One of the Best - Skytech Chronos $1950 Pre-Built Gaming PC Review & Benchmarks

way unnecessary amount of force way way way too much you that's awfully lazy man look at that jesus does that look as bad on camera as it does in real life allegedly 80 plus gold allegedly power supply the method to remove the glass is this well i don't have any major complaints so good job skytech [Music] we think we finally got another system that's acceptable it's in the it's better than dell camp but also in the we can probably recommend this camp so we've been looking at pre-built pcs and the only one we found so far that was mostly acceptable something we could reasonably recommend was the abs challenger that's a new egg house brand system was pretty good overall and as long as you never need new eggs help or support then you're in good shape as long as the system ships functional this is the skytech kronos it is also in the abs challenger camp where it's something we can mostly get behind we'll talk about some of the downsides but overall it's very promising and uh that is sadly a lot of praise because not only did it work when we turned it on which is a very high bar we know uh also it wasn't complete garbage so we're gonna be going over the skytech chronos and we'll look at how this system performs overall and how it's built before that this video is brought to you by be quiet and the silent base 802 case the silent base 802 got high accolades in our review for its high build quality and its versatility in both sides focused and airflow focused built the 802 comes with swappable mesh panels or noise damped panels so you have options for either approach the silent base 802 case is able to fit larger builds as well without being overbearing and it stands out for its mechanics quality and assembly quality learn more about be quiet's new case at the link in the description below okay so a couple things here as stated skytech they do seem to have been around for a little while but uh up until about two or three months ago we had never heard of them so skytech's a relatively small-ish system integrator as opposed to an oem like dollar hp that means they're maybe in more direct competition with cyber power highway power companies like that main gear where you are paying for for known branded parts from companies like asrock evga asus to then be assembled into a box as opposed to dell or hp where they take so much pride in making sure that they have a certain threshold of garbage that they can reach they want to make sure the dumpster is really stacked before they light it on fire and so that's why dell hp lenovo will self-brand components like video cards and motherboards and build in weird proprietary form factors that are completely unserviceable uh sis can run a little more expensive but you get parts that are closer to pc diy so maybe more familiar if you are someone who builds computers and that means you're probably in a position where either you're just tired of building computers you want to buy one or you're recommending something for family friend uh so forth as a reminder as we get into this we buy all these pre-belts with our own money they are starting to cost a lot at two thousand dollars so thank you very much to those of you who have purchased things like our mouse mats the wireframe mouse mounts are hugely popular they're in stock and shipping now and that's what helps us continue to buy these things out of pockets that we can get the true customer experience and we also have things like mod mats shirts and various other items thank you for your support because that's what makes it possible to keep buying pre-built that are sometimes questionable although this one isn't too bad this box overall just externally is promising looking this is why we bought it because we kind of looked through the listings our goal as a reminder when buying pre-built is to buy something without modification we want to buy one that the company has recommended to its customers so that we can test them as they are shipping the bulk of their orders this was recommended by skytech it did not get any modifications in check out from us and we picked it because it looked like it would probably be a reasonable thermal performer if nothing else as for the specs the skytech chronos 0136 that we bought has an amd r5 x it has a wraith prism cpu cooler it's got a b550 motherboard they don't promise a specific model in the checkout page it has 16 gigabytes of ddr4 3200 as promised we actually got 3600 we'll talk about that more later and it's two sticks that's right someone's figured out you can finally use more than one of the the four ram slots that are in a motherboard that's where we are now that's that's our bar they've the sis and oems have really beaten us into submission on what we expect out of a computer gpu is an amd rx 6800 it's a reference board reference cooler and everything there's one terabyte nvme ssd 650w 80 plus gold power supply they don't promise a specific model and then one year of included tech parts labor and shipping support a couple quick methodological reminders not going to go through the whole methodology for testing but the social side is important which is that we make sure to the best of our ability we obscure who's buying the computers when we buy them so it's very unlikely that most of these companies will be able to figure out it's coming to us the reason we do that is because we want to make sure they're not adding extra steps and having their best person pull a system out of the line and inspect it before shipping it we want to be treated just like every other customer so we do take measures to try and prevent them from knowing who's buying it we're not going to go through all those we don't want the manufacturers to know what they are additionally we're looking at systems in certain pricing brackets now we have moved up so we had a 680 system that we looked at from iowa power it