. If you want to use 1,920×1,080 resolution, you’ll need to drop down to a paltry 1xAA and graphics quality set to Low to manage 30.8fps.

We weren’t impressed with the ASUS A58M-E motherboard. This is a very low-budget model, which has little room for upgrading. It has one PCI-E x16, a PCI-E x1 and a PCI slot. If you do opt to install a dedicated graphics card this will obstruct the PCI-E x1 slot. Be aware that your graphics card upgrade options are also limited by the 350W power supply so can only reasonably support low to mid-tier cards. The PSU is at least a Corsair VS350 PSU rather than a generic one, however. The low power is more a shame, considering that the case has plenty of upgrade room in size, with room for a large high-end graphics card.

Most disappointing is the lack of USB3 on the motherboard at all. On the back of the system, you just get four USB2 ports, alongside PS/2 mouse and keyboard, DVI and VGA video outputs, Gigabit Ethernet and three 3.5mm connections for up to 7.1 channel audio. The front connections, located on the side of the case as earlier mentioned, include two more USB2 ports and a headphone and microphone connection.

It’s surprising to see a motherboard without SATA3, too, with six SATA2 ports inside. SATA3 isn’t needed with the 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard disk, which has plenty of storage, but SATA2 is a big limitation if you decide to install an SSD at a later date. It’s a shame, as there’s plenty of room inside the case for extra drives, with two 5¼in external bays, one of which is occupied by the DVD-RW drive, and two 3½in drive bays.

The Fury A10 comes with a single module of 8GB 1,600MHz DDR3 memory, which means you can expand memory to 16GB easily by filling in the second slot. You won’t need to do that for a long time, though, as 8GB is enough for most people.

PC Specialist has made a better choice with the 24in AOC E2470Sw Full HD monitor, which is an excellent performer for the price. We tested the monitor with our colour calibration and measurement tool, which showed it has an excellent 973:1 contrast ratio. The monitor was able to display 84.9 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, which isn’t bad for a screen at this price, while 0.23cd/m² black levels are acceptable if not unspectacular. With one VGA and two HDMI ports you won’t need to swap cables if you want to connect a second device to the display. The supplied PC Specialist keyboard and mouse set was pleasant to use and the keyboard had good travel to the keys, which made it comfortable to touch type on.

Overall we were a bit disappointed with the Fury A10. While we don’t expect spectacular gaming performance from a budget PC, we still expected more from the system. The motherboard left a lot to be desired with its lack of USB3 and SATA3 expansion and the CPU fan was also one of the noisiest we’ve tested. The system comes with a good 24in display, but the Palicom AMD Kaveri Evolution is a better all-round computer.