Well, Lilock, you've done it again. I don't think the PCB will be troubling us
anytime soon. Quite indeed, Plen. Quite indeedly. But just tell me, how did you
manage to crack the case? Miss Katesson's got her shawl back, and
you've managed to determine which of our pre-built gaming computers is the best.
Well, it was quite elementary. Elijah
just paid for a pizza. He never ordered because I bought his info online to
prank him. But while sponsor me, you can stop can stop stuff like that. What's
that? What? Wait a tick. That's not how I remember
it. You see, it was near the end when
Scotland Yard examined our preconfigured computing
machines. Ah, Dell, we meet again. And
this time you're very similar to last year. The XPS 8960 still requires a
screwdriver to access the side panel, but is otherwise mostly toolless. You
get two fans, front and rear, with space for a third, along with decent cable
management, including pre-run cables for adding a hard drive, as well as a GPU
brace that could probably survive an earthquake. The proprietary Z690
motherboard will cause some headaches if you want to upgrade the power supply
later, which you may very well want to do, but is well featured with two M.2
slots and onboard Wi-Fi. The only major
quality complaint that I have here is the cheapo flowerype CPU cooler. There's
a Core i7 14700 nonK under this thing.
And that would live a happier, cooler life with even a basic tower heat sink,
like oh, I don't know, the one that they give you if you order the K variant of
that same CPU. Otherwise, the specs are
about what we would expect at this price, except for the
460W bronze efficiency power supply. At
least Dell's system arrived fully intact, though. I don't know what
happened to our IBY power system in shipping, but aside from the thumb screw
that was lodged in the IO, upon closer inspection, we found that nearly all of
our motherboard screws were loose, and two of the ones that weren't were
crossthreaded. As for the case, it's not particularly toolless, but it's also not
difficult to work in. And we got four 120 mm ARGB fans, though they use a
proprietary connector, which is a bit of a downer. And for some reason, were not
configured to sync with our motherboard or even to each other. Cable management
is decent with nothing loose or hanging around. And this time, we got a much
better CPU heat sink with what looks like an I by PowerBadged Hyper22 ARGB
tower cooler. You guys were so close, you just had to screw down the
motherboard. Oh well. As for specs, we got a strong CPU, dual channel memory,
and ample storage. Too bad there was a little mixup with iby's unauthorized
reseller on Amazon, and we didn't get the 4060 Ti that was supposed to be in
this system. Moving on to Main Gear, the
MG1 case is largely unchanged since our
previous secret shopping spree, and if it is not broken, then nay, it need not
be fixed. With that said, a filter behind the removable face plate would be
a nice touch. Cable management was a strong point, though, with no shortage
of zip ties, though that might be a pain point when you're upgrading later and
you have to start cutting them off. And we got a beefy RGB fan controller
requiring two SATA power connectors that supports six fans and up to eight ARGB
headers for extra lighting strips or effects. It also appears our case power
switch is routed to it as well. curious. Another odd choice was the anti-seg GPU
bracket. It was a nice touch to have it in there, but the way it's mounted made
replacing the graphics card in the system a bit of a pain, so be prepared.
Main Gear is our first competitor to go AMD for the CPU, which we all know is
good for gaming, but the chip that they chose has
literally as many processing cores as the last two systems we looked at. And
while Main Gear chose some of the highest clocked memory in this round,
the high rated latency means they might not get as much performance benefit from
it. As for the rest of the specs, the main standout was Main Gear selection of
an SSD with a DRAM cache. Generally,
these drives perform better and last longer. As for cooling, we got four 120
mm fans and what looks like a Hyper212 Black Edition, so you probably won't
need to change any of that out anytime soon.
Speaking of change, I'm happy to report that Star Forge has gone through quite a
bit of change. Gone is the Deep Cool CG
650 from last time. And in its place, we have the beautiful Fantex XT View, a
gorgeous and mostly toolless case that's easy to work in. By the way, those of
you who suspected that Star Forge's fans were all set to exhaust were
hoodwinkedked by their use of reverse blade intakes. There is an additional
120 mm fan that is exhausting out the rear, but the rest of them are all daisy
chained together for some positive pressure goodness. Curiously, this case
does include an RGB controller, but Star Forge opted to plug into the motherboard
for control instead. Another thing they didn't use was the case's included
mounting hardware. They clearly used something to assemble the computer, but
we were left with the full set of screws and zip ties. Not that we'll need them
since the cable management was solid. I'm still not a fan of this uncapped
ARGB cable that could short out on something and some of these SATA cables
could be tucked away a little nicer, but it's not bad at all. We need to talk
about the CPU cooler, though. The contact frame that's included with their
Arctic cooler is a nice touch. But Star Forge, you might want to let your techs
know that you don't need the full tube of thermal paste. And ours, while secure
enough, was actually not torqued down all the way. As for the heat sink, some
of you noticed that it was a skew after I ripped out the packing foam, but I'm
happy to report that while it looks a tad wonky, it didn't seem to affect
performance. Under our cooler, we find our most pedestrian CPU yet, mounted to
the most bulk of motherboards we've seen yet, along with some other kind of
mediocre stuff. Except for the GPU, our
only Radeon card this round is an RX6650 XT8 gig from three years ago.