shipped in pieces not by design like it was very broken and then we also looked at a bunch of systems the 900 to about 1100 range the biggest thing for you to think about as we go through this review is going to be value keep in mind it's 1950 usd it has a 5600 x it's about 300 if you buy it standalone and has a 6800 whose msrp is 580 bearing in mind that msrp is you know the deal at this point so let's get started with the teardown and then we'll talk about conclusions the system itself seems promising so it's already been through testing now we just need to take it apart the front panel has that fractal inspired design there's a few problems with the case itself in fact patrick's notes on this when we get one of these in we'll take turns going through it compile notes that we can each compare and his notes said i generally hate this case and uh i don't need to look too far to find out why we'll go through some of that as we take it apart more but just some small detail stuff their panel coloring isn't even close not sure how well it shows up after our camera attempts to correct for the white but the front panel's got this nice pre-aged yellow on it like it's been left in the sun for a couple of months and then the rest of it is more of a closer to white value and that's just it's when you go from metal to plastic it is hard to match but most case companies have figured out how to do it properly because they spend actual money on their case additionally found a problem here right away where we've got this really nice modern haptic feedback approach to the left solid steel side panel check this out and this happens because the threads aren't deep enough it seems although once i take it off on though for the screw to get in there and actually secure it so it's actually this screw is doing almost literally nothing at this point so that's nice too good design work by whatever team through this case out of the back of the truck that it was supposed to be delivered on another nice feature of this case that patrick in particular really hated and i've yet to experience is the removal of the side panel so when we do these tear downs i handle the physical hardware aspect of it while patrick gets the initial testing in so that one of us is isolated from uh developing opinions on it so that we can show them on camera and there's a there's actually no way to get this glass panel off once you've taken the screws out so the panel is an inset including at the back there's no glass being exposed to really grab at and remove and that means the method to remove the glass is this which seems not great i'm glad this one is one of the ones that doesn't shatter as soon as a small load is applied to it but that would have been good on camera too once we get inside of the case we're past most of the things that can be truly awful and on to the components other people make uh other than game dias that is and in this instance we've got a ryzen 5600x we have an amd reference board video card i mean at this point it's they have their own problems but it's not really skytech's problem and there's three fans at the front so potential for good airflow or cooling depending on the strength of those fans we have one in the back for exhaust a decent amount of air from this front one is going to make its way up and out before making it to the cpu cooler but that's okay because overall you're gonna get most of it to the cpu cooler patrick noted to me that uh some of the front panel usb 3 headers were not functioning when he was working on the system for review so we're suspicious that maybe removing that 3.0 header is going to reveal some bent or smashed pins but we'll see if that's not the case then it means there's something bad up here in this pcb let's take the back side off see how that looks before we tamper with the cables further just to make sure they haven't done something lazy and stuffed at all in this screw is cross threaded that's not great this one down here that's in at an angle like that so that's someone at the factory not lining it up properly before going to town with auto drive screwdriver oh man that's kind of nasty actually check that out look at that jesus does that look as bad on camera as it does in real life bent side it's like bent at a 15 degree angle how do you bend a flat steel panel with a hole in it like that so this is clearly too much torque the torque setting is not not bottoming out before they do that probably the biggest detractor to anything here is that power supply the game dias p1650g allegedly 80 plus gold allegedly power supply is down there uh kill management looks pretty good they could have left this a complete disaster and really unless you ever opened it you'd never know let's get the tool kit out we're doing all of our work on the gn modmat you can grab one of these on store.gamersex.net we have the next shipment due to arrive in about september mid-september i think is what we're expecting right now so you can grab that on the store they sell out very fast if you want to get one you can get a back order in that'll guarantee you get one okay let's take the let's go for the video card this case really is garbage tier quality it's uh it's not good but especially at two thousand dollars just as a reminder of this computer wow jesus the usb header seems okay which tells me that the dysfunctional port is either a missing driver which he's probably checked or more likely a defective port electrically or mechanically or defective pcb electrically alloy memory which we have encountered before mostly in pre-built these are single-sided dimms the other side's just foam way unnecessary amount of force way way way too much oh gee that feels very not great you can definitely have too much force in these now these are spring tension screws so they're gonna fortunately these are naturally built to resist what the assembler is trying to do to the motherboard there's a protection