YOYOTech Water Dragon 940
Water Dragon 940 Appearance
Based around a Cooler Master 690 case with an L-shaped side window, it’s clear to see that YOYOTech wanted to make the Water Dragon 940 something a little more special than an ‘average’ pre-built system. Although the case can hardly be described as high-end, it’s curved appearance with meshed front and side panels is quite appealing and would be hard to dislike. For those worried about dust, you’ll be pleased to hear that only certain parts of the meshed area on the case (drive bezels and fan areas) are actually open to the elements, with most of the mesh actually being backed by plastic.
The side panel is kitted out with a Blue LED 120mm fan aligned directly beside the graphics card inside the system. As we’ve already mentioned, the case also features an L-Shaped window that conveniently allows full viewing of the CoolIT Domino LCD display (more on that shortly) and of course most of the hardware contained within.
If you happen to be one of those annoyingly observant people, then yes, that is a reflection of my Son’s shape sorter in the image below-left. Oh the unprofessionalism….
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The pièce de résistance of the entire PC has to be the CoolIT Domino A.L.C water cooling system. Although such systems are generally quite poor at keeping CPU temperatures under control (and indeed a CoolIT system reviewed on Overclock3D back in 2008 didn’t do too well) the Domino managed to keep the AMD X4 940 below 30c Idle and 45c Load (25c Ambient) throughout testing. This is pretty damn good considering YOYOTech have applied a healthy 600MHz overclock to the CPU and the Domino consists only of a single 120mm radiator with silent fan.
Finishing up with some other random hardware shots, we can see the Sapphire HD 4870 graphics card with quite a nifty non-standard heatpipe based cooler. This proved to be much much (much) quieter than the standard ATI design cooler and helped keep overall system noise to a minimum.
YOYOTech have made some excellent hardware choices inside the Water Dragon 940 with branded hardware being used in places that most system builders would cut corners with OEM parts. But how does it perform? Let’s put it though its paces over the next few pages.