TechPowerUp.com is one of the few websites that make it past the Chinese firewall and as such, we have a large Chinese community of readers, even if they do not necessarily participate on the forums. Bykski has become an established brand there, with very competitive prices and OEM contracts with Colorful and Thermaltake in the past few years. My complaint on retail availability and the manual not being in English is not a factor there, so if you are among those readers, feel free to ignore that completely.

At the same time, we are a global website first and foremost, and as a resident of the USA, I am not very inclined to go out of my way to buy a product over a third-party seller, which may then take a mail-forwarding service depending on where I buy from. If this were two years ago, where the Bykski block would have been near impossible to differentiate from the EK block, I may well have passed.

But things are definitely improving - they have an English-speaking contact now and are working on an English website to then contact retailers in North America and Europe to get their products distributed. A reason why this would work now is that they have slowly and steadily changed their product ID to give their products a unique identity. The FOUR Founders GTX 1080 is perhaps not the best example, but the backplate and top cover alone still prove my point.

As of now, readers in most parts of the world have to decide whether this $125 price point is justified. I am inclined to say yes - the build quality is really good, you do have color options available for customization, and relative performance is among the very best overall too. But it is not perfect by any means - this sample's colors do not match the rest of the red color FOUR series of fittings and the CPU block I have here, and the backplate is a random piece of open metal that could have been more functional while still retaining the particular aesthetic scheme Bykski used. Despite this and the lack of included thermal paste, the pros outweigh the cons significantly enough to merit a high score and a recommendation - if you can buy it!