YoYoTech Warbird i750CX
Overclocked CPU and dual Radeons? Ripper
Review The YoYoTech Warbird i750CX is a juiced-up version of the Warbird i750X. Both models are bare towers that come without a display, mouse, keyboard, speakers or operating system, although our review unit was supplied with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit already installed to save us the effort. Everything else is included.
YoYoTech's Warbird i750CX: it's what's inside that counts...
The i750X has an AMD ATI Radeon 5850 graphics card and a price of £800, while the i750CX combines a pair of Radeon HD 5850 cards in CrossFire mode. The power supply has been beefed up to 850W to ensure there’s plenty of juice to keep things humming along.
Dual HD 5850s have the potential to offer epic levels of DirectX 11 gaming power, provided your CPU is up to the task. This is where YoYoTech has taken a bold step by overclocking the i750CX's Intel Core i5-750 processor from 2.67GHz to 4.0GHz. In our experience, you can overclock a 'Lynnfield' Core i5/i7 or 'Penryn' Core i7 900 to 3.8GHz with the minimum of effort and 4.0GHz shouldn't be any harder.
Naturally, we wanted to see how YoYoTech had managed the overclock the CPU, so we had a look in the Bios settings of the i750CX's Asus P7P55D-LE motherboard and found the answer was very simple: the core voltage has been raised to 1.45V, while the base clock speed is set at 200MHz - 20 x 200MHz = 4.0GHz. SpeedStep has been disabled and an Asus setting, Xtreme Phase Full Power Mode, has been enabled.
...so here are the beast's innards
The 4GB of G.Skill DDR 3 memory has been clocked at its rated speed of 1600MHz but still runs at the default setting of 1.5V. As far as we can see, that’s the extent of the changes.
COMMENTS
YoYoTech Customer Service
I have had a couple of bad experiences with YoYoTech and now I will never buy another thing from them after a manager in one of their stores was extremely rude to me when I tried to return a faulty sound card...
Hero?
Did the Mrs say no then?
And just out of curiosity ..... Mini/Smart owner????
DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT
I actually ordered one of these a little while ago. I was told it would take 3-5 working days until it was finished. That seemed fair as aparently they put the system through "a long series of stress tests" and went ahead with the order around midday on a monday.
The following tuesday I had heard nothing so I gave them a call. I was put straight through to the technical dept to a person with a strong accent called Luke. He then said he would look up my order and proceeded to put me on hold.
10 minutes later I gave up, hung up and tried again. Again I was through to Luke who again put me on hold saying he was "still looking into the order status".
A few minutes went past and I was starting to get a bit frustrated when he came back saying that my system had failed during their testing and they were waiting for a new batch of motherboards which could take up to a week.
This seemed odd to me because they were still showing stock of the motherboard on their site.
I hopped on the underground to go and have a look for myself in their london store, which I found out was where they actually build the systems, contrary to what their sales staff told me on the phone!
Sure enough the motherboard was on the shelf and you can actually see half of the tech department. In all honsesty I have never seen such disorganisation with boxes, systems and components everywhere. I'm not suprised they couldnt find my system!
As I was looking at the technical department (which is towards the back of the shop),while pretending to look at keyboards. I was suprised to hear the technician Luke talking to who I would guess was the manager. Their convesation was most enlightening. They were talking about what to tell a customer who had bought a system who first had a system with a faulty graphics card, then had faulty memory and another problem that I couln't quite catch, bad CPU cooler or overheating? After a bit more "browsing" around the store they continued to talk about what to tell a customer about a system that was not dispatched in time. They came up with quite an elaborate tale about the courier not delivering the system!!
They had no intention of just telling the truth to either customer and I don't believe that there should be any reason to lie to paying customers.
It puts into question everthing that I was told about their methods of building, testing and so on..
As you can imagine having just been lied to myself, I cancelled my order, and I would advise others to tread carefully with such purchases. If their treatment of customers is that bad prior to even receiving the system, imagine what their after sales is like!?
Buyers beware! Stick to "proper", truthful companies.
Re: not bad for just over 1k
"If you're serious about building a real gaming rig, you'd opt for a pair of small SSDs in RAID 0 for your OS, and a single large (and bloomin cheap these days) SATA for storage. I can't really mentally place this in the market because of these omissions."
That is just dumb. Using SSDs for the OS, is just going to make the system boot faster. It won't make it a better gaming computer. It could, if you actually put games on the SSDs, but you preclude that by saying they should be small and for the OS. There are two types of "gaming rigs": one with stupid trinkets like blue LEDs and glo-in-the-dark video cards, and ones with actual useful stuff in them. I think you are in the market for the former.
The bigger problem, is that PC gaming is pretty much dead, due to rampant piracy. There are more titles released for consoles that PCs, and console games sell more units. I'm interesting to see what happens with the Mac game market now that Valve is putting Steam on Macs.
...no...do you call THAT a case...?
God I'd die of embarrassment if I had one of those silverstone monstrosities in the house. I'll stick with the non-descript square black box thanks.
