why would origin PC sponsor a video where their top-of-the-line gaming
machine performs like
this well maybe because it doesn't hey there we go that's better
the neuron should be getting hundreds of frames per second in CS2 and ours would
have if we hadn't given it to our techy friend 2 fix and gotten it back worse
than before of course it arrived from origin in perfect working order but well
we'll get to that it's a really common situation and for many people the next
move is to prepare their wallet and head to the tech shop if they had an origin
PC they could just use their 24/7 lifetime support but if they don't have
an origin PC well the big question is where do you go the service department
at a big box store would surely have the processes and tools to diagnose and
repair your PC but on the other hand maybe the veteran Tech at the mom Pop
shop down the road is best equipped to evict your systems
Gremlins yeah we couldn't decide which route to go either so we dropped off two
identical and identically broken systems
courtesy of origin to compare big box
versus small business but before we get into the results we need to know the
problem let's take a look at the messes that we're going to be handing over I'm
that friend everyone asks for tech support but I don't mind helping to set
up such a beautiful machine it looks so
fast and it is but it's a little loud okay I've
watched a lot of videos about system tuning and I know what this
means overheating that is where everything
went from oops to OMG that cable that was loosened during
unpacking handled communication between the PC and our Cooler's I Q Link system
Hub so that knocked out RPM monitoring
for our fans meaning it's Full Throttle o clock all the time now a quick reality
check before we go further the link AIO and fans all have temperature probes in
them so this Behavior doesn't normally happen but in general a hub running full
speed due to a loss of signal is a very common scenario and one that should be
easy for a technician to rectify too bad our friend isn't a technician first they
tried rolling back the NVIDIA driver to the earliest one available Unfortunately
they did so without removing the existing driver so not only did this not
solve the problem it created a new one device manager is now reporting error
code 43 oops too bad my friend didn't notice
then they ran C cleaner and started uninstalling stuff in hopes that it
would help which it did not friendo was
running short on ideas by this point so they dug around in the BIOS and disabled
everything they could find that would cause extra heat in hopes that the fans
would slow down and for good measure they also locked the core clocks as low
as they would go it's too bad the LTT hat Pro doesn't make you smarter just
more water resistant LTT Store.com now
as a pretty average buyer of a pre-built system I don't know any of what my
friend did and even if I did I wouldn't understand what it meant all I would
know is my games are unplayable they crash and my system is as loud as a
vacuum cleaner I would have no way of knowing
is it a hardware or a software problem or even how to tell the difference and I
would probably be scared of damaging it any further now I could contact the
manufacturer and for a brand new pc that's probably a pretty good bet origin
PC has scored well for customer service in our secret shopper series origin PC
what can I say wow A+ a nail under 10
minutes and bacon face mask 24/7 A+ and
they have free lifetime support but not everybody has a brand new PC or An
Origin PC for that matter now of course what we actually are dealing with here
is a software and BIOS mess and one loose cable the quickest way of fixing
it then would be to plug the cable in clear the SOS and reinstall Windows but
it can also be fixed without doing either of those things if you know
exactly what we did the texts of course don't so let's listen in and see what
kinds of conclusions they drew starting with the langly Best Buy hey so I bought
this off of a friend a couple days ago and it's been giving me problems when
I've been trying to play games on it um they're just running super slow and the
thing sounds like it's going no um chew
who bought it um from origin I believe I thought butas it from no no no no is a
custom made right uh um I'm not sure he
he bought it and never even took it out of the box it's a yeah put a sticky note
here with my steam in case you need to get in there like when you play games
they're lagging or they're super slow yeah super slow one of the games I have
hell divers 2o when I open it it just crashes and it says something about the
CPU being bad or something I'm not sure chewy did a really good job of both
playing the ignorant customer who has no idea what he's talking about while also
putting out a nice little trail of breadcrumbs for them to follow in order
to diagnose this issue he even gave them access to a steam account that has a
specific game installed that requires AVX support so they would get the error
message that would help them reconfigure the BIOS we not taking
it excuse me I mean I guess right like I
can't force you to work on something you
can just be like no look this job is not right for us maybe take it somewhere
else but we we are not taking it it's a
little direct we're not working on custom
Bill he say you know what up like that because we have those parts from the
brand directly with manufactur warranty okay fortunately I'm really sorry for