mechanism built in so a little too much torque on the cpu i think that's our biggest problem right now is they need to do some training on consistent torque and that's how you do it so this is a more or less amd cooling solution not a skytech one and that means that the corners of the cpu go uncovered so it does squish the paste out there but there's no contact so that that could be better that's on the cooler side got a copper slug in there though that's good it's better than the aluminum only ones i feel like i'm doing something wrong because i i haven't had like at least one meltdown as to their assembly quality at this point so skytech you're confusing me it's kind of like abs the other system that was actually built competently where we've seen so many incompetent builds now like dell cyber power and highway power systems we reviewed that i i actually become i don't know what to do with myself when it's built like it should be having trouble right now do people still care if it's not terrible i think so because we want to find things that don't suck so we can actually recommend them hopefully this is one of those things i think that's it i think i think the tear down's done well i don't have any major complaints so good job skytech you get the no major complaints award now we need to get into the performance the thermals and everything else acoustics see how it does from that angle of things probably the most important angle we'll quickly look at thermals now the skytech system's reset button is actually a fan speed button it has three speeds they're minimum medium and high minimum was the default configuration though so we prioritized that for thermal testing in a full system workload on the cpu and the gpu the cpu ended up at about 80 degrees celsius t-dot that's completely fine and far better than the throttling results of some of the other cpus with some of the other pre-builts that we've tested recently the gpu was at about 70 degrees celsius for both the core and the memory here as for the motherboard that one plotted around the 40s for whatever vrm thermals were being reported by hardware info and the sensor overall all these numbers are fine to good and the switch can bring fan speeds up as necessary but it seems like it's able to handle just fine and it's minimum speed configuration for the workload that we threw at it next up is gaming as usual gaming benchmarks mostly tell us the performance of the silicate and that's handled by nvidia intel or amd not the system integrators or the oems in this instance though skytech is responsible for one key thing and that's the combination of silicon and assembling a build in a way which doesn't unnecessarily hinder itself we'll start gaming off with cyberpunk 2077. in this one the skytech kronos pc instantly claims a new top spot it's the most expensive so it should but it also puts the aurora r10 to utter shame given its muriat other issues and the beast canyon knock has only the benefit of size but clearly loses in value the skytech system holds 141 fps average here with lows spaced appropriately that's a lead of 23 over the aurora r10 for only 7.7 percent more money if you want to look at it that way that's far better value than we saw lower down the stack where it was closer to a one-to-one gain and dollars to percent performance uplift it still doesn't feel good paying nearly double what the cpu and the gpu alone are worth for the computer and skytech isn't doing any favors here either but relative to the others at least it's scaling well it'd make more sense for a 5800 or better to be in the system at the price so alienware does get a positive mention for that but the rx 6800 in this is really what's carrying the weight for skytech there was no difference from enabling 3600 memory speeds here much of this is the auto timing trade-off and so you just leave it stock as long as it's configured to how it was shipped to us in rainbow six siege the kronos blasted an impressive 446 fps average at its best that's ridiculous clearly only made more ridiculous that even a computer which is literally falling apart is able to maintain 140 fps average in this game that'd be the i buy power one it's all relative though at 446 fps average skytech out does alienware's r10 by 30 in exchange for again about eight percent more money or so that'd be an embarrassment for alienware but then that have required alienware's r10 having any dignity left to lose to begin with the abs challenger is a good competitor from a value perspective it's clearly fully capable of gaming at in this game 200 fps average with these settings and it's the only system at its price class that we tested with two sticks of at least half decent memory that's the secret that allowed abs challenger to run a 151 fps 0.1 percent low dodging many of the latency spikes or the frame-to-frame interval spikes more appropriately that hits to those with worse memory configurations it's sad that a second stick of ram is somehow still a mystery to many of these pre-built manufacturers but until it's not it's an advantage that these few good computers have so far skytech and abs look best on this chart for overall value and performance intel does fine but it's too expensive even in spite of its form factor changing the memory setting didn't help skytech at all again you can just leave it stock at 1440p we became gpu bound as the limits close in around it the skytech system shows that there's still headroom yet thanks to the 6800 out doing every other gpu on this chart and so it leaves the alienware r10 system behind with a 21 lead for skytech or it leads the intel beast canyon with the 3060 by 58 to be clear nvidia makes extremely competitive cards at the high end too but none of the builds we've bought yet leverage them and so the rx 6800 ends up the highest end we've found for under two thousand dollars yet uh we will however see if we can find something with a 30 80 or maybe a 30 