PCSpecialist Fusion Nova Review

Conclusion

If you spend a few minutes online it’s very easy to come away with the feeling that unless you’re spending a recent lottery win then you might as well not bother. It doesn’t matter what sphere you’re in, that’s a belief of the louder people online. Unless you own a Bugatti Chiron your car is a junker. Don’t own an original 59 Les Paul? Why are you even bothering with music. And, of course, if your PC isn’t a custom water-cooled Ryzen 9 5950X and RTX 3090 running through an Ultrawide 5K panel then you might as well stick to Solitaire. This is absolute nonsense. There are far more of us who aren’t a trust-fund kid living in their moms basement than those who are. Great value isn’t something to be sniffed at.

PCSpecialist have become the masters in good value systems in recent times. They’ve always had exceptionally fine taste in product choices to ensure you’re getting the maximum value for your investment, but as we all know when you’re cutting your budget down to these levels the amount you have to choose from becomes a short list by default. The Fusion Nova has the kind of specification we wouldn’t have thought possible to achieve and still keep to a three figure price point, but here we are.

Almost, we’ll get to that, without exception the money has been spent in the right places. The Ryzen 5 range of processors is outstanding value for money and the Ryzen 5 5600G can give you over 4 GHz across its 6C/12T die to ensure that you wont be left bemoaning the lack of CPU horsepower available to you. Similarly the newly released RX 6600 is more than capable of running things smoothly at 1080 and some games at higher resolutions than that. Okay you probably couldn’t run a Ray-Tracing heavy title at 4K with it, but neither is it priced to make you think you could. If you want to be able to play any game on the market at 1080P then it has got you covered.

The only areas that there have been obvious compromises made to hit that price tag are the places that either have little or no bearing upon your real world performance. The case is fine, even if nobody will confuse it for a high end Corsair number. The OS drive is fast enough that you’re not hanging around, although 256GB will quickly fill even with a cautiously-sized Steam library. The only area we’d perhaps look to spending a little more in the PCSpecialist configurator is the motherboard. No Type-C USB, only 4 SATA ports, no WiFi, the Gigabyte B550 Gaming X V2 is fine as the system is specced, but not a greatly expandable platform for down the line. We’d also love to have Windows 10 instead of the heavily dumbed-down, MacOS aping horror show that is Windows 11, but that’s a personal thing. We’ve learnt how use Windows since 3.0, so taking away all the toys we’re used to use to tame our systems to our will is annoying. YMMV.

As we’ve come to expect from PCSpecialist the Fusion Nova is a carefully curated set of hardware designed for the aim of giving you great 1080P gaming performance at a price that won’t blow even the tightest of budgets, and wins our OC3D Gamers Choice Award.

  

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