that but that be okay he tried to soften
it a little bit some called memory memory the shop nearby they do B
C and stuff like that on the one hand I kind of get his rational now look we
don't necessarily have access to replacement parts for this thing on the
other hand if you're going to recommend that I go to another shop can you at
least tell me the actual name of the shop ah the irony of not being able to
remember the name of memory something Express that's it so we just
got told to leave essentially at the
first Best Buy that can't be policy Emily is that that's not policy is it no
we called them afterwards and they told
us that yes they actually absolutely do work on like pre-built computers or and
also custombuilt computers that they they don't sell in their stores you know
what I bet it's about they probably saw how high-end it was looked at the issues
that we were having with it and went this thing's haunted and just didn't
want to deal with it cuz you make a mistake on a you know $600 office box
okay what that's a $50 mistake or a $100 mistake you make a mistake on on a you
know 5,000 6,000 Canadian dollar gaming
rig let's move on drop off this time at
the Best Buy on King George Highway
heyel is this big is this what do you
want to do now get it fixed whatever
whatever it needs chewy really does play the ignorant customer extremely well he
has like strong trust fund kid Vibes
I've got this like crazy machine I just like you know fix it I guess sure
whatever J's our community coordinator by the way so if you ever see a reply on
Reddit that's not from me it's probably from him you st
or a monitor it's an interesting question do you hook it up to a TV or a
monitor unless they were trying to help
figure out if we were plugged into the onboard GPU or the dedicated graphics
card maybe it's a custom leave order uh
I I bought it off a friend I'm not sure what is a custom PC they won't look at
it wait this is an interesting
distinction and I can kind of see where they're
coming from but even at this second Best Buy location they're drawing a line
between a system that was built of custom parts by an experienced
integrator Like An Origin PC and a system that could be built of the exact
same Parts but by the individual user
and in that case it's not about the value of the parts and the risk of you
know breaking them or the difficulty finding Replacements because they're
willing to work on an origin PC they just don't want to work on potentially
those exact same Parts if you put it together yourself and maybe bungled
something up because who knows you could be trying to blame them for it if you
bent a pin in the socket or whatever the case may be they've probably run into
some horror stories working on custom PCS
you so my friend tried but he moved just
before just after he sold it to me it seems almost seems like what he did made
it worse I don't really know what he did and the thing is if you've ever worked
in a tech shop you will know exactly how
common this kind of scenario is oh yeah my friend or my nephew or my uncle
worked on the system and like I don't
know what they did and you see all kinds of wild things that supposedly techy
friends and family members will do to systems they're well-intentioned they
just don't really have familiarity with the hardware this is not a software
issue so it's kind of a hardware issue we need to ship it out to
the what you can't tell me that you know what kind of issue it is without even
like turning on the system then again
what I suspect is that they just don't want to deal with it there in the store
they want to send it to the depot so they're just telling us anything that it
takes to get us to accept that this needs to go to the depot so that they
can just kind of go yeah fancy expensive
system I don't want to deal with it I send it away to the other guys P
shipping and diagnosis it's $100 man 100
bucks to even start to do anything do
you have any important data that's a good question they're going to call you
after diagnos do you want to sign up for the wait what sign up for membership
hopefully you're going to fix it I won't need a membership to Best Buy the whole
drop off process at the second Best Buy took about 20 minutes half of which was
filling out paperwork they did log the issues that we had with the machine and
they gave us a case ID and a phone number we could call to get updates but
we're still having a hard time figuring out exactly what Best Buy's policy is
with respect to working on custom PCS versus just OEM PCS from HP Lenovo and
the like when we called the main line they said no there's no reason that they
wouldn't look at a completely custombuilt PC let alone one that was
built by a system integrator but both of
the stores we talked to were like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa when it came to
working on custom PCS and only one of them was willing to work on our origin
now for the one I'm more excited about let's listen to the drop off at black
laab which you guys may recognize as the mom and pop shop that we bought all the
old inventory from a couple of months ago Keith seemed like the kind of battle
hardened technician that should be able to make short work of this but only the
result results matter and let's see what they are what's going on with it right
to the point um so first of all it's insanely loud and I feel like that's not
right and it's it's running slow in general but especially trying to run