70 sometime in the near future hitman 3 is where we'd see a difference emerge from the memory configuration if ever we will as we test this game it's highly memory and cpu dependent and the skytech chronos ended up at about 126 fps average with lows at 53 and 36 for the stock build or about 124 fps average with xmp 3600. the lows were within variance and ultimately the takeaway is that this particular kit in this configuration doesn't yield much of a difference between these two options that's because the timings would need to be more manually controlled and tuned and just flipping the frequency to a higher number won't really do much for you the board will compensate and it'll loosen timings even those which aren't exposed to you when left to auto anyway the r10 here does much better than previously so comparatively uh it's more competitive that's thanks to its r75800 rather than the r55600x that's in the skytech box the 5600x and the rx 6800 combination is still the better performer overall and on average but the gap evaporates as the extra two cores and four threads do work on hitman 3's heavy physics simulation in the benchmark in fact the kronos has worse 0.1 lows here than either beast canyon or the r10 that's from less consistent frame to frame intervals resulting in performance that exhibits the occasional stutter but it's really not too bad it's not experience ruining but again it's a disadvantage of the way skytech chose to configure the system it's all trade-offs of course they're doing better in gpu bound stuff but they're sacrificing a bit in the cpu we'll close the gaming specific tests with red dead two the kronos ran at a massive 45 lead over the r10 or 78 over the beast canyon neck at least as it's configured price for price that's enough to establish a dominant force and the abs challenger remains a good option for the more sort of budget oriented buyer it's still sort of mid-range e in price but it's one of the best systems we've found so far especially in the 1000 or cheaper class noise when moving on to noise levels as left auto configured we measured the skytech kronos at 36 dba when idle at a 20 inch distance and at a noise floor of 26 db that's louder than it needs to be for example here the g5 and the t5i run at 31 dba and since there's no load it's not running hot but it's still not bad 32.6 is fine the low noise levels do ramp to the louder side of the chart though at 42.8 dba it's much quieter than the dumpster fire that is the alienware r10 but it's louder than everything else so far the difference between the previous actually good system again the abs challenger is only 1.6 dba here so overall it's in reasonable territory it's not impressive but we also think it's not in territory where most people would think it's objectively loud although if you are more sensitive to noise then you might want to manually control the fan speeds looking at ramp speed we learned that the skytech chronos has one of the twitchiest fan curves on a pre-built we've tested on this chart this comes down to bios and any custom configurations the fan curve has had done to it by the si or the oem or the motherboard manufacturer in this instance it only holds for 18 seconds of load before blasting the fan rpm to its peak and ultimately steady noise level ideally there's a little bit more lag here and more use of the full fan curve to help smooth out the noise fluctuation and transition to the higher speeds with less of a sudden spike in noise but we're not seeing it with the chronos power consumption at the wall is up now we look at full system power consumption here rather than component level that's because this is how the computer is used since it's a pre-built the skytech chronos pulled about 144 watts under full cpu load from blender which is as expected extremely efficient that's thanks to the amd r55600x which alone is closer to the 63 to 66 watts of power consumption under load under a gaming specific workload the power consumption is higher relative to the other systems that's because of the rx 6800 the 5600x is very efficient it's at 350 watts total compared to the r10s 321 watts or so that still allows the chronos to run more efficiently in most comparisons but it does chew away a little bit of the efficiency this also gives us perspective as to where the trade-offs are for that higher-end gpu clearly it's in the power consumption but you also get more performance and in this sense the power consumption isn't so high that it's unmanageable time to talk about the setup the bios and the instructions this lets us look at how well a company prepares the buyer so that they can get it all up and running without further help first off there was a large stop sign placed inside the case with instructions to refer to a quick start guide before turning the pc on for the first time it also suggested visiting a url for a quick start guide if one wasn't included unfortunately our pc didn't come with a printed quick start guide the url leads to a database of systems some of which have unique guides and others which reference a single generic guide with a link to the case manual the chronos is part of the latter group it isn't hard to get to the quick start guide but every minor obstacle reduces the chance that users will actually care we'd prefer a generic guide printed out and packed with the system just because the amount of small problems it can prevent and this would benefit skytech too because if they have call volume coming in because the display out's not working because these are plugged into the motherboard on board video instead of the video cards then they're just kind of burning support time over something that could be resolved by the user part of the paperwork included with skytech system is a checklist detailing various inspection steps that have been completed before shipping these are grouped into build inspection installation and performance testing it's actually