Yoyotech Warbird RS10 review: Yoyotech’s gaming beast tears apart the competition

This is not a PC for shrinking violets. It’s big, it’s bolshy, it’s about 50 times more bling than we’re used to in the refined pages of PC Pro. I’m not even referring to the neon blue 120mm fan on the side and the red backlighting of the MSI motherboard: even the twin sticks of 4GB DDR4 RAM light up.

It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to detect that this is a PC for gamers. Especially since a glance through the case window highlights the MSI GTX 960 lettering on the chunky graphics card. Despite its size, the GTX 960 sits in the middle of Nvidia’s GPUs range, and is best partnered with screens up to 1,920 x 1,080 resolution – it will struggle to play action-packed games at any higher resolution than that.

Stick to this resolution, though, and you’ll have little cause for complaint. For instance, Dirt Showdown returned frame rates of 82.3fps at Ultra quality with 4x anti-aliasing, while Tomb Raider delivered over 50fps with 2x super- sampling anti-aliasing and Ultra quality. It’s only when you play more demanding games, such as Metro with super-sampling and anti-aliasing switched on, that things slow (to just under 30fps in this case).

The gaming theme extends to the motherboard, namely MSI’s Z170A Gaming Pro. Aside from its pulsing red lights, its gaming credentials include numerous features designed for overclockers. Two PCI Express x16 slots sit vacant, along with two available PCI Express x1 slots (one x1 slot is blocked by the double-height graphics card).

Yoyotech ensures that there’s enough power for some of these extras, courtesy of the Integrator 500W PSU. It neatly arranges the cables inside the case too, so when you decide it’s time to add an optical drive – there isn’t one included – or another hard disk, everything you need is there already. In total, three internal 3.5in bays sit empty, with three vacant external bays at the top: two 5.25in, one 3.5in.

Not that running out of storage should be an immediate concern, with 1TB of storage available as things stand. Note this is a mechanical hard disk, so you might want to invest in an SSD at some point for a further boost but, even as it stands, this is one fast machine. Overall, it scored 128 in our benchmarks, which is 28% faster than our reference Intel Core
i7-2600K PC.

With all of this power, you might expect the Warbird to be a screaming banshee. Not abitofit. Yoyotech has taken great care to select quiet fans, and in general use you’ll only be able to discern a gentle, quiet hum. That does change once you push the graphics card and CPU in games for a prolonged period, but by then you should be too busy fending off alien invaders to notice.

Even when I put it through its paces in our rendering and image-processing benchmarks, it barely raised a murmur. That’s all the more impressive when you consider that the Intel processor, which has a stock rate of 3.5GHz, is overclocked to 4.4GHz. This isn’t a dangerous level for the excellent Skylake i5-6600K processor, which, as the K suffix denotes, is unlocked for just such tweaks. Each chip will have its own limit, though, and the MSI motherboard makes it easy to boost if you want to see how high your particular processor will go.

The case itself looks imposing, especially from the front where Yoyotech’s logo stares out at you (and no, unlike Alienware, this one doesn’t light up). The more interesting action is at the top, though. If you place this 480mm-tall tower on your floor, then you can easily access two USB 3 and two USB 2 ports, plus slots for SD and microSD cards. There’s even a convenient rotary volume control to mirror the power button on the right. In general, the case looks and feels high-quality. The only bum notes are those buttons, which feel cheap by comparison. The rear backplate offers another eight USB slots, six of which are USB 3. 

There’s no shortage of video outputs either, with the MSI card providing three DisplayPort outputs, one HDMI and a DVI-I port. The price doesn’t include a monitor, keyboard or mouse, but for an extra £100 inc VAT, Yoyotech is offering a bundle of a 22in Iiyama E2283HS-B1 monitor and a Zalman keyboard and mouse. With or without this bundle, you’re getting a lot of hardware for the money. This is an excellent base on which to build, but is enough to keep most people happy for several years. After a long run, it knocks the Chillblast Fusion Quasar off its A-List perch.