Build of the Week: Feb2, 2025
- Tomiax
- Feb 2
- 5 min read
This post will be a short and simple one. After looking around for a little bit, the Skytech Chronos Gaming PC was happened upon. So, we are going to look at the PC, its components, and its price, and the estimated cost of building an equivalent system.
Keep in mind that the prices listed for components are based on availability found at the time of writing the post. Prices may vary, and are based on Canadian Currency in a Canadian market. The admin of this website might earn a commission whenever links that lead to Amazon are used to make purchases, but these links do not affect the final price to the consumer. Furthermore, we will still always link to the lowest price we found. Remember to add taxes and shipping to these prices when budgeting, and consider cost-saving strategies like waiting for sale prices or finding used parts.
$1443.89 @ Amazon
Most of the components in this system are fairly well described: The exact processor is listed in the title. The type of graphics card is listed, along with its dedicated video memory. So, we should have an easy enough time picking parts that are either identical or roughly equivalent, making this a fair comparison between the cost of buying this prebuilt system vs buying the parts to build your own.
Parts List: $1145.85
$159.00 @ Amazon
$42.90 @ Amazon
$214.99 @ Amazon
$34.99 @ memoryexpress
$69.99 @ Amazon
$419.99 @ BestBuy
$84.00 @ Amazon
$119.99 @ Amazon
Picking the Central Processing Unit (CPU, Processor) for our parts list was easy: The product description of the prebuilt system we are replicating explicitly states exactly what the used CPU is. The RAM was also fairly well described. Although we don't know the exact brand of the RAM, we do know that it is 16 GB, and DDR4 3200 MHz. The motherboard, however, was not even mentioned. So, we have picked most of the components in this system prior to picking the motherboard. This assures that we can pick a motherboard that meets all of our needs. However, we didn't just pick the cheapest motherboard either. We had some additional requirements for various reasons. First, it had to have built-in Wi-Fi because there is no reason to buy a modern motherboard that doesn't. Second, we picked a motherboard that will be compatible with some more powerful CPUs than the one suggested in this build. This is so that we can have the flexibility to select a better CPU if we choose to. Getting an Intel Core i5-12600KF 3.7 GHz 10-Core Processor for $219.00 @ newegg only costs about $70 more than the one used in the prebuilt option, but for that extra budget we go from 6 to 10 cores, and the base core clock speed goes from 2.5 GHz to 3.7 GHz. If you are keen on overclocking, you can get a boost clock out of the 12600KF of 4.9 GHz but "only" 4.4 GHz out of the 12400K. We also made sure that our motherboard could support more than just the 16 GB of RAM, and that it can support RAM even faster than 3200 MHz, and this is just in case we want to upgrade the RAM later and push the system even faster. If we put in the 12600KF processor, for example, we might want to also upgrade the RAM speed to push it harder. Alternatively, if we have an application where the 16 GB of RAM isn't enough, such as content creation that requires editing large raw video files, then we might also want to upgrade the RAM used. The G.Skill Trident Z RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory is a great example of a set that has double the RAM capacity, a clock speed that is 12.5% faster, and an aesthetic design with LED display. Costing $84.99 @ memoryexpress, it is only about $50 more expensive than the set matching the prebuilt system.
The CPU cooler and Storage components were fairly easy to pick out, although neither was very fully described as part of the product page. The CPU cooler appears to be an air cooler in the photos. We one-upped this by choosing an air tower cooler with a display that can be programmed to show the current CPU temperature (or other graphic). The storage was described as "1TB NVME SSD – Up to 30x Faster Than Traditional HDD". So, we included a 1TB NVME SSD in our parts list. We could upgrade this easily enough in a couple of ways. First, our motherboard can support up to 2 such drives. So, doubling our drives during the build would be an easy enough task. But there's another option available to us. We selected a M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 x4 drive. However, one of the slots available to us on this motherboard can support M.2-22110 M-Key. So, we could also have gone with TEAMGROUP T-Force Cardea Z540 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 5.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive for $189.99 @ Amazon. Although this costs a full $120 more than the storage originally selected, this device would provide noticeably faster loading speeds in applications were large amounts of data need to be loaded and saved all at once.
When it comes to graphics cards, it feels like the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 4060 platform is in every prebuilt gaming system we have seen over the last month or so. The product description of the prebuilt system does not specify what brand and design of the graphics card outside of the chipset. We could upgrade the graphics card to the MSI VENTUS 3X OC GeForce RTX 4070 12 GB Video Card, which has more dedicated video memory, faster clock speeds, and triple-fan cooler instead of dual. This graphics card costs $779.00 @ Canada Computers, which is about $380 more than the RTX 4060 option in the Skytech Chronos.
Conclusion
The Skytech Chronos system is priced at $1443.89, while the estimated cost of our custom built system that mimics it adds up to $1145.85. That's about a $300 savings by building it ourselves. That $300 difference gives us options: We can pocket the difference. We can spend it on a better CPU and RAM combo that fit our motherboard. We can blow it all on the better graphics card. These prebuilt to custom built system comparisons can sometimes reveal opportunities to save on budget. Aside from the potential for savings, building one's own system also comes with a certain degree of satisfaction in the newly learned know-how.
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