really cool that there is this qc checklist and that someone's checking it off as long as they're actually doing the things they're saying they're doing then it seems like a good way to try and prevent problematic systems from shipping like that i buy power one we looked at although i power has since changed its qc process we double checked everything on the list that we could and we found little that was incorrect with maybe the possible exception of correct software geforce experience was installed on our system even though it contains no nvidia hardware so this is a little odd the correct amd driver package was also installed so really no harm done driver conflicts can occur but we haven't experienced any and drivers have also improved over the years the correct memory entry is also maybe arguably false but it's to our benefit only because skytech bumped us up to a 3600 megahertz kit instead of 3200 which is what we paid for and they didn't tell us this and also there's no reason skytech would have suspected we were the buyers here in bios the 3600 megahertz xmp docp option was enabled and then memory was set to 3200 megahertz to fit the actual product listing what was sold to us this is potentially bad since it locks several important timings to sub-optimal values this kit should be able to run tighter timings at 3200 megahertz in addition the default board settings sync uclock and f clock to the memory speed so both of these values are reduced to 1600 megahertz by down clocking the memory when the memory is set to 3600 these clocks rise to 1800 megahertz with all that said though the limited set of game tests that we use for pre-built testing showed no significant performance differences with xmp applied correctly so for these games at these settings performance is bottlenecked elsewhere we really can't criticize skytech for this anyway since we got a higher spec better kit than the one that we technically paid for we would like to see an additional step added to the qc checklist for correct bio settings but again they correctly applied the bio settings that we paid for they may have even flashed a new bios version because the build date is from april of this year for the motherboard bios so that's relatively new and it's better than some of the other ones that we've seen even though they're not sitting around on shelves right now overall then the skytech kronos does in fact get the it's better than dell award but it also gets the yeah we can recommend this relatively the biggest downside for sure is the value it still feels really bad to buy maybe a thousand dollars worth of parts they might be approaching like 1100 so it still feels bad to buy parts that are so far below the assembled price of the system historically in the past like with cyberpower for example before the current situation the market many years ago it was very common for sis system integrators to sell a pre-built for not much more than maybe one to two hundred dollars markup which is effectively your labor cost to assemble the system as opposed to doing it yourself now they would sometimes choose really stupid parts that blew the pricing out of proportion and was nonsensical but if you did a part for part match in our experience in the past you don't pay much more than one or two hundred dollars and that's not true anymore you're paying a lot more than the msrp some of the parts it's really hard to comment genuinely from our position on what you should do because if you can't get the parts for msrp maybe it's a good deal and if you can then it's not a good deal so i don't know if you can get them from msrp this is a bad deal this system overall has passed our tests it is minimally fine and in some aspects good so the overall part selection we think is pretty good we would like to see a 5800 in here instead of 5600x that might be asking for a lot right now depending on what skytech's margins are you're most limited by the cpu at this point if you're doing something like blender the 5600 x is a great cpu it is one that we've recommended strongly but it's not quite up to production level tasks uh as other 2 000 systems might be but it comes with a 6800 terrible value right now those two parts for two thousand dollars uh however the 6800 in this build is far better than what the alienware system had in it for the same price so you kind of it's six one half dozen the other overall then we are fairly positive neutral the positive on this not a lot of critical points value is the hardest argument against this computer but if you look at the market it's kind of in line with the others so it just becomes a matter of do you try to diy it do you try to wait because the prices should come down at some point or do you buy the bullet and go with something that at least functionally is reasonable so that's how we use for skytech it's compared to these other pre-builts we'd say that's a pretty positive review and this is in fact something strictly on function ignoring value this is something that we would feel comfortable saying from what we're seeing here you can buy it and get something decent do bear in mind that their configurations change we have only tested one so keep an eye on that front panel this is the thing that most these companies screw up and it's very easy for you to identify before you even buy it so that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more let us know what pre-built you'd like us to look at next we're trying to go through a bunch from uh various companies before we start buying multiple from the same company so we can get a wide spread and uh you can go to store.camerasex.net or patreon.com gamers nexus to help us out directly you'll get behind the scenes videos there we show some of our testing in advance and on the store you can grab mod mats mouse mats and other items that helps us buy these things subscribe for more we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 409,022

