you can keep hoping the market will magically change and gpus will begin
appearing on the shelves or you can do something about it that's
right there is a way come closer don't
be shy a little closer don't
tell anyone but graphics cards are still on the
shelves they're just hiding in much bigger boxes
ones that look like this
and today we're gonna find out if getting the rtx 3070 in that pc is worth
all the extra money you might end up blowing on the substandard parts
included with it we're also going to see if there's a cheap way to turn a
pre-boat like this one into an enthusiast grade machine like say by
putting a proper power supply in it from our sponsor seasonic seasonic makes
great power supplies for brand new machines and for fixing up older ones
and we're going to have them linked down below
pre-built gaming pcs can be cheaper than building one yourself but it's an open
secret that you kind of get what you pay for in no particular order here are some
of the tricks that big manufacturers use to save a buck on production installing
only a single memory module rather than two
cheaping out on unsexy components like the motherboard cooling and power supply
all of which can affect performance upgradeability and long-term reliability
and signing deals to include bloatware on your pc for an upfront payout
basically if it doesn't fit on the price tag out of best buy they probably went
for the bare minimum i mean who needs a dram cash on your SSD anyway
now one area where they don't tend to cheap out as hard is the GPU i mean sure you can
find gaming pcs on the shelf that have onboard graphics you can't cheap out
much harder than that but when they've got a GPU in them it tends to be built
to a similar standard as the one that you would buy standalone
keyword being would buy
because the reality is it's been so hard for gamers to find gpus on a shelf that
they've resorted to buying entire computers like this one just to extract
their precious graphics cards to find out if this is actually a good idea i
sent ploof to our local best buy his mission to buy a pre-built gaming pc
with an enthusiast tier graphics card inside now the ASUS rog strix g15dk
wasn't strictly speaking on the shelf but it was available in store and once
the sales rep came back with his big brown box ploof paid the 2800 canadian
pesos with the company credit card strapped that machine to the back of his
snowmobile and made a beeline for the mexican border thankfully mexico doesn't have
snow so we caught up with him pretty quickly
let's take a look at it here then it's an ASUS so it should be more like a
custom rig than your typical dell starting off strong we've got an ASUS
dual fan rtx 3070 and a ryzen 5800x
cooled by ooh a random tiny 80 millimeter fan tower
cooler there's just a single 16 gig stick of sk hynix memory although at
least it is 3 200 megahertz i guess there's a 512 gig western digital sn530
for our boot drive this appears to be an oem only sku with no dram cash and they
used a 7200 RPM 2 terabyte toshiba hard
drive for extra storage which is fine
and all of that is sitting on an ASUS prime b550mk micro atx board or so we
thought our BIOS lists it as a g15dk and the rig
is powered by a great wall c780 plus bronze power supply now this video is
sponsored by seasonic so we're not going to create an obvious conflict of
interest by evaluating this beauty in any way but we can say that the model of
our unit is so obscure that the only place we found one for sale is a now
delisted post on what appears to be russian ebay
now the case is an ASUS pre-built special that i absolutely hate for many
reasons we'll get into those later but let's say it would cost i don't know a
hundred bucks so that puts us at around 1750 us dollars so far throw in a
Windows 10 license an RGB strip assembly a cheap wi-fi card and we're getting
pretty darn close to the 2 000 price tag not bad on the face of it that is as
long as we ignore the fact that the 3070s msrp was never formally adjusted
by NVIDIA from 4.99 to 870 dollars you know what you can still
get for msrp trusty LTT water bottle with the new lid new design and new
colors get yours today ltdstore.com now to be clear it's not like this
thing's a pile of garbage our out-of-the-box performance was pretty
solid but our CPU reached as high as 90
degrees celsius in cinebench and while our GPU maintained a respectable 69
degrees infer mark nice the piddly 80 millimeter exhaust fan means that as
soon as the going gets tough the fans get going user complaints about the
noise of this machine appear to be entirely on the money that's strike one
crappy case now let's start with the things we can do to improve our
situation without spending any more money we uninstalled all the bloatware
we could find thankfully it wasn't that much then we installed ryzen master and
MSI afterburner to see if our power supply and cooling could handle any
overclocking the GPU managed some minor improvements with a quick and dirty 800
megahertz overclock on the vram though major core clock adjustments resulted in
instability and as for our CPU well
if the cooler was at its limits before overclocking is unlikely to fix the
problem so what can we do nothing really at least not without
spending some money our first idea was to swap it out with the tried and true
and cheap hyper 212 but unfortunately the case isn't deep enough to fit a 120
millimeter tower cooler that's strike two now there are downdraft style
coolers out there still but high performance ones aren't cheap enough
that we're really saving any money so our next thought was to add some more
