Yoyotech Warbird RS1 review

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.