The SkyTech Blaze II Gaming is a powerful showpiece meddling together the best of modern technologies to make a stylish rig with enough oomph for gaming and productivity. The Blaze II is capable of supporting additional components because its interior is spacious which is great for tinkerers and performance enthusiasts who want to increase performance on their rigs.
Pros
- Elegant gamer design
- Spacious interior for expansion
- Great performance for the price
- Plenty of ports at front and rear
- Beautifully lit with tempered glass side panel
- Runs fairly quiet, even under load
Cons
- Prioritizes productivity over gaming
- Ryzen 5 2600 6-Core 3.4GHz (3.9 GHz Max Boost) CPU Processor | 500G SSD – Up to 30x Faster Than...
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 6GB GDDR5 Video Card | 8 GB Gaming Memory DDR4 3000 with Heat Spreader |...
- PCIe AC Wi-Fi with Antenna | No bloatware | 4 x USB 3.1 Gen1 Ports, 2 x USB 2.0 | HD Audio and Mic |...
SkyTech has built quite a good reputation for itself as a prebuilt manufacturer that focuses mainly on budget gaming desktops and productivity desktops. The review unit we break down here is the lowest tier of their gaming PC offering.
SkyTech offers buyers three options with varying price pint. Each of the three machines offers a dedicated graphics card with the highest (SkyTech Omega Gaming PC) running with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 8GB card.
The SkyTech Blaze II Gaming under review flaunts a Ryzen 5 2600 processor, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 6GB graphics card, 8GB DDR4 memory, and 500GB Solid-state drive storage. It offers some respectable overhead space for further upgrading of additional components.
Thankfully, the components come together to make a powerful productivity and gaming PC that answers the classic dilemma of building yourself or going for a prebuilt system. The SkyTech Blaze II is an alluring choice for a gaming mid-tower.
SkyTech Blaze II Gaming Specs
| Processor | Ryzen 5 2600 |
| Memory | 8GB DDR4 |
| Storage | 500GB SSD |
| Graphics Card | Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 6G |
| Operating System | Windows 10 Home |
| Dimensions | 20.1 x 9.7 x 21 inches |
| Weight | 21.2 pounds |
| Motherboard | A320M Motherboard |
Ports
The SkyTech Blaze II keeps true to its gaming pedigree; it sports a port system with plenty of ports both at the front and rear. There are plenty of ports to connect all your favorite peripherals. The front ports, which are accessible on the top of the case, include a single USB 3.0 port, a pair of USB 2.0 ports, a microphone jack and a headphone jack.
There’s an additional list of ports at the rear including four USB 3.1 ports, 2 USB 2.0 ports, a single HDMI port, and one D-Sub port. Thanks to the RTX 1660 graphics card, there are additional ports including an HDMI, DisplayPort, and DVI port.
One of our main complaints about this system is that you won’t find a USB Type-C port or Thunderbolt 3 port. For a modern gaming PC of this caliber, such an important future-proof feature should not be missing. It essentially makes this PC less future proof means that this system can’t take advantage of the single VirtualLink connector. Instead, you’ll need to plug in multiple cables to drive your headset.
Performance
Inside, the SkyTech Blaze II Gaming rocks an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 processor coupled with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card. Although marketed as a gaming PC, it’s not hard to envision small business owners and home users adopting the SkyTech Blaze II for productivity workloads.
Primarily, the AMD Ryzen 2600 is a great productivity CPU. But it’s built as a great gaming CPU with serious multi-threaded chops. It has a base clock speed of 3.4GHz and a boost frequency of 3.9GHz.
The AMD Ryzen 2600 thrives in real-world usage such as web browsing, moderate photo-editing, and heavy productivity tasks. Heavier and more intensive tasks such as video encoding will require slightly more time for the system to complete.
The Digital Storm Lynx performs much better than our unit considering it packs an Intel Core i7-9700K processor. The Omen Obelisk’s 8th Generation processor takes just about the same time as our unit.
Memory and storage
Our unit shipped with an 8GB DDR4 memory and 500GB Solid-state drive storage. As far as memory goes, 8GB is considered the baseline for memory especially for PCs dealing with heavy productivity workloads and gaming. Most manufacturers won’t go beyond 8GB or 16GB at the utmost for a PC under $1,000.
That’s all because 8GB is more than enough if you’re serious about freeing up this potential performance bottlenecks that become apparent in modern games.
SkyTech included a 500GB solid-state drive which is a good minimum floor to start with. You can save the occasional video from the internet, save files, and multimedia. But the biggest advance of this storage format is it speeds up boot time, wake-from-sleep time, and the time it takes to launch a game and load a new level.
The drive is also easily upgradeable should you find yourself needing more space to store your documents, photos, videos, and game files.
Gaming performance
The SkyTech Blaze II benefits from strong processor performance but with the RTX GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card, keep the unit out of consideration for enthusiast-level gamers when newer features, like ray tracing, are enabled at higher resolutions.
That means, compared to the RTX 2070 and 2080 cards, the RTX 1660 Ti has no Real-Time Ray Tracing and DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) capabilities. That makes the RTX 1660 Ti incapable of RT and Tensor cores. On the whole, the GTX 1660 is an excellent card and it delivers high frame rates with many games at 1080p for smooth gameplay, certainly better than the GTX series cards.
If you have a gaming monitor with a refresh rate higher than the 60Hz norm, the card will be great. Better yet, it should be able to game at 144Hz.
On gaming benchmarks, Battlefield V manages 78 fps on Full HD (1920 x 1080) settings and 59 fps on WQHD (2560 x 1440) settings. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, frame rates dip to 69 fps on 1080p and 46 fps on 1440p settings. Far Cry New Dawn played smoothly at 83 fps on 1080p and 60 fps on 1440p settings.
Considering the RTX 1660 doesn’t use ray tracing these are respectable frame rates on both 1080 and 1440p settings.
Conclusion
The SkyTech Blaze II Gaming has all the qualities and components that a desktop might have if you built it yourself, from top-notch aftermarket parts to good wiring and assembly. On top of that, it performs just as good as other gaming desktops if not better and is quite affordable.
The system is silent; there’s no motor noise or whine and the 120mm fans at the case rear work well to keep the temperatures down low. The case design and toned-down lighting is another plus side that we appreciate coming from an industry where RGB lighting is overdone.
All told, the SkyTech Blaze II Gaming makes about as compelling an argument to go with a prebuilt gaming tower as we can imagine. If you’re looking for a machine that is great on 1080p and capable of handling 1440p, the Blaze II is a good choice.
- Ryzen 5 2600 6-Core 3.4GHz (3.9 GHz Max Boost) CPU Processor | 500G SSD – Up to 30x Faster Than...
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 6GB GDDR5 Video Card | 8 GB Gaming Memory DDR4 3000 with Heat Spreader |...
- PCIe AC Wi-Fi with Antenna | No bloatware | 4 x USB 3.1 Gen1 Ports, 2 x USB 2.0 | HD Audio and Mic |...