Rating: 4.962317 out of 5

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, pre-built gaming pc review, best prebuilt gaming pcs 2021, best gaming pcs 2021, best gaming pcs right now, is skytech any good, skytech gaming pc review, skytech gaming pc benchmarks, skytech chronos 0136 review, skytech chronos review, skytech pc worth it, cyberpower vs skytech, ibuypower vs skytech, best $2000 gaming Pcs

Id: XYyBeYW4FX4

Length: 29min 55sec (1795 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/LivingGhost371]

Specs and Stock Picture: Wraith Prism Cooler

Actually Shipped With: Wraith Spire Cooler.

[u/CadenLucianArcher]

No major complaints

Broken front USB 😶

[u/Vitosi4ek]

Sorry if I'm missing something, but why is Steve so particular about cable management on the back side of the case? There's no glass panel here, so looks aren't an issue, and IMO not having the cables tied down makes for easier maintenance (as you don't have to untie them every time you want to make a change).

[u/[deleted]]

"One of the best"

I would be pissed if I had paid 2k for this...

[u/Amaran345]

If Skytech as a OEM can get the RX6800 at msrp or something close, then they are making some good money on these builds

[u/Techboah]

A PC that costs $2k and they couldn't throw in a proper mid-range cooler?

[u/Storyteller_Of_Unn]

Skytech is a company that refuses to honor warranties. They are rude, callous, and should be put out of business.

Only buy from Skytech if you want to be ripped off.

[u/kaszak696]

Surprisingly the PSU isn't a complete trash, judging by reviews on the web.