games like it can't even run anything really really yeah SSD obviously I'm not
sure huh first thing he asks is do you
have an SSD that makes a ton of sense
it's really interesting how the kind of shop you go to
dictates the kinds of questions they ask just like secret shopper you know Dell
is asking questions like are you buying an entire fleet of these things do you
want on-site service whereas a custom builder like origin PC is asking what
games do you want to play and what FPS do you want to play them at so in the
same way Keith probably sees a lot of 15-year-old machines so he wants to know
okay is there anything obvious that's making this thing dog slow like does it
have a hard drive and also do I even want to work on another machine that has
a hard drive in it wait you know 10 minutes for an application to install
you didn't even take it out of the box interesting what yeah how
much uh that's hilarious chewy doesn't know how much he paid for it like 3K he
just made up a number yeah he was moving away so he just want to get it off his
hands but it's not running right nope maybe that's why he wanted to get it
off yeah for now so it goes into Windows
yes and then everything goes is there a password no but my steam info is Hest
sticky note there perfect I'm going to go home
tonight I can't believe neither of the best buys called chewy on giving his
steam credentials whereas kei's like Yo dude the low points for professionalism
but high points for efficiency the whole interaction with Keith took less than
five minutes is it a 49 you know uh I
don't know we get this video part
10 I'm just kidding that
oh man see I don't know Keith very well but
I've spent enough time with him to know that I think he's honest enough that he
wouldn't actually just swap out the hardware in someone's machine who
obviously has no idea what they have but
he's also smart enough to see that this is someone he freaking could if he
really felt like it awesome all right okay thank you take care of just as I
remember him an efficient troll now it's
time for pickup Chewy was sick that day so we sent in llo to grab the machines
starting with Best Buy so I just want to
SC can I see the document that they're looking at please yep my goodness we got
a whole folder jeez motherboard uh the hard
drive RAM everything is good so this is
the T P okay wait a second whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa
how much did I pay for this whole tube of thermal paste of which you guys used
one tiny dollop they sold me a giant tube of thermal paste because they Reen
read the cooler really how much did I pay for
this 20 bucks in thermal paste that wasn't even the problem you guys okay uh
nothing wrong with the hardware just the pH like you know the overheating was
causing the problem overheating was the
problem no you put on new thermal paste you think you solved the problem but H
we're about to look at this machine and I don't think we're going to find the problem solved if they think overheating
was the problem if anything under heating was the problem we had too much
cooling fans they played the game for a little while and see how it goes they uh
kept it on like you know the computer for almost like you know more than 24
hours you to sees anything happening passing anything okay all is good I'm
afraid I don't really understand what they're saying so they reimbursed me the
hardware repair and then charged me almost double for
software repair because they reinstalled the operating system they made no
mention of Bio settings no mention of the loose link Hub cable they charged me
20 bucks for a gigantic tube of thermal paste that I think it's pretty clear
from the way that I'm talking about this system I have no idea what it is I am
never going to use did they even solve the problem you had the lot of fan so
the fan like over the time you were B noise oh oh the fans were noisy yeah
yeah because say you had three here three here six oh just a lot of fans in
it yeah so that is normal
there more fans is not more noise yeah
we have 12 fans which means they should be spinning very slow and making very
little noise oh Best Buy Best Buy Best
Buy it is very heavy yeah yeah I know I know I going have to carry are you manag
to carry yeah it'll be okay yeah going
to somebody to their credit it seemed like
they were offering to help them carry the system out that's one thing they did
well but I paid $123 to fix a computer that as far as I
can tell is not fixed actually it was a
total of 209 because what a total of 209
holy bananas we paid 250 bucks for them to
not fix the problem maybe they shouldn't work on
custom PCS all right let's see how black lab
did can I get the documentation for that one about the same price though
realistically I guess what it comes down to now is did Keith manage to fix the
computer hey I just had a pick up oh okay what was wrong with it oh it had to
be completely reloaded completely reloaded it was wacko man those fans
were just roaring I tried everything to get them to shut up oh yeah okay
reloading software all that stuff just didn't work so ioaded everything did all
the drivers again it's awesome interesting Okay cool so it's all it's
all good now yep and if he has any problems whatsoever just tell him to
call me that's nice offering the followup and he did have some malware on
there so malware oh okay do we have any idea what malware he's referring to did
