Cube Skeleton Red Review

Performance Analysis

The Core i7-6700K and GTX 970 is a popular combination and with good reason. The results obtained from the Cube do not throw up any surprises. This is a capable system for gaming both at 1080p and 1440p, and the 4.6GHz, hyper-threaded CPU is great at number crunching, holding its own well in our media and rendering tests. In fact, the PCMark 8 Photo Editing result was excellent, and we suspect this is because the overclock was constant, with the CPU locked at 4.6GHz even when idle. Photo editing is a bursty workload, not a constant load like rendering or video editing, and the CPU not having to waste time switching power states as the load varies likely explains this strong result. It's possible the NVMe drive is also a factor.

The absence of downclocking on the CPU's part meant that idle power consumption was a little high at 95W, but even under maximum load the system was comfortably below 400W and the PSU thus remained quiet always.


The SSD results are a familiar sight too – not quite as potent as we've seen before but there's no denying the SM951 is a seriously fast drive. This is clear in the PCMark 8 workloads – differences here aren't massive, especially when gaming, but the Photoshop workload is helped along by NVMe.

The Skeleton Red sailed through our stability testing fine as well. With the CPU under full load, the Nepton 240M cooler's fans do ramp up noticeably, but it's rare you'll be pushing your CPU the way Prime95 does. The cooler was also effective, keeping the processor at a maximum delta T of 59°C, so even on a warm summer's day you have plenty of leeway. Similarly, the GPU never got beyond 54°C and the fans were always less than 1,400 RPM, which we could hardly hear at all, and they quickly turn off completely when load is removed. As mentioned, this is a fine example of the GTX 970M.

Conclusion

Tallied up, the components, accessories and OS here would cost you just over £1,550 were you to buy them yourself, meaning you're paying almost £200 for the build and warranty. However you look at it, this is a steep mark-up for a system of this calibre. In terms of the build, Cube has performed admirably, as the Skeleton Red simply looks awesome. The colour co-ordination, good placement of lighting and excellent cable tidying all deserve praise, and the system was perfectly stable as well. Our only real complaint here is very minor and relates to the four fans on the all-in-one cooler not being the same models. On the warranty side of things, however, two years is fine but not anything special – we were hoping for three at least.


This specific system is tough to recommend for one major reason, which is the motherboard selection. There is no shortage of solid sub-£150 motherboards that can handle everything this system needs; essentially an M.2 drive and a 4.6GHz overclock, and many have a red and black colour scheme too. The £300 Gaming M9 ACK is seriously overkill here. However, Cube's configurator is readily available to remedy this and knock some cash off the price in the process. Ideally, we'd probably also opt for the SSD 950 Pro to fully complete the colour scheme, as well as maybe a slightly better PSU, although the one used has no practical issues.

All things considered, the Cube Skeleton Red still wins our favour. If price-performance is a primary concern, there are numerous better options than this. However, if that was all system integrators pursued then we'd live in a pretty boring world. For a powerful, responsive and on the whole quiet gaming PC capable of tackling 1080p and 1440p games while also really looking the part, the Cube Skeleton Red is a decent choice. The motherboard selection and a few other niggles disqualify it from our top award, but as this is easily remedied through the configurator it's not a disaster. Provided you make a more sensible motherboard selection (keeping in mind the colour scheme), we're happy to recommend Cube's services here.