Yoyotech Redback N5
Eight cores and more
It’s our job to point out the differences between desktop PCS, so you can pick the best one to buy. But more obvious are the similarities. Big black box on the outside. Intel processor on the inside. Add some drives, printed circuit boards and fans and you’ve got a PC. Beyond that, the devil is in the detail.
Not so with the Yoyotech Redback N5. As befits the kind of splendidly silly Star Wars character model name that brightens up our day, it comes in a spaceship-style case, with a white plastic front that wraps around to the top and full-width smoked glass sides.
Peer inside (see image below) and the LED- lit CPU fan gently illuminates MSI’S version of Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 1070 graphics card. This is mounted on an Asus Prime B350 Plus motherboard along with the brand new AMD Ryzen 7 1700 processor. It may not propel you into hyperspace, but it can certainly give Windows 10 a boost.
To make the most of these components, Windows 10 Home comes installed on a 256GB SSD. It’s on the SATA interface, though, not the faster M.2 socket that’s tantalisingly provided for an even faster drive, should you care to add one, and the accompanying 1GB hard drive is average. Still, there’s plenty of room for more storage, fans and add-ons. With two fast USB 3.1 ports included as well as six USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0 (including four ports on the top panel for easy access, see image below), you won’t be stuck when connecting peripherals.
With 8GB of memory, the GTX 1070 graphics card will give you super-smooth frame rates in any 3D game at Full HD or the increasingly popular 2560x1440 resolution. Only users who have a 4K monitor will need to reduce the quality settings from maximum. Turning off anti-aliasing should be enough, and at 3840x2160 any jagged edges on graphics are too small to see.
While the Ryzen 7 1700 processor isn’t as powerful as the 1800 (see our PC Specialist Apollo Zen review in Issue 502), it still gives you eight cores for the price of Intel’s four. Not surprisingly, its multitasking score in our usual benchmark tests blew away every Intel system we’ve ever tested, even beating a Kaby Lake i7-7700 processor by more than 70 per cent. You’d want outstanding performance from a PC costing £1,300, of course, but this is better than we’d dared to expect – even at this price.
Hold your horses, though, because in less demanding tasks the Redback N5 was about 12 per cent slower than computers powered by the i7. Depending on your technical confidence, you could try speeding things up by overclocking the Ryzen processor.
So is the Redback N5 for you? If you’re mostly into gaming, the GPU is great and the CPU is arguably more than you’ll need. If you run creative software that makes heavy use of the GPU, such as video editor Davinci Resolve, the Redback N5 could be a great-value solution.
However, if you need a lot of processing power but don’t need advanced graphics, keep your money in your pocket. But maybe we’re over-thinking this.essentially, you’re getting a processor that’s, at worst, almost as fast as anything in Intel’s consumer range, and at best much faster, plus a GPU that’s ready for anything and a nice big case to expand into.
Lightning fast, expandable and great for multitasking