To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more

Yoyotech Fi7epower Cobalt CS review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £999
inc VAT

With a Core i7 processor and a decent graphics card, this is a great performance PC, but it fails to match the range of components

Specifications

4.5GHz Intel Core i7-3770K, 8GB RAM, 23.6in 1,920×1,080 display, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

The Yoyotech Fi7epower Cobalt CS’s Intel Core i7-3770K processor has been overclocked to 4.5GHz and gained an overall score of 139 in our tests. Although we’ve seen faster overclocks that produce higher scores, including some Core i5 Ivy Bridge systems, this is more than fast enough. The overclock is aided by a high-quality Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 Pro CPU cooler, which keeps the processor’s temperature controlled, even at 4.5GHz. It’s almost silent, too, as are the front and rear case fans, making this PC quiet enough to keep in the sitting room.

Yoyotech Fi7epower Cobalt CS

Its looks are less inconspicuous. It might look like the black obelisk from the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but we’re fans of CoolerMaster’s CM 680 II case. It’s built to last, well finished and has noise dampening drive bays. The drive cages are attached in sections so you can remove four bays and leave the other two if you want to add extra cooling fans.

The PC’s GPU is a 2GB AMD Radeon HD 7870. It’s Sapphire’s overclocked edition of the card, which has a custom cooling array. This means it’s particularly quiet and can be pushed a little further in terms of performance. Its benchmark frame rates confirm this. They have the edge on a standard 7870 card. Not much, but enough to matter. In Dirt 3, we got an average frame rate of 83fps, while Crysis 2 ran at a smooth 30fps.

Yoyotech Fi7epower Cobalt CS

The rest of the PC’s components are equally high quality. The power supply is a 550W model from OCZ. The PC also has 8GB of 1,600MHz RAM, leaving two empty memory slots, and a 1TB HDD storage drive. We’re less than impressed with the SSD boot drive, though. This OCZ Agility 3 model has just 60GB of space and Windows takes up most of it, leaving just over 10GB free for you to install applications. The optical drive is a vanilla DVD-RW, so you’ll need to add a Blu-ray drive if you want to use this system for your HD movie-watching pleasure.

Pages: 1 2

Basic Specifications

Rating ***
Processor Intel Core i7-3770K
Processor external bus 100MHz (DMI)
Processor multiplier x45
Processor clock speed 4.5GHz
Processor socket LGA1155
Memory 8
Memory type PC3-12800
Maximum memory 32GB
Motherboard Asus P8Z77-V LX
Motherboard chipset Intel Z77

Ports

USB2 ports (front/rear) 2/6
Firewire ports (front/rear) 0/0
eSATA ports (front/rear) 1/0
Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Wireless networking support none

Internal Expansion

Case midi tower
PCI-E x1 slots (free) 2 (1)
PCI-E x16 slots (free) 2 (1)
Free Serial ATA ports 2
Free memory slots 2
Free 3.5in drive bays 4

Hard Disk

Hard disk model(s) OCZ Agility 3 60GB + Seagate ST1000DM003-9YN162
Interface SATA3 + SATA2
Total storage capacity 1,060GB

Graphics

Graphics card(s) 2GB AMD Radeon HD 7870
Graphics/video ports DVI, HDMI, 2x Mini DisplayPort

Sound

Sound Realtek ALC887
Sound outputs 5.1 line out, optical S/PDIF out, line out, mic in
Speakers none

Removable Drives

Supported memory cards none
Optical drive type(s) DVD+/-RW +/-DL

Display

Viewable size 23.6 in
Screen model Hanns.G HL249
Native resolution 1,920×1,080
Screen inputs DVI, VGA

Other Hardware

Keyboard Logitech K120
Mouse Logitech M-U0026

Software

Software included none
Operating system Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Operating system restore option Windows disc

Buying Information

Warranty three years RTB
Price £999
Details www.yoyotech.co.uk

Read more

Reviews