Yoyotech XDNA 760 review

Building a fast PC is easy these days thanks to the current generation of easily overclockable processors and lightning-quick graphics cards. Making that system stable, sturdy, tidy and quiet, however, is far trickier.

Yoyotech’s XDNA 760 certainly gets off on the right foot, exuding an air of quality and a range of features that will appeal to enthusiasts with money to burn. It’s all housed in a Cooler Master HAF X chassis, which is a good start. Its meshed, angular design is imposing, and build-quality is top notch, with thick side panels and sturdy metal throughout.

The front of the machine is dominated by a water-cooling reservoir and, more unusually, a Scythe Ultra Kaze fan controller. Four smart aluminium dials let you adjust the speed of fans at the front, rear, top and side of the case, while an LED screen lets you monitor processor, graphics card, hard disk and system temperatures. It’s not an essential addition, but it’ll undoubtedly appeal to tweakers.

Rather than stick with one of the under-performing pre-built units that we’ve seen from the likes of CoolIT, Yoyotech has put its own system together, consisting of a 240mm radiator in the roof of the chassis, a 12V pump towards the bottom of the case, and a reservoir occupying two 5.25in bays. The pipes themselves look striking too: they’re filled with red coolant, wrapped in black cable, and match the trio of red cold cathode tubes that illuminate the matte black interior.

Yoyotech has worked hard to ensure the rest of its machine lives up to this high standard. The modular Thermaltake power supply, cable partition and roomy motherboard tray ensure wires are barely visible at all, making fleeting appearances to plug into the relevant sockets. It’s very neat indeed.

The HAF X also sports a number of smart touches. The hard disk bays are furnished with plastic trays that allow you to fit and remove hard disks without the need for tools, and the PSU sits on a rubber pad that absorbs vibrations. Yoyotech has routed a pair of USB 3 ports from the backplate to the front of the chassis, and there are plenty of ports and sockets elsewhere: the front panel sports two USB 2 ports, plus eSATA and FireWire, while the rear provides further eSATA, FireWire and optical S/PDIF ports.

Inside, two spare DIMM sockets are still accessible behind the pair of cooling tubes that loop towards the processor, and the Asus P7P55D-E motherboard offers a single PCI Express x16, two standard PCI and one PCI-Express x1 slots. Four SATA/300 ports lie empty at the base of the motherboard, and there’s a pair of free SATA/600 sockets empty too. Three hard disk bays lie vacant and, while there are only two 5.25in bays free, they’re easy to access. Once again, clips allow the mesh covers on the front of the chassis to be removed and new optical drives to be added quickly and without fuss.