A £1,500 high-performance PC, with a little extra added
Built into a monolith black tower, YoYoTech's Warbird RS12 begs you to take a closer look. And as you peer through the windowed side panel of the NZXT H440 case, you'll find plenty to like.
Forming the basis of this system is an MSI Z170A-G43 PLUS motherboard. Sitting in the CPU socket is an Intel i7-6700K Skylake processor running at 4.4GHz, and it's cooled by an NZXT Kraken X31 liquid cooler.
You also get 16GB of DDR4 YoYoTech branded memory, a 250GB Samsung EVO 850 SSD with Windows 10 Home 64-bit on it, and a Toshiba 2TB hard drive for mass storage.
The graphic on this particular monster come courtesy of an MSI GTX980ti OC Edition, an exceptional card with a base clock speed of 1102MHz. That's over 10% faster than the stock GPU speed. The boost clock speed is 1190MHz, which is over 11% faster than stock speed. The 6GB of GDDR5 isn’t too shabby either, and it helps push the Warbird’s 3DMark11 score to a pretty decent 18,909, while the PCMark8 score was an equally great 5,649.
The list of features doesn’t stop there, though, as YoYoTech has also included a Creative SoundBlaster Audigy FX 5.1 PCIe sound card, as well as the Creative A250 2.1 speaker kit. There’s even a Thermaltake Commander gaming keyboard and mouse kit, and a Creative SB Inferno gaming headset.
The PC itself is exceptionally well designed and built. We’ve mentioned the layout of the newer NZXT cases in a recent gaming PC group test, and the H440 is no exception. The large radiator for the NZXT X31 Kraken is fitted to the front of the chassis, keeping it neatly out of the way from interfering with the other components. And the 620W Seasonic EVO PSU is tucked away at the bottom behind the NZXT logo embossed power supply shroud.
This is a fantastic and high performing gaming machine, one that can easily run anything from the Steam library without breaking into a sweat. The selection of games we tested performed magnificently, never dropping below an unplayable frame-rate.
YoYoTech includes a three year warranty with the Warbird RS12. The first 30 days are free collect-andreturn; the first year covers full parts, labour and return to base; and the second and third years are labour and RTB only.
For the price, it’s certainly one of the best gaming PCs we’ve reviewed – up there with the likes of the Chillblast, PC Specialist and Falcon Computers machines we’ve had in the past. In short, the Warbird RS12 is well worth considering for your next gaming PC upgrade. David Hayward
Excellent extras, design and performance.