Wired2Fire Fury VX-4 review

Wired2Fire’s entry-level Fury VX-4 departs from the company’s usual emphasis on gaming. The case has a shiny curved front panel, and is more compact than most. The interior is cramped and the plain steel feels improperly finished in places with the odd sharp edge. There are two spare 5 1/4in bays and seven free 3 1/2in bays, one external. Two bays are occupied by a Blu-ray reader and 1TB hard disk respectively.

Wired2Fire’s choice of a six-core AMD Phenom II X6 1055T is an odd one. We’ve previously found the processor to be underpowered, despite the advantages of extra cores for applications such as virtualisation. However, Wired2Fire has managed an impressive overclock, raising the external bus speed to 240MHz and bringing the processor up to 3.3GHz. This produced an overall score of 93 in our benchmarks – close enough to our reference Core i5-2500K for the difference in performance to be indistinguishable.

Unfortunately, while the latest Intel Core i5 and AMD Fusion processors have their graphics processor built into the CPU, the 1055T must rely on the graphics chipset built into its motherboard. The Asrock 890GM Pro3 R2.0 motherboard has a built-in Radeon HD 4290 with HDMI, DVI and VGA outputs. It wasn’t even powerful enough to run the menus in Dirt 3, let alone play the game. If you want to play 3D games, you’ll have to buy a dedicated graphics card – or opt for a different PC.

At least the power supply – a 430W Corsair CX430 – is a good choice if you plan on upgrading, as its cables include 6-pin PCI-E power and plenty of extra Molex and SATA power connectors. Despite the hefty overclock, large CPU can and flimsy case, the Fury doesn’t get too warm or make too much noise.