ZooStorm offers 8GB Fusion APU boxes at £229

At the top end, AMD graphic cards can cost up to £380 for the XFX Black Edition 7970, but eBuyer's latest offer is for a complete Fusion system, with 8GB of memory, for 40% less money. KitGuru opens an online account to investigate.

It's in the topsy-turvy nature of the PC marketplace that while AMD suffered a poor Q1 financial result (losing $590 million due to ‘restructuring production'), it still managed to take some market share from Intel. Almost a 1% pick-up according to Mercury data.

To the average outsider, it looks like AMD is in the midst of a complete business (r)evolution. While everything around it is in flux, it's still pushing hard against the sea of Intel Ivy Bridge launches.

While it can't compete at the high-end, it seems that it's still possible to create attractive specs at the low-to-middle price ranges.

KitGuru is not in the habit of flagging individual machines as news, but the eBuyer offer is so impressive that we wanted to ‘say it out loud' to see if it's real. So what do you get for your £229?

• AMD A6 3500 Fusion APU with Triple Core CPU
• Radeon HD 6530 graphics
• 8GB DDR3
• 750GB SATA II hard drive
• DVD Writer
• Black chassis and Warranty

While not suitable for gaming on delivery, adding something like a Radeon HD 6670 to this spec for around £50, means you'd be able to get sensible frame rates on most games – and still get change from £280.

The challenge for AMD is “How many people would have looked through eBuyer's stock list the way we did?

KitGuru says: When we see this kind of machine appear in the market, sandwiched between a Via Chromation and very old Pentium offers on eBuyer's site, we realise that AMD's ‘jab and move' approach to winning market share can win – but only if the world plus dog is actually aware of these deals.

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