We'll also be exploring the performance of this system with the 7700 XT upgrade
that we would have gotten for the $300 we had left in our budget, but our value
calculation will be based on the system that they sold us. Next up is HP with a
new case that sports these nifty stealthy Wi-Fi antennas and a perforated
front panel for better air flow for our dual 140 mm intake fans. We've got a 120
mm exhaust in the rear. And all three fans are wired directly to our
motherboard headers instead of into the perfectly good RGB fan hub where they
did decide to route the RGB cables for the fans. Cable management on the back
isn't terrible, but on the front, come on, HP. Either use a nicer case with the
power supply shroud, you know, like the one you sent us last time, or just take
a little bit more time to tidy this up.
On the plus side, unlike Dell, HP has basically no proprietary weirdness going
on that would prevent you from changing parts or upgrading in the future. And
upgrade in the future, you shall. On paper, this is our weakest system yet
pretty much across the board. Okay, I
guess the slightly less basic CPU cooler and the 500 W power supply are
technically ahead of Dell, but not by
much. Cyberpowers case is designed by Cooler Master and resembles a Masterbox
5 light, but with some better ventilation at the front. It includes
four 120 mm RGB fans, though
surprisingly no RGB fan hub. Cable
management is mediocre. No thanks to the board or the case. But at least they
tried. Other than this unholy chain of four pin Molex connectors for those
fans. Where they could have tried harder is the specs. Decent CPU. And
surprisingly, this 600 W Avia power supply didn't fail our testing. More on
that later. But a single 16 gig stick of memory in 2025 and this subpar flower
cooler. We didn't do formal acoustic testing, but I can tell you this one
gets pretty loud. Almost as loud as the Dell. Wrapping up our physical
evaluation. In third place, we've got Cyber Power, though I wouldn't mind some
more amenities, especially front USB type-C. As for the win, I've got to give
it to Main Gear. Overall, Star Forge did
a great job with cable management, and packing in the Fantex hardware was a
nice touch, but Main Gear looked ever so slightly cleaner. Not to mention, they
didn't go overboard on the thermal compound. Of course, everything we've
talked about just now, including the overlication of thermal compound, is
just looks. I've got a feeling that the
beauty of these machines might be only skin deep, and the order might change
when we look at performance and value.
But first, software. Well, Dell, how up
to date and gaming ready are you this year? According to my report, the BIOS
and Windows versions were both from November of 2024, so just a few months
before our ship date. However, our GPU drivers were from July, like of
2024. Resizable bar, an important
feature for modern GPUs, was enabled, but we found no trace of XMP memory
overclocking in our antiquated looking BIOS. With that said, our memory was
running at its maximum rated speed of 5600 megat transfers per second. So, I
guess that's fine. Our recovery environment and ability to refresh the
PC were both configured properly. And while there were some Dell applications
pre-installed, they were for the most part not configured to start up without
permission. So we only had to remove McAfee during our debloating step. Let's
move on to IBY Power. For those who missed part two, this is the kind of
weird PC that Miss Katesson accidentally bought from an unauthorized third-party
seller on Amazon when I by Power directed her to get the system from
Amazon rather from them directly. And
this is an odd one. Our BIOS isn't too old. It's from September of 2024. But
our Windows install is ancient. I'm
talking a 22H2 build from a year ago.
So, I mean, it's been getting security updates since the latter half of 2022.
But come on, 23H2 has been out for kind
of a minute now. And our Intel management and GPU drivers are both
similarly out of date. Looks like someone hasn't been updating their prep
image. Thankfully, not only does the recovery environment work, an
improvement over last time for I by Power, but there was zero bloatware and
no odd folder remnants on our drive. Both of which are nice to see. But wait
a tick. What's this? Oh, I by power. How
could you? XMPP is disabled out of the
box and our CPU cooler tuning is set to
a lowly 65 watts. Rebar may be on, but
you guys aren't getting any points for that since this MSI board enables it by
default. What a mixed bag this has been.
