Skytech Azure 2 Review
This is my honest and unbiased review of the Skytech Azure 2. thank you in this video I’m going to quickly zip you through the unboxing and what’s included take you through some very thorough gaming and Creator benchmarks talk about the design and build quality the internals thermals fan noise overall ease of use pricing breakdowns and comparing it to the competition as well as my top pros and cons now if you get discouraged about choosing this PC after anything that I say in this video just keep watching because I’m also going to be showing you some alternative PCS that I recommend for every budget if you watch this entire video I guarantee by the end you will know if this PC or one of the others that I mentioned are right for you or not but if you still have any questions after watching this entire video just shoot me a comment and if you’re publicly subscribed I guarantee a personal response now the specs for this PC may sound pretty tame but because it has a 13th gen CPU and 4000 series GPU it actually left last year’s top spec PCS in the dust this model includes the latest gigabyte Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 TI GPU and 13th gen I5 13600k CPU with 5200 megahertz ddr5 Ram
Unboxing
now let’s jump back to about a week ago and check out the unboxing first what we’ve got included in the small box is our skytech gaming keyboard the quality and comfortability of the keys I would say is pretty average as far as standard membrane keyboards go on the back of the box they’ve actually got a pretty handy image showing you all the features and your hotkey functions over on the other side and then underneath this top foam we’ve got this little folder that includes a quality control certificate giving you some peace of mind on all the testing that was done before it was shipped a troubleshooting guide and a maintenance guide and then one more tiny little box and here we’ve got our included skytech gaming mouse the clicks and scroll wheel both felt pretty average and after several hours of gaming I can say it was pretty comfortable as well they also included this bag with an extra custom keycap an extra Sata cable for providing power to any extra hard drives that you might want to add in the future an extra CPU mounting bracket your power cable and two external antennas for Wi-Fi all right once you get all that unboxed you’ll just need to take off the side panel and remove the internal protection foam that they included to keep the internals from getting damaged and shipping
Design & Internals
now design wise this PC uses the new montex Sky 2 case which is a very well-built Sleek looking mid Tower design near the front we’ve got two 120 millimeter intake fans Which pull fresh cool air from outside of the case where it then picks up heat generated from the components across the motherboard but mainly from this GPU where it then gets sucked out through this rear exhaust fan now the heat that’s generated from our I5 1300k CPU that actually gets transferred via this intermax cooler block up through these tubes into a radiator here at the top where the heat is then spread out and then blown out with these two very powerful 120 millimeter exhaust fans those two fans also help pull a lot of the heat from the rest of the components out of the case and it did do a pretty nice job as I’ll show you here once we get to The Thermals and next to our CPU is our 5200 megahertz Kingston Fury Beast ddr5 Ram we’ve got two sticks of 16 gigabytes for a total of 32 which is plenty for any game that you’re gonna play and underneath our CPU is our one terabyte SSD which is our main drive that our operating system is installed on this one is an MSI M3 71 and we’ll show you the speeds that we got for that here in a sec and beneath that SSD is the most important and most expensive part of this PC our gigabyte Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 TI GPU this GPU has a pretty cool looking design and it is massive basically the same size as a Founders Edition 4090 just slightly thinner quite a bit lighter than that one though and as you can see after we removed the GPU we have another SSD slot here for more high-speed storage and then whipping around to the back we’ve got even more storage expandability with two two and a half inch SATA SSD slots and on the bottom left two bays for traditional three and a half inch mechanical hard drives and then lastly in the other corner to power all of this a deep cool 850 watt 80 plus gold certified power supply for the ports
Ports
on the top we’ve got a power button and your LED button for quickly cycling through the RGB effects two USB 3.0 ports a headphone and microphone Jack and a USBC port and on the back two more USBS and a PS2 port for older keyboards and mice an HDMI and two USB 2.0 ports a bios flashback a super fast USB a and USBC Port both capable of 10 gigabits per second two more USBS and an RJ45 ethernet port and at the bottom a microphone front speaker and line in and then just a little lower on the back of our graphics card an HDMI 2.1 and three display ports for the software skytech
Software
doesn’t include any fancy Hardware monitoring dashboards or controls for fan or thermal profiles or performance profiles but it does include software called signal RGB which gives you control over your RGB animations and allows you to customize based on what game you’re playing for performance controls as you can see here within the BIOS there is a bit that you can tweak if you’re a more advanced gamer that wants to push your computer a little further only mess with these settings if you really know what you’re doing though when it came to the fan noise
Fan Noise
these were my results after testing each of the main fan profiles from within the BIOS in quiet mode this is what it sounded like at 44.2 decibels 45.5 for performance mode and at full speed 45.9 as you can see within this graph it was on the higher end compared to the others but for me personally it didn’t really bother me these fans did cool the PC pretty efficiently though you can tell
Thermals
on our thermal imaging time lapse from computer off to full-on gaming that much of the heat bunches up over here against the glass right next to our GPU and then removing the side panel reveals another typical hot spot right next to the CPU both of these temps were pretty low compared to the others that I reviewed thankfully this computer does an excellent job getting rid of heat up the back exhaust fan and two top exhaust fans and this translated very well in every game that we tested these were our CPU temps for several different games at 4K as expected this I5 is way way cooler than the i9s and the other current gen PCS we’ve tested I’m pretty positive that you will never ever have any thermal throttling here same thing with this 4070 TI GPU temps here well below throttling limits then comparing the average temperatures of all these games against the last 13 PCS that were reviewed they revealed this PC to be the absolute lowest CPU you temperature here at 1080P and the third lowest GPU temps right after the Corsair Vengeance A7 300 and the newest HP Omen 45l but when moving up to 4K gaming this PC was the overall King with the lowest temperatures by far for both the CPU and the GPU cooler than any PC that I’ve ever reviewed significantly lower than the last two skytech PCS that I reviewed at the end of last year all right
