Yoyotech Piranha A866se review

So it’s hit and miss performance-wise from the Piranha, but it does at least come in a fine-looking case. The X7 is manufactured by Gigabyte, but sports a shiny Yoyotech badge, and the matte black finish and red borders complete a stylish look.

Build quality is fine for a budget chassis, even if the interior is all bare metal, with nothing as fancy as a motherboard tray. Cables run in neat straight lines up and down the chassis, with some hidden behind drive bays. Upgrade space is decent, with four hard disk bays, three 5.25in bays and a single front-facing 3.5in bay vacant, and they’re all tool-free.

The basic Asus F1A75-M LE motherboard provides the usual expansion paths, too, with single PCI-Express x1 and PCI sockets free beneath the graphics card, and a pair of DIMM sockets unimpeded by the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev. 2 processor cooler.

The modest specification ensures you’ll hear little noise. The combination of processor heatsink and small graphics card fan make for a system that’s extremely quiet when idle, and barely any louder at peak. This also heralds an impressive maximum temperature of 65°C from the overclocked APU.

By now we’ve established through a range of reviews that AMD’s Fusion is better at graphical tasks than they are at raw application speed, and this PC is no different. Llano can’t match most Core i3 processors, but it’s efficient and the ability to combine its integrated GPU with a cheap discrete card is intriguing. It’s perfectly suited to a small, media-focused PC.

That, however, is not what this PC is, and in the realm of mid-range desktop PCs the Yoyotech Piranha simply doesn’t stand out. It’s not a bad all-round system, but for similar money you can get an Intel PC with discrete graphics that easily outperforms it. Most people will go for that.