Yoyotech Warbird A10 review

Housed inside an unbranded EZcool K5 case, Yoyotech’s Warbird uses appropriately red LED lights to signify the machine’s AMD components, with both the processor and graphics card made by AMD. The chassis is nothing if not plain, but it’s enlivened slightly by those LEDs and the large Yoyotech system badge on the front.

Even by midi-tower standards, it is a small chassis, and this compactness isn’t helped by the decision to mount the mechanical hard disk at the same height as the graphics card, making it difficult to manoeuvre if you plan on replacing either of these components in the future. Nonetheless, the machine is neatly wired up with good-looking cable tidies used to route the cabling around the right side of the case. It’s not a very well insulated case, however, and this is emphasised by its humming intake fan and slightly buzzy processor heatsink fan. The noise doesn’t increase under load, but it is constant and louder than we would have liked.

The motherboard has two spare USB3 headers for the PC’s front panel, which is a useful addition, and there’s the expected pair of 3.5mm jacks on the front, too. There are two more USB3 ports around the back, along with a pair of USB2 ports and three 3.5mm jacks.

The MSI A78M-E35 motherboard leaves little room for PCI expansion, with just a single legacy PCI slot accessible, tucked just below the graphics card. There is also a PCI-E x1 slot, but this is rendered inaccessible by the graphics card. There are six SATA3 connectors, four of which are still free, for further storage expansion for the likes of an SSD or extra hard disk. 

The AMD A10 A7850K Kaveri processor powers the Warbird A10. The K signifies that this is an unlocked, enthusiast’s processor, although in this PC Yoyotech has kept its stock clock speed of 3.7GHz. With 8GB of 2400MHz DDR3 RAM – coming in the form of a single 8GB stick instead of two 4GB units –  the PC’s performance in everyday tasks such as web browsing and document editing feels lightning quick, but its performance in our benchmarking tests was significantly slower than comparable Intel Core i5 processors found in other £700 desktop systems we’ve tested.

In the image conversion test it scored 76, 73 for video rendering and 70 for the multitasking test, with an overall score of 72. This is considerably slower than the overclocked Intel Core i5-4690K chips found in comparable machines made by Palicomp and Chillblast, although it perhaps doesn’t show off the processor’s full potential. The latest AMD Kaveri architecture sees significant performance gains from programs that support OpenCL programming framework, such as the latest version of Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud. It’s difficult to measure these gains in our stringent benchmarks, but the performance boost is proven nonetheless.

Gaming performance was good, thanks to the MSI Radeon 270x graphics card, which has 2GB of memory. In our Full-HD Dirt Showdown test on Ultra settings, the Warbird A10 produced an excellent 73.9fps. In the challenging Crysis 3 at High settings, it managed 30.8fps, but sometimes dropped to a stuttery 19fps during more action-packed moments. Reducing the game to Medium settings brought the performance up to a more stable 45fps with troughs of 26fps, which we’d consider just about playable.

The graphics card has two Mini DisplayPort connectors and solo DVI and HDMI ports, too, so you you won’t have a problem connecting it to the supplied Iiyama ProLite XU2390HS-B1 which, is one of our favourite 23in monitors. It has an IPS panel that produces accurate and vibrant colors and super slim bezels for added style, and is a screen we highly recommend.

There’s a single storage component in the Warbird A10, coming in the form of a 1TB Seagate SSHD. This has an 8GB SSD cache in it to boost OS boot and application start times, but it’s not as effective or as good as having a separate SSD.

The Gigabyte KM6150 keyboard and mouse set supplied with the Warbird A10 is basic but pleasant to use, with the keyboard in particular surprisingly tactile despite its lack of mechanical switches.

The Yoyotech Warbird A10 is a good £700 PC, but it lacks a little performance when compared to identically-priced PC systems running Intel Core i5 processors, which is a shame. Despite shipping with a brilliant monitor, the faster Chillblast Fusion Obelisk is the better choice.