Keeping a 4.0GHz Intel CPU cool doesn’t require exotic hardware, as YoYoTech proves by specifying an Akasa Freedom Tower CPU cooler. This is a regular air cooler that is closely related to the Akasa Nero that won our Core i7 Cooler round-up last year. Throughout our testing, the overclocked CPU behaved impeccably and the PC was pleasingly quiet despite having a 120mm fan at the front of the case and another at the rear.
Cooling a-plenty
The huge overclocking potential of Core i5-750, which has a retail price of £145, makes the 2.8GHz, £232 Core i7-860 look expensive. And it's a positive bargain compared to th 2.93GHz, £429 Core i7-870. In our experience, the Core i7-800 won’t clock much past the 4.0GHz mark and we don’t feel that the HyperThreading feature is worth the significant premium that Intel charges.
The system is built into a SilverStone PS02 mid-tower case which looks smart and has plenty of ventilation. However, there are mounts on the top of the case where you could add another 120mm case fan should you feel the need. On the front of the case there are the usual headset jacks and a pair of USB 2.0 ports along with the blue-lit power button and a hard drive activity light that strobes like an aircraft warning beacon.
Popping the side off the case reveals the Recom Pro Engine 850W power supply, which is mounted at the bottom of the case. It also uncovers an awful lot of empty drive bays as the basic configuration consists of a single 500GB Samsung SpinPoint F3 Sata hard drive and a Samsung SH-S223C DVD writer. There’s plenty of room to install a 2TB data drive and a Blu-ray Rom drive at some point in the future.
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.
