Yoyotech Fi7epower Cobalt CS review

The Yoyotech Fi7epower Cobalt CS’s Intel Core i7-3770K processor has been overclocked to 4.5GHz and gained an overall score of 139 in our tests. Although we’ve seen faster overclocks that produce higher scores, including some Core i5 Ivy Bridge systems, this is more than fast enough. The overclock is aided by a high-quality Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 Pro CPU cooler, which keeps the processor’s temperature controlled, even at 4.5GHz. It’s almost silent, too, as are the front and rear case fans, making this PC quiet enough to keep in the sitting room.

Its looks are less inconspicuous. It might look like the black obelisk from the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but we’re fans of CoolerMaster’s CM 680 II case. It’s built to last, well finished and has noise dampening drive bays. The drive cages are attached in sections so you can remove four bays and leave the other two if you want to add extra cooling fans.

The PC’s GPU is a 2GB AMD Radeon HD 7870. It’s Sapphire’s overclocked edition of the card, which has a custom cooling array. This means it’s particularly quiet and can be pushed a little further in terms of performance. Its benchmark frame rates confirm this. They have the edge on a standard 7870 card. Not much, but enough to matter. In Dirt 3, we got an average frame rate of 83fps, while Crysis 2 ran at a smooth 30fps.

The rest of the PC’s components are equally high quality. The power supply is a 550W model from OCZ. The PC also has 8GB of 1,600MHz RAM, leaving two empty memory slots, and a 1TB HDD storage drive. We’re less than impressed with the SSD boot drive, though. This OCZ Agility 3 model has just 60GB of space and Windows takes up most of it, leaving just over 10GB free for you to install applications. The optical drive is a vanilla DVD-RW, so you’ll need to add a Blu-ray drive if you want to use this system for your HD movie-watching pleasure.