we bought them do you have um roosters around you we unboxed them they have
extra oh why we trialed their tech support
i managed to pull it out all the way and now in our final act we're
benchmarking all six of our systems to
see which pc integrator offered us the most bang
for the buck when it comes to gaming and streaming performance
but as regular viewers of this series have probably come to expect by now
there's a lot more here than meets the
eye like thanking dbrand for sponsoring this series they're cool and you're not
more on that later
ah alienware i mean
dell after a wholly unimpressive sales and
support experience our dell surprisingly at least came with the latest version of
Windows the latest Windows update and video drivers and also the usual slew of
dell support software including everyone's favorite mcafee antivirus
which we promptly uninstall wait a minute
12 month subscription what did they actually end up charging
us for that after we said not to no way well
not exactly dell seems to include a one-year
subscription to mcafee on their g5 desktops for free so that's all right i
guess but here's the problem first of all any mention of a discount
disappeared from our order entirely and if you load up a g5 on dell's website
spec it out with the appropriate hardware fun fact you can actually
choose a dual channel memory kit for no added cost
you end up with a system that costs just over sixteen hundred dollars canadian
not anywhere near the two thousand we spent oh and remember the warranties
they tried to sell us which we actively declined multiple times so that's the
reason we are suggesting you to take the warranty oh no
well they're still on the invoice just under much more obscure names
so i thought did we actually get them and i went to
checker warranty status and sure enough it has four years of extended on-site
warranty and four years of premium support which if you add both to the
online configurator would bring the total to just two dollars off what we
spent so they straight up charged us for something we told them we didn't want
it gets better for the icing on the cake on dell site you can't even select both
of the warranty packages the rep included at the same time it only lets
you order one so in summary then not only did the dell
sales rep straight up scam agent sarah
and by extension me out of over 300 canadian rubles on services that we said
we didn't want they managed to deliver a system with the worst expandability the
least resilient packing material zero upgradability for either the power
supply or motherboard thanks to the proprietary case and nearly the worst
performance of the bunch more on that later they even failed to
help with a routine tech support problem over the phone i am straight up furious
like dell you guys told us that secret
shopper 2018 was going to be part of a service and support overhaul but it
obviously didn't happen and while many of our viewers have been
quick to blame the representatives that we spoke with
i believe this is actually a systemic problem it is no secret that forcing
employees to rely on selling services like financing to make their commissions
creates this kind of negative customer experience honestly it felt like
shopping at a we finance all used car lot and it sucked
dell you came in dead last way to go
losers based on the ordering and tech support experience
and the actual spec of our system our other tier one hp on the other hand
looked very promising but both Windows and the NVIDIA drivers were nearly a
year out of date from the time of ordering i mean i get it they were
probably clearing old 9th gen stock after the launch of their 10th genome
desktops but it's not the best experience to spend an hour updating
your brand new system in terms of build quality it was great
to see a mostly non-proprietary setup from hp though and there were no
apparent restrictions in terms of swapping in off-the-shelf components the
secondary front storage bay came with both power and SATA data already run to
it for an easy storage upgrade and the 750 watt 80 plus platinum power supply
is standard atx continuing with the trend last time
around hp's omen command center still does
basically nothing i mean you do at least get some control over the included
chassis RGB but aside from the utterly useless network optimizer there's
nothing really to command in there
the rest of the pre-installed software is the usual complement of hp support
stuff along with a 30-day mcafee trial which we uninstalled as for the BIOS
it's limited to a basic hp support setup with only system tests and information
pages available until you open up the advanced menu which isn't that advanced
adding only some basic power i o and boot options the main issue we had last
time around with hp's config was the heavily limited boost clocks on the CPU
and unfortunately these same issues are
still present i mean how is that even possible
stressing the CPU with y cruncher a pie calculation tool we started at around 4
300 megahertz all right but then our temps immediately climbed into the high
80 degree range which is i guess okay
and then after a few seconds with no appreciable spin up in the CPU fan our
clocks would drop to around 3 700
megahertz and the CPU would draw exactly wound exactly 65 watts of power which
happens to be the rated TDP of this chip
now we thought that it might be some kind of power virus mitigation so we
loaded up the blender bmw test and
unfortunately it exhibited the same behavior
as for the GPU with fermark running hp's
stock configuration for the system had the GPU's blower fan spinning at just 60
percent speed with temperatures hovering in the high 80s and the card clocking
down below its base speed we tried manually tweaking the fan curve
in afterburner and while it did yield better temperatures the clocks remain
the same due to power limitations now you can bypass these but
it's just confusing right like why is hp
intentionally handicapping both the CPU and GPU in a gaming branded system for
noise i mean like okay but hp there are other
ways to solve this maybe just maybe a single 92 millimeter
exhaust fan isn't enough for a powerful
gaming rig with how well hp performed during the rest of the purchasing
experience and with how good the system was on paper this was kind of a letdown
but we'll let the performance numbers make the final call
on to ibuypower this system also came with Windows 1909 from late last year
but their NVIDIA drivers weren't quite as bad as hp at only
five months or so old on the inside you'll probably notice this like the
rest of our remaining systems was pieced together strictly with off-the-shelf