Let's see if Main Gear can do any better. Considering their BIOS, Windows,
and driver versions are all from 2025,
most from the very same month that we ordered the machine, I'd say they have.
Expo memory tuning and rebar are both enabled. There's no antivirus or
additional bloat to remove and no random leftover prep folders.
Magnificent. But it's not all good news.
Our system had a little tiny overclock
that was pre-applied. Nothing major, just a PBO boost of 100 MHz and our
curve optimizer set to all cores with a minus15 offset, which sounds fine. It's
just that it didn't work. We did try a few adjustments, but our system outright
refused to boot with these settings enabled, so we ended up turning them
off, keeping only Expo enabled for our testing. Sorry, Main Gear. While I do
believe you that it probably worked during QC, alas, tragedy must have
struck this system somewhere along the journey, which highlights the pitfalls
of factory overclocking systems. What
about Star Forge, though? Well, it appears they've done the opposite of
Main Gear and updated very little. Our
BIOS and GPU driver versions are from late 2024, and Windows hasn't been
updated since late 2023. Oh my goodness. And the Intel
Management Engine driver is older still. Pity. They also left a slew of
leftovers on the system like wallpapers and animations. But on the bright side,
look, outdated Windows and drivers can be dealt with by the user, and there's
very little bloat otherwise, and XMP and Rebar were both enabled. Moving right
along, let's talk about the system that almost didn't get here. HP is an odd
duck this year. The BIOS version of our machine, F.08, isn't available from
their website, so we're not sure when it's from, but we appear to be just one
revision behind F-09, which released earlier this year. So, it's probably
from 2024, like our Windows version, chipset, and GPU drivers. But if you
look closely at HP's website, you'll notice that we're on the latest versions
of some of these. HP, are you suggesting
that AMD's most recent chipset drivers
after multiple new CPU launches are several months old?
Inconceivable? No, though, actually inconceivable. What this means is that
HP is not only not updating the images that they use to install their systems,
but they aren't updating their own driver database and website. For shame.
Also, while rebar was enabled, our recovery environment works and they've
left no CIS prep traces, they failed to enable XMP and had a bunch of unwanted
software installed like Dropbox promotion, my HP, Omen audio control,
and gaming hub and McAfee. We removed
McAfee before testing, by the way, per our standardized process. Finally,
there's Cyberpower. Their BIOS is fairly
recent. XMP and Rebar were both enabled. Their recovery environment works, and
system prep was nice and clean, which puts Main Gear on top, and CyberPower in
a clear second place when it comes to system prep with Dell making a surprise
podium appearance thanks to their non- ancient software. But who will win the
allimportant gaming performance carriage
race? This is it.
This can't be right. Do mine eyes
deceive me? Dell
wins. I mean, I know that a 4060 Ti is better
than a 4060, but look at this margin of
victory. And what a fantastic writing instrument. Get yours today at
ltstore.com. At 1080p, it's nearly a
clean sweep. Red Dead Redemption 2,
F-124, Cyberpunk, Allen Wake, Dell
demolishes the competition when it comes to pure gaming performance. It's not
even really close. They do suffer one
loss in Dota 2 where Main Gear's choice of a Ryzen processor, one that is cooled
properly, not to mention quieter, helps them out in this CPUbound game. And I by
Power manages to pull ahead simply by again properly powering and cooling that
same CPU Dell is using. But the rest of them, hey, a W's a W and they're all
W's. As for our clear losers, Star Forge
lands at the bottom of the list more often than not with HP, Main Gear, and
CyberPower trading places for second and third worst. What's particularly
interesting is the ray tracing testing we did. Yep, that's the RT performance
that you can expect out of a 6650 XT. All right, it was a modern card at one
point, but AMD's newer cards are a lot
better in this regard. At 1440p, it's
more of the same. Dell loses to Main Gear and I by Power in Dota and then
crushes them along with everyone else in every other game. That 4060 Ti is
putting in the work. It's a real shame that our I by Power system didn't come
with one, especially when it was supposed to. Whether the blame lies with
I by Power or with Amazon's crummy marketplace model, it has clearly hurt
them here. As you'll see when we do our what could have been analysis
later. Of course, raw performance doesn't tell the whole story. There's
also the question of value. And here, Dell's victory is still a victory, but
not as clearly so. In Alan Wake 2, Cyberpower dethrones Dell. In Cyberpunk
2077, Dell wins by less than a dime. I
by Power and Main Gear come out ahead in Dota 2 and then Dell wins by about a
dollar in F124 and by about a quarter in
Red Dead Redemption 2. Still though,
what an upset. These results are really
going to make the overall pick a tough call this
year. Now, while Miss Katesson did specify that the system was for gaming,
we thought we'd take a quick look at productivity performance. In our most
GPUintensive test, Blender, Star Forge is way down at the bottom thanks to
their lack of HIP RT capabilities. HIPP
is just AMD's version of CUDA rendering and HIP RT is the latest version of it
that utilizes ray tracing. But I digress. Dell is the clear winner here
again. But that is their only win in productivity. In Cinebench 24, I by
Power is on top in multi-core and tied with Dell in single core. while Star
Forge hangs out at the bottom. And in AV1 CPU encoding with Handbreak, Dell
performs admirably, but loses to I by Power with Starge on the bottom again.
