Yoyotech Water Dragon 940 gaming PC

We were recently impressed by Chillblast’s Fusion Stinger, an overclocked Core i7 gaming PC. Intel’s Core i7 processor is a lot faster than AMD’s Phenom II, so when we received the Yoyotech Water Dragon 940 we expected its benchmark results to be below the Stinger’s. But it actually managed to top the Stinger in gaming performance.

At the heart of the Water Dragon 940 sits one of AMD’s Phenom II X4 940 processors, which has a default clock frequency of 3GHz. In the Water Dragon, this processor is running at 3.6GHz, thanks to a neat water-cooling installation using a Cool IT Domino ALC.

The CPU sits in a Sapphire Pure 790GX motherboard, based around AMD’s 790GX/SB750 chipset combination and 4GB of Corsair TwinX PC6400 800MHz DDR2 memory. This isn’t as fast as the DDR3 memory and Intel X58 chipset combination in the Stinger, with the Water Dragon scoring 5,542 in PCmark Vantage compared with the Stinger’s 6,632.

However, the Water Dragon’s secret weapon is a Sapphire Radeon HD4870 card, with 512MB of GDDR5 memory, superior to the Radeon HD4850 in the Stinger. This gave it an overall 3Dmark06 score of 17,024 and an overall score of 9,559 in the more demanding 3Dmark Vantage Performance benchmark.

All this hardware sits in a Coolermaster 690 case with a 320GB Samsung Spinpoint hard disk and a 22-speed DVD burner. The build quality, cable management and water-cooling setup are professional and eye-catching.

For general tasks, the Water Dragon may be outperformed by Chillblast’s Fusion Stinger, which only costs an extra £84, but it’s better at gaming. However, if you upgrade the video card for the Stinger, it will outperform the Water Dragon.