Yoyotech Redback N5
A brilliant showcase for the Ryzen 7 1700, the Redback is powerful, well-specified and offers bags of expansion
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £1,083 (£1,300 inc VAT) from yoyotech.co.uk
Yoyotech’s newest Ryzen PC comes in a striking white Game Max Vega chassis. It’s a large case, but stylish, with smoked glass sides that show off the glowing AMD Wraith cooler. The effect is rather undermined by the large amount of empty space around it: this isn’t an underspecified PC by any means, but the windowed sides make it obvious that the internals would fit happily into a case half the size.
Still, the Vega housing definitely has its plus points. There’s space inside to add a whole stack of extra drives, and even a water-cooling system should you wish to install one. That’s not as fanciful as it might sound: we’ve seen with previous systems that high-end cooling helps Ryzen CPUs achieve their full performance potential.
It’s well connected too, with twin USB 2 and USB 3 ports at the top, and – courtesy of the Asus Prime B350 Plus motherboard – another eight at the rear. That includes four USB 3 ports and two USB 3.1 ports, supporting 10Gbits/sec connections.
Inside, the main event is an AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU. This is the most modest chip in the Ryzen 7 series, but it’s still a formidable chunk of silicon, with eight physical cores servicing 16 simultaneous processing threads. It comes at a stock speed of 3GHz, and boosts up to 3.75GHz as needed – although since all Ryzen processors are factory-unlocked, you’re free to try pushing these frequencies higher if you so desire.
It’s supported by 16GB of 2.4GHz DDR4 RAM (with two sockets left empty for future expansion, should you somehow require it) and a 250GB SK Hynix SATA SSD, alongside a 1TB mechanical data drive. Needless to say, all this makes Windows feel very nippy indeed, and the Redback achieved an excellent overall score of 240 in our desktop benchmarks. Nominally, that means it’s 2.4 times as fast as the Intel Core i5-4670K that serves as our baseline in benchmarks. It’s also more than 50% faster than the StormForce Ventus ( see opposite), with its Kaby Lake Core i7 processor – a system which, incidentally, costs £200 more.
But be warned: that headline figure doesn’t tell the whole story. With its proliferation of cores, Ryzen does extremely well at multitasking, but single-threaded performance is rather more down to earth. In our image-editing test, the Redback N5 fell behind the Ventus, scoring 127 versus the Core i7’s 141. To fall back on cliché, it’s horses for courses: if you’re dealing with a lot of multi-threaded operations then Ryzen is hands-down the better bet. For more linear workflows, Intel could still be the smarter choice.
Aside from blazing multi-core processor performance, the
“There’s space inside to add a whole stack of extra drives, and even a watercooling system should you wish to install one”
Redback N5 also delivers a decent turn of speed when it comes to gaming, thanks to an 8GB MSI “Armor edition” GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card. This is something of an overlooked GPU, inhabiting the grey area between the flagship GTX 1080 and the value-oriented GTX 1060, but it’s a powerful card. In our Metro: Last Light Redux benchmark, running at 1080p with all detail options set to maximum, it achieved a supersmooth average of 75fps; even at 2,560 x 1,440, the GTX 1070 kept up a very playable 44fps.
Only when we pushed the resolution up to 3,840 x 2,160 did things become jerky, with an average frame rate of 19fps. However, if you really want to play at 4K, you can always disable anti-aliasing; this brought the average frame rate back up to a decent 40fps, and at the pixel density of a typical 4K display it makes very little visible difference.
For the price, the Redback N5 is a hugely impressive all-rounder. Depending on your workload, desktop performance ranges from great to phenomenal, and while the graphics card isn’t the pinnacle of gaming technology, it’s powerful enough to keep you gaming in glorious HD for many years to come.
Our only real niggle comes back to the size of the case. With so much power at hand, we doubt many customers will ever need to upgrade the Redback N5 in any significant way – so you’re buying a system that’s much larger than it probably needs to be. Still, it’s aesthetically a cut above your average “gaming” case – and if you’re looking for a system that can grow into something more ambitious, the Redback N5 is the perfect place to start.