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When we opened the Yoyotech Warbird 3570XTI, we had to double check we hadn’t got the case upside down. This is because the motherboard tray is mounted on the left side of the case rather than the right. Although this might not be traditional, it certainly works well here. The Warbird 3570XTI was one of the quietest overclocked Ivy Bridge PCs we’ve seen yet. That’s despite having four 120mm case fans and a tower-style third-party CPU cooler to help keep temperatures down.
These are all needed, because Yoyotech has overclocked the Intel Core i5-3570k processor to 4.5GHz, providing a huge performance boost over stock-clocked machines. With its 8GB of RAM, it blitzed our multimedia benchmarks with an overall score of 143, suggesting very few applications will slow it down. The 64GB SSD boot disk certainly helped, speeding up file access and transfer times over a traditional hard disk. There’s also a secondary 1TB hard disk for storing your multimedia files, so you won’t run out of space in a hurry.
If you’re looking for a gaming PC, you’ll be happy to know the Warbird 3570XTI has an Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 TI installed. It isn’t a current generation card, but it’s a proven performer. It completed our Dirt3 test with an average 61.6fps. Newer games will trouble it slightly, as shown by our Crysis 2 test. An average frame rate of just 18.2fps means you’ll have to reduce detail settings for the latest titles.
Once you get your head around the reversed design, there’s a reasonable amount of room for expansion inside the midi tower case. Three empty 5.25in external drive bays let you add extra optical drives should the included DVD re-writer prove insufficient, although the two empty 3.5in internal bays may be a little restrictive if you need extra storage. Only two of the four RAM slots are occupied, so you can add more memory, and there are three empty PCI slots, one PCI-Express x1 and a PCI-E x16 slot to choose from if you want to fit an expansion card.
On the outside, a simple front-facing I/O panel contains two USB ports and two 3.5mm audio jacks. This sounds basic, but we were very happy to find that one of the USB ports supports the faster USB3 standard. There’s much more around the back, too, with four USB ports, two USB3 ports, one PS/2 port, three 3.5mm audio jacks and a digital optical output. There’s also VGA, DVI and HDMI video outputs for the integrated GPU, but these are superfluous if you’re using the dedicated graphics card.
Yoyotech sells the Warbird 3570XTI as a base unit only or with an Asus VS247H monitor. It’s a 23.6in LED-backlit panel with a 1080p resolution, making it the ideal upgrade for an older display. VGA, DVI and HDMI inputs provide plenty of flexibility, in case you want to connect additional hardware to the same screen as your PC.
Overall, there’s very little not to like about the Warbird 3570XTI. The SSD boot disk helps speed up Windows and the overclocked processor is easily fast enough for today’s demanding applications. However, the Palicomp Alpha Excite has a faster graphics card and a Blu-ray optical drive for £10 less. If you prefer gaming performance to boot times, it may be a better choice.
