Yoyotech Warbird Gamer i650CS-4.2SE review

With its meshed facade and angular, sloping roof, the Yoyotech's imposing Thermaltake V9 BlacX Edition chassis certainly looks like it means business.

As an added bonus, the top panel provides two SATA/300 bays, and this is one of the only machines we’ve seen to include a front-mounted USB 3 port, even if it's achieved by routing a cable from the backplate through the top of the chassis.

Inside, the modular power supply and numerous cable ties make for a tidy case, and the tool-free clips and side-facing drive bays make adding extra hard disks easy. Helpfully, the Thermaltake Contac 29 cooler doesn't block the pair of vacant DIMM sockets, and the Asus P7P55D-E motherboard serves up a spare PCI Express x16 socket too.

There’s plenty of room to grow, then, but you shouldn’t need to think about upgrading in the near future. The system's processor - a 2.6GHz Intel Core i5-650 - is backed up by a Kingston V Series SSD as a boot drive. The result is good performance, with a decent benchmark score of 2.42, and this could be boosted even higher with a little tinkering in the BIOS. Recent systems from Chillblast and Wired2Fire have shown that Intel’s chips can be tweaked to 4GHz and still run stably.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 has popped up in plenty of systems recently, and scores like 49fps in our High quality Crysis benchmark indicate why this mid-range card has proved so popular.

The Yoyotech handled more demanding settings, too, achieving a playable 29fps in our Very High quality test run at a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080.

The rest of the specification is fine, with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3 drive for traditional platter-based storage and a Blu-ray drive for movie fans.

The monitor, an Iiyama ProLite E2208HDD, is another good choice, sporting a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 as well as minimal backlight bleed, bright, vibrant colours and sharp detail. Logitech's MK250 wireless keyboard and mouse set, meanwhile, is both comfortable and versatile.

The only fly in the ointment is noise. Most of the Warbird's system fans are quiet, but the CPU cooler was intrusively loud in our stress tests.

If you can look past this, though, there's plenty to like about this Yoyotech PC. The combination of stock-speed processor and SSD provide strong performance with plenty of headroom for more, and it's packaged with an excellent chassis and monitor.

Author: Mike Jennings