PC Specialist Fusion 6550D review

PC Specialist’s Fusion 6550D looks just like a miniature version of a tower PC. It’s sturdily built and has its main cooling outflow fan at the top of its case. The Fusion 6550D’s a little noisy, but the noise isn’t too obtrusive. Inside, the case doesn’t look quite as neat, but that’s because there’s plenty crammed into this small space. Astonishingly, it has two hard drives: a 1TB 3.5in disk mounted in a bay at the bottom of the PC and a 2.5in 120GB SSD mounted above it. There’s also a slim laptop-style Blu-ray rewriter and, below it, a second 3.5in bay.

The motherboard is a socket FM1 Asus F1A75-I Deluxe model with two memory slots. Both are occupied by 4GB 1,333MHz memory modules, but are capable of supporting a maximum 32GB of RAM between them. There are also four SATA3 ports, of which three are in use, leaving one spare in case you ever want to make use of the extra drive bay. There’s even a PCI-E x16 slot, but it’s worth noting that there’s only enough room in the case for a low-profile graphics card. The processor is a 3GHz AMD A8-3870K Black Edition, one of our favourites from AMD’s Llano range.

The system performed adequately in our benchmark tests, getting an overall score of 66. This means that it’s powerful enough to run most applications and its quad-core processor makes for effective multi-tasking. Like other processors in its range, the A8-3870K has a remarkably powerful onboard graphics processor that can easily cope with most modern games at reasonable settings. When we ran Dirt 3 at high quality and a resolution of 1,280×720, we saw an average frame rate of 29fps, which is smooth enough for comfortable play.

At the rear of the case are six USB ports, of which two are USB3, as well as a PS/2 port, eSATA2 port, 5.1 analogue audio outputs and an optical S/PDIF output. It also has a Gigabit Ethernet port and a pair of antenna connectors for the motherboard’s integrated 802.11n Wi-Fi. On the front of the PC are two USB2 ports and 3.5mm microphone and headphone jacks. The supplied antennas are rather nifty, being two long wires with magnets on the end that you can wrap tidily around the outside of the PC.

The PC comes with a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium installed. You don’t get a keyboard or mouse, but there’s a little media centre remote control that has a very tiny keyboard built into the back of it. You wouldn’t want to use it to write a blog post, but it’s certainly handy if you connect the PC to your TV to play media and want a convenient way of entering short strings of text, such as when searching YouTube.

If you want a system that’s compact but powerful enough for gaming and multimedia entertainment then the Fusion 6550D’s a great PC, but the Chillblast Fusion Dagger has a much more powerful processor, a high-end graphics card and almost twice as much disk space. It costs just over £100 more, but it’s a better buy.