Yoyotech Warbird i650cs review

Yoyotech’s Warbird i650 is insanely powerful. For your £700, you get a dual-core Core i5 processor, overclocked from 3.2GHz to 4GHz. An appropriately massive heatsink stuck on top ensures it doesn’t get too hot, while front and rear case fans ensure good airflow across the motherboard. Surprisingly, the system emits little more than a muted hum under normal working conditions.

As you’d expect, the Warbird did incredibly well in our benchmarks, helped out by its 4GB of RAM. The overall score of 144 makes this one of the fastest computers that we’ve ever seen, and capable of dealing with any job you throw at it. It’s faster than quad-core Intel Core 2 and AMD Phenom II-based PCs.

Graphics performance is similarly as good thanks to the powerful 1GB ATI Radeon HD 5750. This DirectX 11 graphics card managed 67.2fps in our Call of Duty 4 test and 32.9fps in our demanding Crysis test. High-resolution, high-detail gaming is easy for this PC. As with other cards in this range, you can drive up to three monitors (one of the three has to be DisplayPort) in Eyefinity mode to play a game across multiple screens.

The supplied 22in LG Flatron W2254TQ monitor has a native resolution of 1,680×1,050. While we would have preferred a full HD 1,920×1,080 model, this monitor is very high quality. We found the image was bright with accurate colours, and generally pleasing to the eye, while its base is sturdy and easy to adjust. It has DVI and VGA inputs, and is HDCP compliant. Using an adaptor, you can use the DVI input for HDMI devices, such as a Blu-ray players.

We were impressed to find an Asus P7P55D LE motherboard, a cut-down version of the Asus P7P55D Deluxe, one of our favourite P55 motherboards. This incarnation doesn’t have as many features; for example, it has fewer PCI-E x16 slots, uses a different variant of Asus’s motherboard power system and only supports dual graphics cards using ATI’s CrossFireX standard, rather than both ATI and Nvidia’s dual-card configurations. However, this is still an impressive motherboard with an excellent reputation for stable overclocking.

It has a pair of PCI-E x16 slots, two PCI-E x1 slots (one of which is completely blocked by the graphics card) and three PCI slots. In short, there’s enough room for almost any component upgrades you fancy, within the capabilities of the 500W power supply. There’s plenty of room to add drives to supplement the DVD writer and 500GB hard disk, too, with four free SATA ports, three spare 5.25in bays and six free 3.5in bays. Helpfully, all the free bays come with clip fittings, so you’re not even obliged to fiddle around with screws to add new drives. The motherboard even has an eSATA port on the back, so you can connect fast external storage.

Although nothing remarkable, the Viewsonic wireless keyboard and mouse set are perfectly functional, despite a slightly rough texture and clunky feel to the keys. In short, there’s nothing to fault on this system – it’s the best performing £700 PC we’ve ever reviewed. The Warbird i650 is, without any doubt, our Best Buy.