WEBVTT

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you can keep hoping the market will magically change and gpus will begin

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appearing on the shelves or you can do something about it that's

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right there is a way come closer don't

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be shy a little closer don't

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tell anyone but graphics cards are still on the

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shelves they're just hiding in much bigger boxes

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ones that look like this

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and today we're gonna find out if getting the rtx 3070 in that pc is worth

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all the extra money you might end up blowing on the substandard parts

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included with it we're also going to see if there's a cheap way to turn a

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pre-boat like this one into an enthusiast grade machine like say by

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putting a proper power supply in it from our sponsor seasonic seasonic makes

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great power supplies for brand new machines and for fixing up older ones

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and we're going to have them linked down below

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pre-built gaming pcs can be cheaper than building one yourself but it's an open

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secret that you kind of get what you pay for in no particular order here are some

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of the tricks that big manufacturers use to save a buck on production installing

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only a single memory module rather than two

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cheaping out on unsexy components like the motherboard cooling and power supply

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all of which can affect performance upgradeability and long-term reliability

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and signing deals to include bloatware on your pc for an upfront payout

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basically if it doesn't fit on the price tag out of best buy they probably went

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for the bare minimum i mean who needs a dram cash on your SSD anyway

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now one area where they don't tend to cheap out as hard is the GPU i mean sure you can

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find gaming pcs on the shelf that have onboard graphics you can't cheap out

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much harder than that but when they've got a GPU in them it tends to be built

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to a similar standard as the one that you would buy standalone

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keyword being would buy

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because the reality is it's been so hard for gamers to find gpus on a shelf that

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they've resorted to buying entire computers like this one just to extract

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their precious graphics cards to find out if this is actually a good idea i

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sent ploof to our local best buy his mission to buy a pre-built gaming pc

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with an enthusiast tier graphics card inside now the ASUS rog strix g15dk

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wasn't strictly speaking on the shelf but it was available in store and once

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the sales rep came back with his big brown box ploof paid the 2800 canadian

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pesos with the company credit card strapped that machine to the back of his

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snowmobile and made a beeline for the mexican border thankfully mexico doesn't have

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snow so we caught up with him pretty quickly

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let's take a look at it here then it's an ASUS so it should be more like a

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custom rig than your typical dell starting off strong we've got an ASUS

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dual fan rtx 3070 and a ryzen 5800x

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cooled by ooh a random tiny 80 millimeter fan tower

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cooler there's just a single 16 gig stick of sk hynix memory although at

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least it is 3 200 megahertz i guess there's a 512 gig western digital sn530

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for our boot drive this appears to be an oem only sku with no dram cash and they

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used a 7200 RPM 2 terabyte toshiba hard

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drive for extra storage which is fine

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and all of that is sitting on an ASUS prime b550mk micro atx board or so we

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thought our BIOS lists it as a g15dk and the rig

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is powered by a great wall c780 plus bronze power supply now this video is

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sponsored by seasonic so we're not going to create an obvious conflict of

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interest by evaluating this beauty in any way but we can say that the model of

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our unit is so obscure that the only place we found one for sale is a now

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delisted post on what appears to be russian ebay

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now the case is an ASUS pre-built special that i absolutely hate for many

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reasons we'll get into those later but let's say it would cost i don't know a

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hundred bucks so that puts us at around 1750 us dollars so far throw in a

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Windows 10 license an RGB strip assembly a cheap wi-fi card and we're getting

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pretty darn close to the 2 000 price tag not bad on the face of it that is as

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long as we ignore the fact that the 3070s msrp was never formally adjusted

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by NVIDIA from 4.99 to 870 dollars you know what you can still

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get for msrp trusty LTT water bottle with the new lid new design and new

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colors get yours today ltdstore.com now to be clear it's not like this

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thing's a pile of garbage our out-of-the-box performance was pretty

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solid but our CPU reached as high as 90

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degrees celsius in cinebench and while our GPU maintained a respectable 69

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degrees infer mark nice the piddly 80 millimeter exhaust fan means that as

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soon as the going gets tough the fans get going user complaints about the

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noise of this machine appear to be entirely on the money that's strike one

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crappy case now let's start with the things we can do to improve our

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situation without spending any more money we uninstalled all the bloatware

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we could find thankfully it wasn't that much then we installed ryzen master and

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MSI afterburner to see if our power supply and cooling could handle any

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overclocking the GPU managed some minor improvements with a quick and dirty 800

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megahertz overclock on the vram though major core clock adjustments resulted in

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instability and as for our CPU well

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if the cooler was at its limits before overclocking is unlikely to fix the

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problem so what can we do nothing really at least not without

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spending some money our first idea was to swap it out with the tried and true

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and cheap hyper 212 but unfortunately the case isn't deep enough to fit a 120

