Yoyotech Warbird RS6 review

The Yoyotech Warbird RS6 takes its fans seriously, with three brightly-lit 120mm intake and exhaust fans the most striking features of the PC’s plain black Ezcool case. It certainly looks the part, with some sharp lines and accents on the front of the chassis, with the red LEDs leaving you with no doubt that this is a PC for someone who likes to show off, but is still on a budget.

Take the side off the case and you’ll see a relatively tidy and simple internal setup. The bundle of wires that lead to the two side-mounted case fans are less attractive, although you probably won’t spend much time looking into the case once you’re up and running. While you have to open the case to remove the protective packaging, we had to open the other side of the case because a cable had been routed into the blades of the front intake fan, stopping it from spinning. It’s a minor error but with custom PC builds, attention to detail is key.

The front of the case has two USB3 ports and two 3.5mm audio jacks, with a further four USB3 ports, two USB ports and three more 3.5mm audio jacks. The graphics card, meanwhile, has two DVI outputs and single DisplayPort and HDMI outputs, too.

Yoyotech has gone for a mid-range processor with this machine, installing a quad-core 3.1GHz Intel Core i5-4440 processor. It’s not as fast as some of the other Core i5 chips in similarly priced machines, but unless you’re going to be performing very intensive media tasks you probably won’t notice the difference. Its results in our benchmarking tests were very respectable. It managed an overall score of 87, peaking at 97 in the image-editing test and managing 87 and 84 in the video editing and multitasking tests respectively. Things ran smoothly in all of these tests, with the processor and case fans remaining relatively quiet throughout.

Graphics processing is handled by the 2GB XFX AMD R7 260X that sits in the single PCI-E x16 slot on the motherboard. It’s not the most powerful graphics card in AMD’s range, but it can handle most recent games in Full HD at moderately challenging graphics settings. Metro: Last Light wasn’t playable with graphics settings turned all the way up; the Warbird RS6 managed just 13.3fps at Very High settings in Full HD with SSAA turned on. Switching to High settings and disabling SSAA improved things hugely with a stable 35fps making for a very playable game. Dirt Showdown at Ultra settings in Full HD was a smooth 49.1fps.

Yoyotech has generously included a 120GB Patriot Blaze alongside the 1TB Seagate Desktop HDD, so quick boot times and speedy access to your bigger files is guaranteed. You may wish to upgrade to a larger SSD if you have lots of games or big files you access regularly, but the 120GB model is great for boosting startup and application load times.

There’s not a huge amount of room for expansion with this system. Its MSI H81M-E34 motherboard has been mostly filled by Yoyotech’s components, with both RAM slots, three of the four SATA connectors and the only PCI-E slot already taken. This realistically leaves you room for another hard disk if you need it and a single PCI-E x1 expansion card such as a TV tuner or wireless card.

The bundled monitor is a 24in AOC E2470SWHE. It’s a Full HD panel, although it uses TN technology instead of IPS, so images aren’t quite as pleasant to look at as they are on similar IPS screens. We were a little concerned when we saw a fair degree of motion blur with fast-moving objects moving both horizontally and vertically, so this screen probably won’t suit twitchy gamers. Still, it covers 90.9% of the sRGB colour gamut and has a good contrast ratio of 994:1 so we can’t complain too much.

The bundled Zalman mouse is perfectly adequate and looks stylish, but the Powercool keyboard is atrocious. It has patchy coloured backlighting apparently able to light up in red, blue and green colours, but our model could only manage blue and red with the green setting instead switching the backlight off entirely. It was a pain to type on as well; the keys are spongey and the board itself doesn’t have enough elevation. In short, you should avoid this keyboard and choose something else when configuring your system.

Yoyotech’s warranty is good but not exceptional: you get three years of labour cover and one year of parts, but after the first month you’ll need to pay for shipping back to the company as it’s an RTB policy rather than a more generous collect and return agreement. You can upgrade to a Gold warranty for £40, which nets you a year of collect and return and three years of parts cover, or pay £70 for Platinum cover that gets you three years of parts cover and free courier collection.

The Yoyotech Warbird RS6 is a good value and well-balanced PC build that includes an SSD and a decent monitor. Processing performance is strong for the money, and if that’s all your after then this is a great choice. Our only real concern is the lack of flexibility for future upgrades, but if that doesn’t bother you, the Yoyotech Warbird RS6 is a good choice. If this doesn’t take your fancy, our top desktop PCs list will have something that does.