Asus assures us that future BIOS updates will add support for all of the Core i7's overclocking features. That's nice to know, but we'd certainly recommend you check the status of those updates before you buy.

Of course, Fi7epower comes kitted with all the latest drivers, so that's not an immediate issue. Nor does it have an impact on the performance of this PC, which frankly, is little short of sickening.

Fastest consumer CPU ever

Perhaps that is nothing less than you would expect for a factory overclocked Core i7 PC running at 3.73GHz. But we still didn't expect the utter decimation of the competition it doles out in the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark for which it was purpose-built.

Before the Fi7epower came along, the fastest system on the planet was powered by an exotic eight-core UltraSPARC processor that scored 85.5 points in the peak integer rate test. The half-priced Yoyotech blows it away with a phenomenal score of 130.

It also breaks the record for the peak floating point rate test with a score of 88.3. The fact that the SPEC CPU2006 test takes no less than three days to complete also speaks volumes about the stability of this PC.

As for our regular benchmarks, it's a similar story of devastating speed. In our X264 video encoding benchmark, for instance, it's not far off twice as fast as a stock-clocked system running Intel's previous £1,000 CPU, the Core 2 QX9770 Extreme Edition.

Fast as this rig is, however, that massive sticker price is hard to justify. We'd recommend knocking the memory down to 6GB for starters. It won't make any difference to real world performance and will save you a few hundred quid.

Of course, this is a Yoyotech PC, so you can tweak the specification to suit your every whim - most importantly your sense of value. Everything from the beastly Coolermaster chassis downwards is essentially an option.

The added extras...

Triple whammy
One of the only significant shortcomings of Intel's Core 2 chips compared to AMD's processors is the old school memory controller located on the motherboard northbridge chip. With the Core i7, Intel has shot straight past AMD by not only shifting the memory controller onto the CPU die, but also adding a third channel. The result is speeds of 18GB per second and miles more bandwidth than any other PC platform.

Double trouble
Thanks to a change of policy from Nvidia, the X58 is the first non-Nvidia chipset to support the SLi multi-GPU platform. However, individual motherboards do have to be licensed by Nvidia, which is why the Yoyotech's Asus P6T board is SLi compliant but Intel's own X58 offering is not. For what it's worth the P6T is the first motherboard to support both SLi and AMD's competing Crossfire tech.

Chunky chip
Intel's Core i7 processor is a massive performer, so it's no surprise to find it sitting in a big new CPU socket. Of course, the requirement for the new LGA 1,366 socket is more about supporting architectural changes including the on-die memory controller and Quick Path Interconnect. But the sheer physical heft of both the socket and the CPU package is a nice reminder of the raw engineering that Intel has put into its new platform.

Not exactly a northbridge
Although Core i7 has many more on-die features than Intel's existing Core 2 processors, remnants of the northbridge chip remain. The X58 chipset retains an input/output hub chip that links the CPU to PCI Express graphics cards and also southbridge peripherals courtesy of Intel's new 25.6GB/s Quick Path Interconnect. Mainstream versions of Core i7 due next year get a new chipset that ditches the northbridge altogether.

Premium package
Along with the fabulous Core i7 processor, Yoyotech has packed the Fi7epower MLK1610 with pretty much the finest components on the planet. Intel's peerless X25-M drive provides awesome storage performance. Meanwhile, AMD's awesome Radeon HD 4870 X2 handles the 3D rendering duties. But it's the attention to detail with quality peripherals like the modular Coolermaster PSU that really marks out a Yoyotech PC.