PC Specialist Fusion Pro R
Not the most refinedref laptop, but it offers plen plenty of power and excellent batteryba life for a great price
SCORE
PRICE £916 (£1,099 inc V VAT) from f pcspecialist.co.uk/revi pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews
In a Labs dominated by high-end laptops with high- end specs and matching price tags , it’s almost a relief to find something more reasonably priced. True, PC Specialist has cut down the specification and made compromises on the chassis and the screen, but you can see it’s tried to meet the needs of creative users without driving the price out of reach. While the Fusion Pro R isn’t perfect, it hits the target more than you might expect.
There are signs of cost-cutting in the aluminium chassis, which feels like a thin shell and lacks the premium feel of more expensive devices. The lid also has more flex than we’d like, although the base feels perfectly robust. The hinge is slightly stiff, but we’d rather a new laptop started this way than with the lid flopping around.
The keyboard and trackpad carry on the general theme. Neither is as good as what you’ll find on the Razer Blade 15 or Acer ConceptD 7, but the keyboard doesn’t suffer from the common error of trying to cram a numeric pad into a compact layout, and the large, flat keys and shallow action support rather than hinder speedy typing, even if you might be wishing for something crisper with a bit more movement. The touchpad had no problem tracking motion, taps or gestures, and the integral buttons didn’t miss a click. Again, it’s not luxury, but the basic functionality is more than up to scratch.
Connectivity has its limitations. Two of the USB-A ports support USB 3.2 Gen 1, while another is stuck at USB 2. Even the single USB-C port is restricted to Gen 1 5Gbits/sec speeds rather than Gen 2’s 10Gbits/sec, and there’s no support for Thunderbolt 3. However, there’s an HDMI port and Gigabit Ethernet, while the wireless connectivity extends to Wi-Fi 6. There’s also a microSD card slot on the left-hand side.
The screen, meanwhile, has its pros and cons. On the positive side, it’s reasonably bright at 317cd/m2 , and colour accuracy is respectable with an average Delta E of 3.18. As long as you haven’t got it sitting next to high-end OLED screens (as we did), HD video looks great, with plenty of contrast and bold colour. And on the negative side? Gamut coverage is limited, at just 93.5% of sRGB, 79.5% of DCI-P3 and 68.3% of Adobe RGB. With regular stills and SDR video content, you’ll be fine, but if you’re retouching photos professionally or editing HDR video, you’ll need to invest in a laptop with superior display technology.
There’s better news when it comes to audio. While the Fusion Pro R can’t deliver convincing hi-fi tones or surround sound, there’s more body and stereo separation than you’ll get from some laptops with fancy bigname audio branding. Headphones are still a good idea for serious entertainment, but you won’t need them for everyday use.
There’s no fingerprint reader on the Fusion Pro R, but there’s an infrared camera with Windows Hello support, and the facial recognition works well. It’s a shame, though, that PC Specialist ships this laptop with Windows 10 Home as standard. Given the name, we’d expect – and want – the business-grade features of Windows 10 Pro.
If some compromises have been made here or there to hit the price point then at least the spec makes up for it. You get a six-core, 12-thread Core i7-10750H, along with 16GB of DDR4 2,666MHz RAM and a GeForce GTX 1650 GPU. The latter won’t give you the 3D horsepower of the RTX processors used in some machines, but there’s enough puff to accelerate rendering and effects in 3D and video applications, and even modern games.
In more CPU-intensive workloads, the Fusion Pro R tracks closely against more expensive laptops, including the Acer ConceptD 3 and the Razer Blade 15, but it falls behind the latter in more GPU-dependent work. If you want more performance, you’ll need to up your budget, but this laptop has all the power many creative users will need to get work done. What’s more, battery life is excellent. We enjoyed over eight hours of video playback before it ran out of juice.
As with the Acer ConceptD 3, this may not be the ultimate graphics workstation, but it gives you most of the performance you need for demanding creative applications at a much more approachable price.