Yoyotech Warbird RS1 review

1 / 3

The Yoyotech Warbird RS1 is a surprisingly compact gaming PC with a hugely powerful Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 graphics card. Not only that, the PC also comes with a quad-core Intel Core i5-4670K processor that’s been overclocked to an impressive 4.2GHz with the aid of an Enermax air cooler. We were pleased to find that the cooler and the rest of the system was fairly quiet, even under heavy load. The sound it does produce is more of a faint buzz than a whisper. The 3GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 graphics card also proved surprisingly quiet, and its fans barely rose in volume, even when we played Crysis 3.

You’re unlikely to get a larger card than the GeForce GTX 780 in the case because of a set of fixed drive cages, but then there are few cards that will require more space.

The Warbird RS1 performed extremely well in our benchmark tests, which is hardly surprising given its specification. It produced an overall score of 125 in our application benchmarks, and put in a particularly strong performance in the challenging multitasking portion of our tests.

The graphics card is no slouch either, and blasted its way through our Dirt Showdown benchmark test with an average frame rate of 102.2fps at a resolution of 1,920×1,080 with graphics quality set to Ultra. It also scored an equally impressive 57.8fps in our retired Crysis 2 benchmark.

In our new Crysis 3 benchmark test we saw average frame rates of 34fps with graphics quality set to Very High and 50fps with graphics quality set to High. The GeForce GTX 780 can handle up to four monitors in Nvidia Surround mode, and has two DVI, one HDMI and one DisplayPort outputs. The supplied 620W PSU provides plenty of power for the existing configuration, but if you want to add a second graphics card you should install a more powerful power supply.

The Gigabyte IF 233 case has five internal 3.5in bays and four 5.25in bays, although the lowest of these comes fitted with a removable cradle for another 3 1/2in disk. The drive cages are sturdy and fairly well designed, with tool-free clips to make fitting upgrades easier. Only one 3 1/2in bay and one 5 1/4in bay are occupied. The optical drive is an unremarkable DVD-RW unit, while the 1TB hard disk is a Seagate Barracuda ST1000DX001 hybrid drive, a hard drive with an 8GB built-in NAND flash memory cache to improve boot and access speeds. It’s a great combination that provides high capacity storage with a decent performance boost.

If you want to add more storage, there’s plenty of scope to do so, with four of the Asus Z87-K motherboard’s six SATA3 ports still vacant. There are also two unused memory slots. You’ll want to fit fast RAM when you upgrade, though, as the two 4GB modules currently fitted run at 2,133MHz. As far as expansion slots go, the Z87-K has more PCI slots than you’d expect or need these days. All three are vacant and accessible. There are also two PCI-E x1 slots, although one of these is blocked by the graphics card. The other is squeezed between the CPU cooler above and the graphics card below, but you shouldn’t have too much difficulty fitting most expansion cards. Finally, there are two PCI-E x16 slots, one of which holds the graphics card, while the other is vacant. Note that the latter actually runs at x4.

As you’d expect from a high-end PC, there’s a USB3 port on the Warbird RS1’s front panel. This connected to a USB3 header on the motherboard. Also on the front panel is a standard USB port and 3.5mm analogue microphone and headphone connections. At the back of the system you’ll find another two USB3 ports, which is fewer than we’d like, four more USB ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port and three 3.5mm analogue audio inputs that provide up to 5.1 surround sound.

The Warbird RS1 compares well with recent high-powered Haswell-based systems such as the Chillblast Fusion Kestrel and Vibox Black Legion, but we’d prefer a separate SSD and mechanical hard drive. Even so, the Warbird RS1 PC is still an excellent gaming PC.