My detective skills are intuiting a pattern here, and X264 encoding tells us
the same story, as does Puget Bench's Premiere and Da Vinci Resolve
benchmarks. Main Gear manages to take second place in Photoshop, but other
than that, their performance wasn't much to write home about. Yet, if we examine
the cost of our systems, curiouser and
curiouser, I by power once again looks like a solid value proposition, winning
multiple rounds here. As for the worst value of the pack, HP, I'm sorry, but
it's very clearly you. You are consistently at the bottom of every
chart we're flipping through right now. Overall, then, as surprising as it might
be, Dell looks like the top pick. Whether you're looking at pure
performance or performance per dollar,
but value and performance aren't always number one in people's hearts. Some of
you out there care about thermals or care about whether or not your power
supply is reliable. To test our GPU
thermal performance, we stressed our graphics cards with 4K F-124. And I'm
happy to report that across the board, our system builders chose cases that do
offer sufficient airflow, at least for the weak GPUs that we ended up with this
round. Out of the whole bunch, Star Forge performed the worst with still a
totally adequate 75° C average and a max
of 78. As for the rest of our builds, they stayed under 70° on average with
our coolest systems being the Dell and Cyber Power at just 63 degrees average.
though they were by far the loudest. As
for CPU temperatures, things aren't quite as rosy for some of our
competitors. Dell even managed to hit about 70° C average during 4K gaming,
which is a scenario that tends to be less demanding on the CPU. So, what
happens when we run Cinebench on these machines? Well, as it turns out, the
boards really try to juice these processors, at least at first. I by
Power and Dell were the only systems to reach over 200 watts of power
consumption during their Cinebench run, but they quickly realized that they
can't handle that and throttle down to some pretty unimpressive speeds. I mean,
yes, 3 GHz is higher than the advertised
base frequency of this chip, but boy is it ever a lot slower than the maximum
turbo. And Dell's average is even worse at just 2.88 GHz.
For those of you buying an I by Power system, there's clearly thermal headroom
here based on our average temperatures. And you can adjust the power limits to
get a little bit of extra performance out of your purchase. Though that will
take some tinkering in the BIOS, which you, the typical LT viewer, might be
inclined to do, but the average purchaser probably won't. As for our
hottest system, it ended up being Main Gear at a sweltering 92° C average. But
to be fair to Main Gear, that CPU is pinned at over 5.1 GHz for the whole
test. And like it or not, 92° is below
AMD's TJ Maxx. So, I don't know about
you guys, but I would rather have the hotter, more consistent running system
over the one that's running cooler, but not living up to its potential. Either
way, I think the win here has to go to Star Forge. Whether it was their
abundance of thermal paste, the contact frame on that Arctic cooler, or it just
being an older CPU, it was only 700 MHz
from the max boost on average while sticking to around
51°. So, this mediocre performing system
will at least last you a really long time. Something else that might last you
a long time is this 460W platinum power supply from Dell. Don't get me wrong,
it's only 460 Ws and the proprietary connections means you can't build
another computer with it. But when we ran through the light version of our PSU
tester, we confirmed that it is highly efficient with 115 volt and 230 volt. We
were so convinced that the results weren't correct that we went digging for
the 80 plus test that confirms our findings. Incredible. I by Power used a
high power HP1 J600GD
F12S600 watt. Very cool. This one tested
poorly at 2% load efficiency, but this was otherwise a solid contender and
mirrors our MSI and Cooler Master units for the rest of our load points.