Performance
now for the performance and gaming benchmarks this is one of the most important parts of this review second only to the price to Performance ratios and we’ll get to that here in a sec for geekbench 5 we got the highest single core score that I’ve ever seen but it was just under all of last year’s pre-builts with i9s and 3090s when it came to the multi-core score for cinebench R23 which simulates its 3D rendering power we got a multi-core score of 23 858 and a single core score of 1959. The single core score was on par with all the top spec PCs from last year but the multi-core score was just a tad bit lower. Another helpful test for you 3D renderers is The v-ray Benchmark, and these were our Cuda RTX and overall v-ray performance scores. These GPU scores were all higher than all of last year’s top spec PCs. This basically demonstrates that this computer was way faster than those more expensive computers when it came to real-time viewport rendering and high polygon 3D modeling. However, the overall Vera performance score underperformed when it came to the longer cpu-based rendering. again this 4070 TI GPU trumped last year’s 3090 gpus when it came to real-time viewport rendering and just like the v-ray results our blender CPU score showed it to be just under what last year’s top spec models could do which is actually still pretty impressive considering how inexpensive this computer is compared to how expensive those computers are and the last benchmarks for creators before
Puget Benchmarks
we get into gaming are the Puget benchmarks for an adventure resolve we got 2213 not too bad compared to the rest of this price point Adobe Premiere 987 again just slightly lower than last year’s best Adobe Photoshop 1516 very close to this year’s best surprisingly and actually faster than the higher spec Alienware Aurora R15 and then after effects 1296 a pretty decent score compared to the others here as well now for 3D Mark
Gaming Benchmarks
which is a great Benchmark used to determine a computer’s overall game ability we got an overall score of 21625 and a CPU score of 17547. the least powerful of the latest gen pre-builts that I’ve tested here so far but also way less expensive and still faster than the best of the best from last year now for the main Drive the SSD that everything is stored on I got speeds of nearly 2.5 gigabytes read and 1.9 gigabytes right this is actually pretty underwhelming compared to the others that’s less than half the speed that I got with the other pre-builts that I’ve tested this year not a very expensive upgrade though actual gaming benchmarks are what really matters when it’s all said and done though these were our average FPS results we got for several games at their highest preset settings in HD it’s actually pretty impressive how well it did compared to the other more expensive top tier pre-builts that I’ve tested this year here you can see when averaging all the FPS for all these games together at 1440p that it was considerably less than this year’s top tier but check this out still faster than every single top tier PC that I reviewed last year that is insane people who bought those PCS spent four thousand dollars last year and this PC is better at half the price then when moving up to 4K gaming the gap between this computer and this year’s best got a little bit larger but still better than last year’s best your budget and the price to Performance ratios or what really matter though and
Pricing
we’re going to get to that here in a sec if 2100 is still too much for your wallet don’t worry I’m about to give you recommendations for every budget if you can afford twenty one hundred dollars then this is a pretty good price for a computer with these specs you can see here in my price to Performance ratio chart the for 1080p gaming it has the second best value with an incredibly low dollar per f PS ratio and then check this out at 1440p it has the number one lowest cost per FPS out of all the computers that I’ve ever reviewed and at 4K it separated itself even further from the pack with an even larger dollar per FPS Gap compared to all the others very impressive.
Recommendations for Every Budget
now if you’re at a different price point these are my recommendations for every budget I’ve also got links Down Below in the comments and description for all of them if you can afford the best of the best of that four thousand dollar price point and love gaming at the very highest resolutions I would go with that HP Omen 45l that I reviewed that PC has the highest performance out of all the gaming PCs that I’ve tested so far at the three thousand dollar level I would go with this version of the cyberpower PC Gamer Supreme with a 13th gen I9 and 4090 GPU with my experience with cyberpower PCS though they do tend to get a little hot but I personally don’t mind a hotter PC if it’s going to squeeze more power and give me more bang for my buck if that PC is still too much then this same version of that PC with the 4080 rather than a 40 90 is only twenty six hundred dollars for those with a budget closer to two thousand dollars then this PC that I just reviewed the skytech as your two this is actually what I recommend for that price point now closer to fifteen hundred dollars this version of the HP Omen 25l with the ryzen 7 and 3070 and at just over one thousand this version of the Cyber power gamer Master with the ryzen 5 and 3060. and for under one thousand dollars at eight hundred dollars I’d go with this version of that computer with a 6500 XT GPU this is the bare minimum that I would recommend for decent gaming though you definitely won’t be able to have high graphic settings on that PC if you want a decent frame rate now for my top pros and cons
Pros and Cons
my number one con for this PC is the rendering performance that was the only performance area that I was a little disappointed in for a computer with these specs and it was the only area that it did not consistently rise above last year’s best and number two was the fan noise while this wasn’t a huge deal for me personally I do need to mention it as a con because it was a bit louder than average and I know that some people watching this are gonna have an issue with that my top Pros for this computer number one is that pricing at twenty one hundred dollars this really is a pretty good deal for a computer with these specs and with it having the number one lowest dollar per FPS ratio the numbers kind of speak for themselves number two were The Thermals I knew that The Thermals would be lower than the top tier PCS with i9s and 40 90 gpus but I didn’t realize it would be this much cooler and number three is upgradeability I tested a 40 90 in this PC and it fit pretty well with still a lot of room left so if you ever want to go bigger you’ve got that option and because it uses a modular power supply it’s not going to be hard to upgrade that along with it as well overall I’d say that this is a pretty impressive and Powerful PC with a great design and excellent thermals.