Typical price: £1,499

With Intel's Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad dominating the market place, we hardly see any AMD-based systems in our labs these days.

However, those who aren't fans of Intel still have some options – the latest being the Fusion 4870X2 from PC Specialist. It houses AMD's fastest quad-core processor and graphics card, along with 8GB of memory and a 64-bit operating system (Vista Home Premium 64) – all of which combine to create a well-balanced, reasonably priced system.

At the heart of the 4870X2 is an AMD Phenom X4 9950 CPU, clocked at 2.6GHz with 2MB of L2 cache and cooled by a third-party Titan CPU cooler.

An Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe motherboard also sits inside the case. It uses AMD's 790FX chipset, but combines it with the previous-generation AMD SB600 Southbridge. To help keep the noise down, both bridges are passively cooled by copper heatsinks, as are the voltage controllers.

Four Dimm slots sit on the board and all four are filled in this Fusion 4870X2 PC. Each slot houses a 2GB module of 800MHz Corsair XMS2 DDR2 memory, making a total of 8GB, which is the most the motherboard can support.

Needless to say, performance is impressive. It scores 5.9 across the board in the Vista Experience Index, and the PCmark05 score of 9,725 just places the Fusion 4870X2 in the top 10 fastest systems we have tested.

As you may have guessed from the 4870X2 part of its product name, it uses one of Sapphire's Radeon HD4870 X2 cards to power the graphics. Currently the fastest card available, the dual-GPU card makes mincemeat of most games, scoring 14,435 in 3Dmark06.

To make the most of the graphics, PC Specialist has included a decent monitor. The LG W2452T is a 24in widescreen TFT with a 1,920x1,200 native resolution, 10,000:1 contrast ratio and, most important for gamers, a 5ms response time.

It's a very neatly built system with all the spare cabling tied up out of the way. The In-Win GD chassis styling may leave you cold, but it's a case with plenty of room and some interesting design features. With three 5.25in and four 3.5in drive bays free there is plenty of space to add further drives at a later date. The left-hand side of the front bezel holds four USB and two audio ports along with a Firewire port.

Thanks to a terabyte of storage (two Western Digital 500GB 7,200rpm drives and the total of 8GB of Ram available), the Fusion 4870X2 makes for the perfect video-editing PC. There's an LG Blu-ray reader along with a DVD writer, while a built-in Flash card reader makes it simple to grab photos from your camera's memory card.

Considering the number of fans in the system (two 12cm in the front and rear of the chassis and two 8cm ones built into a plastic shroud keeping the graphics card cool) it's remarkably quiet – not silent by any means, but certainly not intrusive.

To add to the experience of games play or movie watching there is a Creative Soundblaster Xtreme Music audio card which supports 7.1, but the Creative Inspire T6100 speaker system only supports 5.1.

PC Specialist has obviously put a lot of thought into this system's components. The styling might not suit all tastes and it's pricey, but you get a lot for your money.