we have logging software on there to see what they were no nothing no no the best
I can figure is CA cleaner and windzip yeah I wouldn't consider those malware
awesome thank you so much thank you so much have a great day all right you too
full marks for efficiency and love the personality but I think at best Keith is
headed for a partial pass here he says
that the fans are quieted down now and there is a way to do that without recing
that Link cable but he didn't manage to
find the underlying problem and he made no mention of any of the issues in the
bio so I have to say I'm a little worried that the performance of the
machine even if the fans are quiet is not going to be up to Snuff he also
charged a little more than Best Buy did but if you managed to solve the problem
at least solved enough that I can use my computer
then it's hard to really complain about
that God I can sure complain about how much it costs to get service done on a
computer I can see why people just buy a new machine like if you have a
5-year-old Dell or something and you take it into a shop they're like yeah it's going to be three or four labor
hours to reload Windows put on drivers and get it up and running again be like
a screw it I'll just get a new one and then it'll just be fast anyway and this
my friend is where e-w babies come from starting with the Best Buy PC I am not
that impressed with the condition of this computer I mean we dropped it off
brand new and it is so covered in fingerprints and thermal paste that I
could probably defeat the biometric security of the phone of this technician
not to mention they left this giant stupid service tag sticker on it
like why it comes off pretty easily so
just remove it I don't know maybe I'm just in a bad mood and being picky
because I don't think they solve the problem let's see let's see maybe I'll
feel differently when we open it up and they did a great job or
whatever all right get me my
screwdriver I'm talking to me I will get me my
screwdriver how's their thermal Pace
job um
realistically probably not going to cause any problems but I'd have put on
more especially since like I have plenty
do we have thermal results for uh the
after no probably shouldn't have pulled this off then oh seriously you made it
that easy on them I thought you meant you were going to pull out like one of
these USBC connections between the link devices you pulled a freaking USB header
off and they didn't notice that they did not
brother I mean if you diagnosed it as a software issue and you didn't look that
closely at the hardw where I can kind of see how you could miss it but you went
you did a full re and re on the CPU Cooler so you thought it was hardware
and you didn't check if a USB header was uninstalled what that tells me is I'm
going to press this button and that's going to happen which
they passed off as normal how much you want to bet origin PC based on the
experiences we've had with them would fix this issue over the phone in like 10
minutes before we hook up a monitor and see how they did software wise let's
have a look at Keith's Hardware also a little fingerprint but
the difference here is that the fingerprints are in the typical carrying
positions and uh are not made out of thermal paste so this is probably
us wait where's the US oh he plugged it back in did he plug the USB header back
in we didn't do it okay so that's
interesting Keith is still it was a
software issue at least that's what he told us but he found the hardware issue
which solved his problem if you do the
right thing that's definitely better than just not seeing it at all even if
you aren't sure exactly which thing you did fixed it he took longer he took a
week compared to 3 days and he did charge us more but here let's get this
thing fired up oh and of course my RGB is working properly now too now that
we're posted let's see how they did they managed to enable XMP they put it on the
first profile which is 6,000 megatrans
per second rather than 6,200 AVX is still
disabled frequency control is fine though you know what's funny to me we've
talked about this in our troubleshooting challenges before if you suspect at all
that a BIOS configuration issue is present modern systems all you got to do
is go into the profiles create a profile
for what they had just in case you know if they had like weird Legacy boot
settings or something like that reset it and see if that solves the
problem and if it does then great you enable XMP and you're done you don't
have to dig through all the sub menus to find what stupid thing their friend
adjusted there's no avoiding it is there we're going to have to start a tech shop
so people can have their computers fixed properly well we'll see maybe black laab
did great now that we're on the desktop I'm even more confused did they really
install user Benchmark and then just leave it here yeah Ida to which is not
free software like you're not allowed to just use it however you want and leave
it on any system you want oh this is even a oh no it is a trial for yeah yeah
there's even a thing that pops up and tells me that probably their worst sin
was that Norton 360 was not on this computer when we dropped it off now the
reason for that can actually be traced back to MSI who includes Norton in their
driver package bundle thing but when you
do a Windows refresh I kind of expect you to pay attention to what I had
installed on the machine and not leave anything extra on it that seems to be
