£800 PCs shootout

Four desktop systems: which is right for you?

SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT); free delivery from chillblast.com

Chillblast’s Fusion Arrow makes a statement right away with its striking purple trim; turn it on and colour-matched LEDs glow through the front fan and windowed side. If purple isn’t your thing, you can switch it for red, green, blue or a bold white design, but we rather like it as is.

This compact case is well appointed, with three USB ports at the top (one of which supports SuperSpeed USB 3), twin audio jacks and an SD card reader. Round the back, the Asus H110M-A motherboard offers an additional pair of USB 3 connectors, plus four USB 2 sockets and twin PS/2 connectors for anyone still wedded to an ancient keyboard.

It’s powered by a 3GHz Core i5-7400 processor, built on Kaby Lake architecture, but the technical improvements in Intel’s latest chips are largely to do with power consumption rather than performance. In our desktop benchmarks, the Fusion Arrow achieved an overall score of 101, indicating it’s effectively no faster than a Haswell-era Core i5-4670K. Still, this is a very powerful computer that will leave almost any laptop in the dust.

It’s also a capable gaming machine. The supplied 3GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card won’t whizz through the toughest games at 4K, but its performance at 1080p impressed us. In Metro: Last Light Redux, with all detail settings set to high, it kept up a slick 53fps. That represents enough power to keep you gaming for several years to come.

One point worth noting, though, is that the Fusion Arrow comes with “only” 8GB of DDR4 memory. That’s plenty for almost any modern workload, but there are no spare DIMM slots. Finally, storage comes in the form of a 250GB SATA SSD and a 1TB Seagate data drive. It’s an unremarkable provision, but there’s an M.2 slot on the motherboard if you want to upgrade later.

The Fusion Arrow isn’t a groundbreaking PC, but it comes with the best warranty here and has enough power to eat up desktop applications and games alike.

KEY SPECS 3GHz Intel Core i5-7400 8GB RAM GeForce GTX 1060 graphics 250GB SATA SSD 1TB hard disk 5yr RTB warranty (first 2yrs C&R) 195 x 375 x 390mm (WDH)

“While the Enigma K2’s specs are similar to the Chillblast, the machine itself is physically quite different”