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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.
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.
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.
The hard disks are hooked up to both of the SATA3 ports on the Asus P8-Z77-V LX motherboard. There are four SATA2 ports, two of which are occupied by the front eSATA port and the DVD-RW drive. There are three unused PCI slots in to which you can press sound cards and TV tuners, one empty PCI-E x1 slot (the other is blocked by the graphics card) and a second PCI-E x16 slot, that actually runs at x4. On the back panel are four USB and two USB3 ports. There are another two standard USB ports at the top of the front panel, too. There’s not much beyond that, just the usual Gigabit Ethernet port, optical S/PDIF output, 5.1 analogue surround sound outputs and front-panel audio I/O.
The monitor is a 23.6in matt Hanns.G HL249 display with a resolution of 1,920×1,080 and VGA and DVI inputs. It’s all pretty standard stuff, but we welcomed the spacious screen. The keyboard and mouse are a no-frills Logitech wired set.
Yoyotech’s choice of a Core i7 processor in a price range where most of its rivals have opted for Core i5s should be a major point in its favour, but its overclocked performance doesn’t provide much of an edge over some overclocked Core i5s. This is a good buy if a Core i7 is your priority. Otherwise, the Chillblast Fusion Vantage is a better system overall.
