Yoyotech Warbird RS2 gaming PC review

Yoyotech’s Warbird RS2 is a compact Micro ATX form factor gaming PC, with an eye-catching design and very strong performance in both gaming- and every day application use.

The Aerocool DS Cube case makes an appearance here, this time in a fiery red colour which matches the detailing on the twin-fans of the factory-overclocked Asus GTX780 DirectCU II graphics card. This can be clearly seen through the case’s transparent side panel.

What can’t be seen though is the 3.5GHz Intel Core i7-4770K processor lurking behind. Unlike the identical chip found in Quiet PC’s rather pedestrian Serenity Mini Gamer, this example has been wound up to 4.3GHz. Although that clock speed is 100 MHz slower than the overclocked Core i5-4670K chips we’ve seen in other recent gaming PCs, the Core i7 adds Hyper Threading support which can add a significant boost to multitasking.

Yoyotech Warbird RS2: performance benchmarks

Our performance results show that in pure computational tasks the Yoyotech Warbird RS2 is a seriously fast PC. However, its overall score falls just a tiny bit behind Core i5 systems we’ve tested recently. Furthermore, although the graphics card has been overclocked, it hasn’t been pushed quite as much as the one we saw recently used by Chillblast, so gaming framerates were slightly behind the Fusion Probe too.

These are very small performance differences, but you should keep in mind that the Yoyotech PC costs more than some of its closest rivals. At £1,360 it includes a DVD burner, but only 8GB of RAM rather than the 16GB found in other gaming PCs we’ve tested recently.

It also comes with with a 23in AOC i2369VM monitor with 1920 by 1080 pixel resolution, a high-quality IPS panel with a 5ms stated response time and built-in speakers.

A Powercool Pro Type 768 keyboard and Powercool Jm-9032U mouse are included. The former featuring multicoloured LED-illuminated keys for those late-night gaming sessions.

While this is undeniably a fast PC, the benefits of the Core i7 processor don’t really show themselves in gaming – which is what a gaming PC should be all about. So, unless you need the extra processing for other application-based tasks, you may be spending more than you need to here. (See also Group test: What’s the best gaming PC?)