I've owned my own Skytech Shiva for a week now and it has been absolutely great so far. While looking for a desktop that gave me a lot of bang for my buck, the Skytech brand kept coming up more than any other. The specs for the price are consistently great. I thought there must be a catch, but the 4.5 star reviews on all their products say otherwise. Here's my experience so far.
The packaging was great. The Shiva comes in a canvas bag, inside of a box, inside of yet another box (the outer box was for containing the peripherals alongside the desktop itself). Foam kept the inner box from sloshing around the inside of the outer. There is also a block of foam inside the tower itself to keep the various bits of hardware intact.
There's very little paperwork included. There is a brief set of instructions, a maintenance guide, a $10 Amazon gift card offer for leaving a review on their site, and a quality control certificate. They all come in a folder. My shipment came with two copies of each by accident.
An RGB keyboard and mouse were included as well. I quite like them, contrary to other reviewers' opinions on here. Though I have hardly used them. I mostly control my computer with a wireless mouse and keyboard set-up from my couch. A remote to control the fans is in he box too. It even has a battery included. There's nothing detailing what the buttons do though. The computer also came with a bag of parts, such as tiny screws and long twist ties. Actually, I received two. I think this was another accidental double-up. The instructions made no mention of this stuff and the computer is running just fine without them, so I probably wasn't meant to have even one. Trust me; this tower comes fully put together.
There are plenty of ports. The back has (among others) a pair of USB, 1 HDMI, 3 DisplayPort, and 1 Ethernet. The top has 2 USB ports and 2 AUX ports. A few other ports on the back are covered by a sticker initially because those are not meant to be used for connecting displays to the unit. Those lead directly to the graphics card and I'm not sure what you're actually supposed to do with them.
Setup was easy even with the lack of a large set of instructions. The computer runs you through about half a dozen steps, including signing into - or creating - a Microsoft account, hooking it up with your Internet connection, and setting your preferred language. Not in that order. Very simple stuff.
So what about FPS? Well:
Minecraft - 120 FPS with a 1024x1024 texture pack and a 12 chunk render distance. About double that with default textures and half the render distance.
Black Ops 3 Zombies mode (high settings) - 170 to 200+ FPS depending on the map.
Borderlands 3 (medium settings) - 120 to 125 FPS in many areas.
Borderlands 3 (high settings) - 90 to 110 FPS depending on the area.
The Borderlands numbers are especially great because the website notebookcheck.net listed 116 and 83 as the expected FPS from the RTX 2060 for the medium and high settings, respectively. I guess the CPU+GPU combo in the Shiva is even better than the particular combo they used. By the way, I highly recommend that site. It's very detailed, and it is very easy to compare a multitude of CPUs and GPUs. I found it invaluable to me desktop search.
As expected, the SSD is lightning fast. This tower can go from shut down to fully booted up in 20-25 seconds. And as a bonus, whatever you had open when you shut it down is brought back automatically. Doesn't matter if its Task Manager, Steam, or tabs in your browser of choice. This might be commonplace, but its new to me. This has also been my first experience with Windows 10 (besides troubleshooting my sister's laptop once or twice), and it's been enjoyable and easy to use so far. You don't have to buy Windows 10 for this by the way; you simply are set up with the Home version automatically.
I've found little to complain about. One is the ratio of DisplayPort ports to HDMI ports. Only one is HDMI, and since that is by far the dominant display cable now, a lot of you buying this comp might need to pick up a converter if you want a dual-monitor setup. I'll be getting one myself soon. Another issue was getting the Shiva to recognize by wired XBox 360 controller. The driver for it needed an update right off the bat, but whenever I told the computer to install the driver update after finding it, I was always told that access was denied. The solution is to boot up the computer in "Safe Mode with Networking" and try again. For some reason, this skirts the access issue. I must stress that this isn't a problem with the Shiva, but with Windows, if anything. Just thought I'd put the solution here for this unexpected problem.
Another thing to keep in mind is there is no internal microphone. So if you want to voice chat in-game or through Discord, TeamSpeak, or whatever, you're gonna have to get a headset or your own mic.
You'll also go through the 500 Gigs of memory quickly with just a few big games and Windows installed. And since this is a gaming rig, most people who have one of these will have to deal with this. Buying an HDD or another SSD at some point is something you should factor into the cost. Still, I feel kinda bad listing this as a negative. It's still half a terabyte, and it's in solid state form. You could argue this is where Skytech slightly cheapens out on the hardware to keep the price magically low, but it's better than giving us 500 GB in the form of a hard drive.
Overall, I'm so happy with my choice of desktop. This essay of a review should prove that much. Anyways, I highly recommend it. For $999, you get a hell of a lot and there truly seems to be no major catch. I'll come back to this review sometimes to edit in stuff about major problems, small conveniences I haven't noticed yet, and FPS testing on other games down the line. For now, I'll keep staring at the pretty fans.
Edit 1: Well, it's now been a month and a week. There's not been much to report on, but I think it's time for an update anyways. There's only one negative thing to mention. About a week back, my computer went into sleep mode with no prompting. It had been about two minutes since a YouTube video finished, and before I got back to the computer, it slept. I have it set to do this after an hour of inactivity; not almost immediately. I don't know what caused this. It was not a shut down at least - my applications were still open. But this is still a little disconcerting. It could be a lot worse.
Everything else has been smooth sailing. No other worries or hiccups. The only other thing to add is I've tested the computer with a couple Minecraft shaders. Even wih a 12 chunk render distance and most other settings on normal or max, I'm still in the 50 FPS range. But keep in mind that this was with Optifine.
And I completely forgot to mention this in my intitial review, but the fans in this tower are so quiet. Even when they need to spin up, it's fine because their pitch range is so low. No whining sounds from these. So, there's that. That's all I got for now.
5-ish month edit: Everything's still going pretty well. About a month back, I noticed my computer was waking from both sleep and hibernate mode overnight. But it wasn't a problem with the computer - it was just Windows trying to check for updates. I turned that off by doing the following: open the Run box via Windows key and R and typing "taskschd.msc". This opens Task Scheduler Library. Go to Update Orchestrator and then click on the Conditions tab. Uncheck "Wake the computer to run this task".
Afterwards, I found a much easier solution: Go to Power Options under Settings and select "Edit plan settings". Then click on "Change advanced power settings," go to "Allow wake timers" under the Sleep settings, and disable them. Wish I found that answer first. ._. But hey, everything else is still fine. I've mostly used the comp for YouTube and Minecraft. Still enjoying 150 FPS with shaders. I know I said before that I was only hitting 50 FPS with shaders, but I guess that one was particularly hard to run.
| Standing screen display size | 1 |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 4k |
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920x1080 |
| Processor | 3.6 GHz core_i7 |
| RAM | 10 GB DDR5 |
| Memory Speed | 4800 MHz |
| Hard Drive | 1 TB SSD |
| Graphics Coprocessor | 3080 |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Card Description | Dedicated |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 10 GB |
| Wireless Type | 802.11ac |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 1 |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 1 |