case fans unfortunately ASUS made a couple of small changes to the prime
b550 mk including removing the second
case fan header so we ended up needing a splitter we then scavenged a few cheap
fans putting our total cost at around 20 bucks for additional cooling then spent
about half an hour getting access to the top and front panels and jury rigging
the mounts for our fans because ASUS didn't think if i'm going to put 500 holes in the
case maybe a few of them should be sized and spaced correctly for fans straight
three surprisingly better case airflow didn't
actually address our CPU thermal issues under heavy load though so we're at a
bit of a crossroads here in gaming our temps with the stock cooler were
perfectly reasonable averaging in the 70s or even high 60s so maybe the
average gamer just leaves it well enough alone but for anyone looking to do
serious CPU-heavy work with this machine we would strongly recommend spending the
60 to 80 dollars on a good downdraft style cooler like one of these
an all-in-one would be an option but there's no cooling whatsoever on the
vrms of this motherboard so going water cooling means that they could end up
running really hot not to mention that getting a radiator into this thing is
going to be tricky to say the least just like putting an xbox series s into a
computer case is going to be a little tricky get subscribed so you guys don't
miss that of course we're not done trying to put lipstick on this pig let's increase our
budget a little and fix the next most obvious problems starting with the
single channel memory in a perfect world we'd like to have another stick of
exactly the same RAM but despite what you may have heard elsewhere you can mix
and match so we found this 3200 megahertz module from g-skill for 60
bucks on newegg bringing our new total to about 2150 us dollars while we were
at it we replaced the great wall with a seasonic focus 80 plus gold 750 watt for
a bit of extra peace of mind to be clear 700 watts was probably fine for a
machine like this but over speccing a little bit on power supply means that
even as the unit ages it'll still be able to keep up and it's a seasonic so
you know that's going to contribute to quieting down an already pretty loud
machine these changes also netted us some minor
performance improvements in games and a slightly higher center bench score but
that's about it and you can probably sell your great wall for 30 or 40 bucks
on facebook marketplace to recoup some of the seasonic cost putting you at
around 2100 and
without spending unreasonable amounts of money replacing core components like
motherboard or storage that's about all we can do with the
sucker so was it all worth it well in the past
no it wouldn't have been but these days for many people the price that they're
comparing against is what they would have to pay a scalper in order to get
their hands on a GPU so let's run the numbers here ignoring the GPU let's
recreate the system as we originally purchased it but without wasting money
on crap that we'd have to upgrade later so better CPU cooler two eight gig
sticks of memory a more robust motherboard in case on seasonic power
supply from the get-go and all SSD storage that puts us at about 1100 us
dollars we're gonna have those parts in our affiliate links down below add a
thousand dollar 30-70 off ebay and we're getting a significantly better system
actually here for only a little bit more cost or we could even go back to a hard
drive and we could match the cost for our better system
so then wait a minute what happened okay
this technique of shucking the gpus in pre-built gaming systems might have been
a good workaround near the beginning of the shortage but as you can see
manufacturers have clearly clued in to the point where it's
not actually any better to buy directly
from the manufacturer in a system than it would be to buy the stupid thing from
a scalper and to be clear this has always been a
thing i mean evga basically wrote the book on releasing a card at launch for
NVIDIA's msrp then following it up with that version with their own msrp that's
20 bucks more a super clock for another 40 ftw for another 60 etc etc etc all
while quietly discontinuing that original msrp sku and not shipping any
more of them and i don't blame them for it the margins in their business are
notoriously slim but when this process ends with cards that
are double the original price like this
becomes a little harder to swallow now this system ended up being
just fine there's nothing inherently wrong with buying a pre-built and using
it as a gaming machine especially if you make a couple of tweaks
and it'll probably go on to live a long and prosperous life as a workstation for
one of my staff but i also wouldn't go out and buy another
one of these because priced as it is it really feels like even system
integrators are scalping gpus at this point did you ever buy a pre-built are you
happy with it unhappy with it let us know in the comments and let us know if
you're happy to see see sonic sponsoring pieces like this where we get to take a
closer look at what's going on in the market what's a good value what should
you upgrade i mean it's kind of an obvious one for them because power
supplies are usually pretty high up on the list so go check them out in the
video description if you're looking for a power supply upgrade if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out the
one where we tested some modern streaming services as an alternative to
getting a graphics card at all they're really not that bad well some of them
are not that bad