I'm currently typing this article on my home rig, a DIY build featuring an AMD Ryzen 7 7700X CPU and an RX 7800 XT. It's my baby, the center of my digital life, and a bit of a monster when it comes to firing huge numbers of frames at my 1440p monitor in all the latest games.
So we both did a double take (can gaming PCs do double takes? It feels like it did) when I spotted this Skytech prebuilt. It's got the same processor and graphics card combo, the same amount of RAM, and much more shiny RGB. I see you, Skytech Azure 2, and I love what you've done with your hair.
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Anyway, if you're looking for bang for your buck and fantastic upper mid-range performance out of your next machine, I reckon this is a super-solid shout—especially for $1,380 at Newegg on Black Friday discount.
I've played a whole host of new games on my very similar setup, and can confirm that it sails its way through all of them, with the odd caveat. Dragonage: The Veilguard? 70-120 fps at max settings with FSR set to Quality. Cyberpunk 2077, with the Phantom Liberty DLC? 90 fps+ with all the goodies turned on, with the notable exception of ray tracing.
Yep, the RX 7800 XT is a beast for raw raster performance, but ray tracing is its Achille's heel. Still, I can hardly call it a major drawback, as my games still look stunning and run like flowing water with it disabled.
I'm not one of those people that reckons ray tracing makes no difference to the look of a game (it obviously does), but we're still living in a world where it's a luxury for most players, and one I still find myself doing without with no real complaints.
The Ryzen 7 7700X is still a cracker of a gaming CPU, with eight cores and 16 threads of speedy performance. Actually, if you pick this machine for yourself you'll have one up on my PC, as this Skytech has liquid cooling, and that's probably the more hassle-free solution to keeping this chip running cool.
Mine has a big 'ol Thermalright Peerless Assassin air cooler taking up most of my case. and while it works very well, I've considered shoving an AIO in there to free up some room.
Other differences? Well, my RAM is slightly faster at 6000 MT/s, but you'll never notice the difference between that and the 5200 MT/s stuff on offer here in real-world gaming. Oh, and I went for a bigger SSD. And so can you!
This is the exact SSD I use every day. My particular motherboard only has one M.2 slot, and it's not clear from the specs here if this one's the same. So this would either be a replacement for the existing 1 TB SSD, or potentially even an addition to take you all the way up to 3 TB if it has a more fully-equipped mobo than mine.
Either way, you'd be matching me for storage, or beating me outright. Boo for me, great news for you.
The 1 TB drive included with the Skytech looks like a Kingston NV2, which is a budget Gen 4 drive that'll be fine to get started with. Me though, I like some room to stretch my storage legs, and this Lexar NM790 drive has been absolutely faultless.
It's super fast, stays cool without a heatsink, and has had more games installed on it than many of you have had hot dinners. Okay, that's a slight exaggeration, but you get the idea.
So, should you be looking for a machine with a CPU/GPU combo that's confirmed to absolutely slap for 1440p gaming, I can tell you with confidence that this is a superstar mash-up. Skytech is a known and trusted builder, which means it's probably better built than my home efforts, too.
Damn, now I'm making myself feel bad. Anyway, awesome component combination, awesome price, the decision is yours. You know the drill.
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