Speaking of which, Main Gear and Star Forge both use the same power supply,
the MAG A650GL from MSI. These were the
best power supplies out of the bunch, featuring good load regulation,
efficiency rating, and low voltage ripple or noise. Excellent selection. HP
also chose well with their Cooler Master PSU. It matches the 80 plus gold rating
and has mostly average voltage ripple and voltage regulation. A little high on
the 3.3 volt, but nothing to be concerned about. Which leaves us with
cyber power in the Avivia ATX PR600
watt. We didn't have a lot of faith in this one. And while it didn't explode,
we were right to doubt it. It's not efficient and doesn't stay above 80%
efficiency at 100% load. We're not sure if this is just one bad unit or maybe 80
Plus was sent a golden sample when they validated it for their rating, but it's
not great. It's a clear tie here between Main Gear and Star Forge with HP as a
runner up and I buy Power with the honorable mention. If you buy from them,
it looks like you'll get quality power supplies that should last you for years
to come. And while the Aevia unit in the Cyber Power system isn't great, at least
it uses standard parts. I'll take that over the low wattage proprietary Dell
concoction any day of the week, even if it is quite efficient in need. Which
leads us finally to a section we're calling alternate
reality. No, not VR performance testing.
VR hasn't been invented yet in my time.
I'm talking about the timeline where we accept Main Gear's offer, get the right
PC from I by Power, don't have our order canceled with CyberPower, and spend our
full budget with Star Forge. Well, as
you can see here, our productivity results don't change much. We mostly see
the Cyberpower PC make some great strides thanks to its stronger CPU, but
these gaming results are something else entirely. It turns out that Star Forge
is the beneficiary of having a yes much
much better GPU than the RTX 4060Ti,
allowing them to win in almost every test. With that said, when it comes to
ray tracing, which is becoming more and more important, it's astonishing just
how much better those third gen RT cores are in NVIDIA's 40 series GPUs. In
Cyberpunk 2077 1080p RTON, our Star
Forge 7700 XT alternate reality system
still manages to lose to our unchanged Dell XPS. And while the 4060 Ti upgrade
on some of our other systems certainly helps here, our Dell still manages to
stay on top when it comes to pure value.
Also, while we don't have the same 120 millimeter AIO that you would expect
with the upgraded CyberPower, take a look at these thermal results and please
do yourselves a favor and avoid them. Unless you're buying a lower-end CPU and
trying to fit everything into a smaller case, these single fan AIO's are never
worth buying thanks to their poor performance. you're better off either
just strapping on a proficient air cooler or stepping up to a version with
a 240mm radiator. With that segment out
of the way, then it's time to declare the winner, which will not be based on
alternate reality, but only based on what we actually received.
Well, Lilock, who was it? You may not like it, and I may not like it, but this
is what peak performance looks like. No,
Dell came first in gaming performance, both in raw performance and in value.
And they also won in our productivity suite. And while performance isn't
everything, it is a lot. The customer
support could have been better as well as the ordering experience. But those
are hopefully one-time events that you can suffer through one time. I would say
the main knock against our little XPS that could here, and it is a big one, is
that if you want something that not only looks like a gaming computer, but can be
easily altered and upgraded and tinkered with like a gaming computer, good luck
doing anything with this proprietary board, weird CPU cooler mounting, and
460W power supply that, frankly, we were
amazed didn't blow up when Constable Lucas was testing it. With all of that
said, as a set and forget gaming box, darn it, I just can't argue with the
evidence. For a runnerup and system that
I would be more likely to pick, it's a tough call. If we'd received the right
system for my by Power directly, they'd probably take the silver medal. But that
loose motherboard and the dodgy purchase
experience. As for Star Forge, if we'd gotten the 7700 XT, there's a solid
chance they would have won the whole thing. But based on what we actually got
this year, I think second place has to go to
Cyberpower. Purchasing from them sucked. What are you calling for? What are you
calling for? I want to buy the computer. But customer support wasn't bad, even if
they just directed us to a video. And at $1,100, it's really hard to beat this
machine. I guess you're right. But I have to say that this year just didn't
excite me as much as it normally does. These new fangled computer gadgets seem
to cost more and more each year, and these 60 class cards seem to go less and
less far each year. What do you say next year or 2 years we up the ante? Up it.
Let's butter our bacon and buy some $2,000 gaming doohickeys. Excellent.
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Thank you all so much for watching. If you want more Secret Shopper, check out
the last time we did I can't believe Dell won this year. It's first time for
everything. But that it's first time for everything.
I don't know. I don't know how they did it. He walked into my office for script
review. Okay. And he goes, "You're not going to believe who won. How many guesses did it take me? Four or five? At
least four.