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millimeter tower cooler that's strike two now there are downdraft style

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coolers out there still but high performance ones aren't cheap enough

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that we're really saving any money so our next thought was to add some more

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case fans unfortunately ASUS made a couple of small changes to the prime

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b550 mk including removing the second

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case fan header so we ended up needing a splitter we then scavenged a few cheap

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fans putting our total cost at around 20 bucks for additional cooling then spent

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about half an hour getting access to the top and front panels and jury rigging

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the mounts for our fans because ASUS didn't think if i'm going to put 500 holes in the

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case maybe a few of them should be sized and spaced correctly for fans straight

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three surprisingly better case airflow didn't

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actually address our CPU thermal issues under heavy load though so we're at a

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bit of a crossroads here in gaming our temps with the stock cooler were

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perfectly reasonable averaging in the 70s or even high 60s so maybe the

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average gamer just leaves it well enough alone but for anyone looking to do

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serious CPU-heavy work with this machine we would strongly recommend spending the

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60 to 80 dollars on a good downdraft style cooler like one of these

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an all-in-one would be an option but there's no cooling whatsoever on the

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vrms of this motherboard so going water cooling means that they could end up

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running really hot not to mention that getting a radiator into this thing is

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going to be tricky to say the least just like putting an xbox series s into a

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computer case is going to be a little tricky get subscribed so you guys don't

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miss that of course we're not done trying to put lipstick on this pig let's increase our

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budget a little and fix the next most obvious problems starting with the

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single channel memory in a perfect world we'd like to have another stick of

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exactly the same RAM but despite what you may have heard elsewhere you can mix

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and match so we found this 3200 megahertz module from g-skill for 60

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bucks on newegg bringing our new total to about 2150 us dollars while we were

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at it we replaced the great wall with a seasonic focus 80 plus gold 750 watt for

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a bit of extra peace of mind to be clear 700 watts was probably fine for a

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machine like this but over speccing a little bit on power supply means that

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even as the unit ages it'll still be able to keep up and it's a seasonic so

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you know that's going to contribute to quieting down an already pretty loud

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machine these changes also netted us some minor

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performance improvements in games and a slightly higher center bench score but

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that's about it and you can probably sell your great wall for 30 or 40 bucks

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on facebook marketplace to recoup some of the seasonic cost putting you at

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around 2100 and

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without spending unreasonable amounts of money replacing core components like

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motherboard or storage that's about all we can do with the

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sucker so was it all worth it well in the past

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no it wouldn't have been but these days for many people the price that they're

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comparing against is what they would have to pay a scalper in order to get

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their hands on a GPU so let's run the numbers here ignoring the GPU let's

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recreate the system as we originally purchased it but without wasting money

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on crap that we'd have to upgrade later so better CPU cooler two eight gig

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sticks of memory a more robust motherboard in case on seasonic power

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supply from the get-go and all SSD storage that puts us at about 1100 us

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dollars we're gonna have those parts in our affiliate links down below add a

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thousand dollar 30-70 off ebay and we're getting a significantly better system

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actually here for only a little bit more cost or we could even go back to a hard

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drive and we could match the cost for our better system

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so then wait a minute what happened okay

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this technique of shucking the gpus in pre-built gaming systems might have been

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a good workaround near the beginning of the shortage but as you can see

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manufacturers have clearly clued in to the point where it's

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not actually any better to buy directly

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from the manufacturer in a system than it would be to buy the stupid thing from

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a scalper and to be clear this has always been a

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thing i mean evga basically wrote the book on releasing a card at launch for

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NVIDIA's msrp then following it up with that version with their own msrp that's

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20 bucks more a super clock for another 40 ftw for another 60 etc etc etc all

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while quietly discontinuing that original msrp sku and not shipping any

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more of them and i don't blame them for it the margins in their business are

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notoriously slim but when this process ends with cards that

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are double the original price like this

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becomes a little harder to swallow now this system ended up being

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just fine there's nothing inherently wrong with buying a pre-built and using

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it as a gaming machine especially if you make a couple of tweaks

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and it'll probably go on to live a long and prosperous life as a workstation for

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one of my staff but i also wouldn't go out and buy another

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one of these because priced as it is it really feels like even system

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integrators are scalping gpus at this point did you ever buy a pre-built are you

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happy with it unhappy with it let us know in the comments and let us know if

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you're happy to see see sonic sponsoring pieces like this where we get to take a

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closer look at what's going on in the market what's a good value what should

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you upgrade i mean it's kind of an obvious one for them because power

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supplies are usually pretty high up on the list so go check them out in the

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video description if you're looking for a power supply upgrade if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out the

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one where we tested some modern streaming services as an alternative to

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getting a graphics card at all they're really not that bad well some of them

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are not that bad