about it now let's get this machine shut down
so ah our audio is usable let's move
over to Keith's machine oh Keith didn't turn off fan speed monitoring so we get
that CPU fan error when the system First turns on that's a rookie mistake it's
even in the simple interface that's how quick that is to fix oh Keith used the
higher XMP profile and did he reset seos no AVX is
still off he's got all the frequency
stuff fixed why not just clear seos both of you In fairness to Keith the CPU fan
error message is a lot less of a problem on these MSI boards on an ASUS one it'll
hang until you go in and tell it not to check it now that we're in Windows I see
no sign of user Heaven Benchmark okay a really
Heaven does anyone use that anymore and
B can't can't believe in software installed on people's systems if you
have a conversation with them that goes I put this on there in order to do this
it's really useful for this you may want to use it otherwise you can just take it
off it's not harming anything then at least Le that's a conversation we had if
you're just leaving software installed on my system it's it's sloppy no Norton
though Kudos Keith for installing the drivers properly either doing it
manually by downloading them and then installing them or by making sure you're
paying attention when you use that package and unselecting Norton for
gamers since we have Heaven on here I guess we can do a quick check and see if
the system is performing as we would expect and it is casual 600 fr per
second did they really put 409s in these things mhm oh
origin you guys and your crazy systems
now that we've run through both systems the results are both clear and also not
clear Best Buy they failed they solved
problems we didn't have and they didn't solve the problems we did have all while
charging us $200 and selling us a bunch of thermal goop that we probably don't
need meanwhile over at black laab Keith
did manage to nail the fanish is so that was the underlying problem but what he
missed was enabling AVX in order to get hell divers 2 working which we
explicitly told him was a concern and
even gave him our Steam account so that he could check however I don't want to
write him off yet because on our way out the door he did say hey just give me a
call if anything else goes wrong let's see if he's willing to troubleshoot this
for us over the phone or fix it for free in which case I'm ready to give him
Colin can you call this computer shop for me and just explain the problem that
we have uh it's AVX related and we can't
launch hell divers too right no it's okay never
mind we found Hoffman I can't talk to him because he'll probably recognize my
voice okay we ready yeah
may I ask if uh Keith is around no he's
coming back in two hours yeah we'll give you a call I guess
yeah I want to talk to Keith in two hours well that went about as poorly as
it possibly could have two hours later
Keith gave us a call back and in about 8 minutes walked us through changing the
setting but before he did that he did say hey if you bring it in I'd be happy
to fix this for you for no charge he joked about charging us $600 for it or
something like that but was obviously joking in the way that he does and I
guess at this point it's an a he hit
everything now that everything's fixed up we should take a look at the kind of
performance we should be getting from our origin PC and this is cool while I
was digging into that I noticed a couple of other things that Keith got right he
installed IQ and he installed what then was probably the latest GeForce drivers
these are quite new even though they're not quite the newest uh the reason I was
poking around in the control panel was that I want to enable DSR Dynamic super
resolution so we can see what kind of 4K gaming performance we should expect from
a machine like this here's what I'm thinking 4K Ray tracing
Ultra natively rendered and then motion
blur off should should handle it right maybe we'll see God this game looks so
good when you max it out but it is so demanding this is a 4
490 with a core i 94900 k and we're
getting about 70 FPS now with that said
it's a really even 70fps so it feels
extremely smooth compared to if we had lows that were much much lower and we
were getting any kind of hitching or stutter but uh when you crank it man is
R tracing ever heavy the good news is
now that Keith has solved our fan problems
it's quiet not everybody needs a Swanky
LCD on their cooler a ton of RGB fans an RTX 49d a 99d pro SSD and 32 gigs of
Dominator memory the neuron starts at just over $2,300 with respectable specs
in readyto ship configurations and you can find links to their neuron desktops
and more in the description down below but if you want one that goes this hard
you can win one for free origin PC is
giving away a neuron just like like the ones we used today with a core i 94900 k
and an RTX 490 winners will be drawn 2 weeks from today and all you need to do
is follow the link to origin PC's giveaway down below and enter big thanks
to them for sponsoring this video while I can't speak to the experience you'll
have at every single Best Buy or at every single mom and pop shop
I still think there were some interesting learnables here that might help equip you better if you or one of
your loved ones who you don't feel like fixing a computer for ever needs to go
through an experience like this if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out
the recent secret shopper origin PC makes a very small cameo