YoYoTech Intel Spartan 300 Gaming System

 

With the only other pre-built system tested recently at Overclock3D coming in at nearly double the price of the YoYoTech Spartan 300, it would be somewhat unfair to place the two systems head-to-head. Therefore, in the testing over the next few pages we will be assessing the Spartan on its ability to run the latest games while also performing some traditional benchmark tests for good measure. The test suite used can be seen below:

 

 

As mentioned earlier in the review, the Spartan 300 comes with the option of being pre-overclocked by YoYoTech. As you can see from the CPU-Z screenshots below, our system was overclocked to just under 3.5GHz from a stock speed of 2.53GHz using an FSB of 368MHz and with a reasonable vcore of 1.445v set in the BIOS.

 

 

What the untrained eye may not see however is that the CPU used inside our test system is in fact an Intel Engineering Sample (denoted in CPU-Z as (ES)). This, we’re sure is certainly not something YoYoTech will be providing in all of their customers machines  (as Intel would most certainly have something to say about that), so it will be interesting to hear how it found its way into ours.

 

Official reply from YoYoTech:

 

 

 

Being a pre-overclocked system great attention needs to be paid to the stability of the machine under high loads for extensive periods (Gaming etc..). For this reason we subjected the Spartan 300 to 12hrs worth of OCCT and ATITool artifact scanning. At the end of the test, the system had pretty much heated the entire OC3D office, but impressively hadn’t shown any signs of instability or artifacting.

 

However, the Spartan wasn’t completely without fault. Whenever booting the system from cold we would be presented with spinning fans and a blank monitor. Powering the system off and back on again then booted into the BIOS where we was told that the motherboard had recovered from “failed overclock settings”. Shutting down and restarting for a 3rd time finally allowed the system to boot into Windows while still using the overclock settings configured by YoYoTech.

 

To us this seemed more of an issue with the MSI motherboard than anything else. While the system was perfectly stable once it had booted into Windows, the P43 Neo-F just seemed unhappy about powering on at anything other than stock settings. Hopefully this is something that YoYoTech will be able to easily address and prevent from happening on customer machines.

 

 

Of course, we couldn’t let the chance to overclock an Engineering Sample E7200 pass us by, so with a quick delve into the BIOS we managed to push the chip up to 3.66GHZ before OCCT started failing on us.

 

 

Now let’s move on to some benchmarks and see if the Spartan is worthy of its title as a gaming system…