components so there's nothing proprietary like we found in
particularly the dell it also seems like this is the one
manufacturer so far that listened to our criticism from last time around you
might remember that we were disappointed in the complete lack of cable management
from ibuypower in 2018. well this year
the cables behind the motherboard tray were managed about as well as you can
expect from a pre-built and for bonus points the fans were plugged into the
correct ports this time that's sarcasm by the way you don't get
bonus points for not screwing up it's also the first of our systems to come
with a ryzen CPU specifically the eight core 3700x
during our y cruncher stress test the ibuypower machine maintained a
consistent all-core boost of 4.1 gigahertz at just over 70 degrees not
quite the 4.5 gigahertz max boost that AMD advertises but this is about what we
would expect on an all core synthetic load like this on verizon the GPU an MSI
rtx 2070 super with a decent dual fan cooler managed to maintain clock speeds
higher than base in our firm arc test and temps were in the low 80s as you'd
expect on an NVIDIA card with GPU boost this system also featured dual channel
memory and it's worth noting that while none of our tech support agents
instructed us to re-enable xmp profiles
after our phone calls we did go ahead and do this for this system and the rest
of them that allowed it so that every system was putting its best foot forward
and we even set our power plans and Windows to high performance
back to the BIOS though on the included ASUS x570p it was two revisions or about
four months old as of ordering it which would be unlikely to make much of a
difference in performance especially this late in ryzen 3000's lifecycle but
BIOS updates usually do improve system stability and compatibility especially
with the higher speed memory that ryzen loves so it's one of those things that's
just a nice touch and would make us think wow you know these guys really
care overall a very solid job so far i buy
power and assuming that you didn't somehow handicap your gaming performance
it seems like this is your race to lose
cyber power pc oh boy well for the second season in a
row they effectively didn't provide us with any guidance on the ordering
experience i don't know what you need or what you do
but we did at least manage to get a system from them
as we noted in the unboxing experience this machine did experience some minor
shipping trauma but cyber power did at least chip over replacement panels at
our request for no extra cost so i'm gonna put a little gold star right there
for the record though cyber power you need to make sure that you test your
packing material because you were probably a good two inches on the
backside from being thick enough if you know what i mean
software wise this system also shipped with a near-year-old Windows 10 build
but with AMD graphics drivers that were only three months old not terrible
still not great oddly enough though we struggled to find
any indication that this system came from cyberpower in the operating system
they didn't even bother to set a branded wallpaper the only clue that we did end
up finding was their support information listed in the about your pc section of
control panel aside from the external shipping damage
though the overall build quality is on par with the ibuypower system we just
looked at and cyberpower spent the extra time to clean up the back of the
motherboard tray and overall present a pretty decent looking rig our only
recommendations here would be to opt for a power supply with all black cables
some better color coordination on the memory and to go for an NVMe SSD that
last one is the biggest especially in a system that cost fourteen hundred
dollars the Intel 10700k boosted nicely between
4.6 and 4.7 gigahertz under full synthetic load while maintaining a cool
68 degrees and on the flip side during our fermark stress test the asrock rx
5700 xt which was the only AMD GPU in
our lineup reached a smoldering 87 degrees while hovering slightly below
its advertised base clock on the plus side though the BIOS version was at
least the latest available as of the order date so that's cool
now y'all ready to see the slowest pc out of the bunch whether it's the fact
that their cheapest system barely fit into our budget in the first place or
the fact that they have to spec a lower than default case to make it work it's
no secret that origen doesn't cater to peasants who only have 1500 us dollars
to spend on a gaming system it shipped with the latest major build
of Windows 10 and the most up-to-date NVIDIA drivers we've seen yet just over
a month old dang with the only shortcoming being the BIOS which was one
revision old again not expecting any performance issues it's just a little
disappointing when you're paying this much for a system to be set up properly
they were however the only company to save a pre-configured BIOS profile which
included both xmp settings as well as some tweaks to the fan curves
like everyone else in this competition though they failed to instruct agent
sarah to enable their profile after our RAM reseeding debacles so
oopsie cable management up front is the best
that we've seen so far and it better be but around back while it was on par with
the other systems it didn't wow me you know something that i was
hoping for at this kind of markup on assembly the 10400 processor that came in our
system stayed super cool at just 62 degrees with the excessive included aio
water cooler and maintained a respectable four gigahertz on all cores
just like what origin has listed on their site and while running furmark the 1660 ti
managed reasonable temps and a small bump over base clocks which
well is unsurprising for this size of a cooler on a GPU that draws this little
power it comes down to this then origin
if you're gonna sell systems in this price bracket you should at least try to
offer some sort of reasonable value it doesn't need to ship in a wooden crate i
don't need a 50 visa card and i don't need the mouse pad and t-shirt that is
easily a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars in value that i would have
rather you guys just put towards well a better computer
or just be expensive and own it like
voodoo used to if i click on the fifteen hundred dollar system you should just
have a little pop-up that says oh i'm sorry you must have taken a wrong
turn last but not least main gear the first
time around on secret shopper we struggled to find anything wrong with
the build quality of the system they sent us and again that seems to be the
case cable management solid the cooling
layout makes sense and they even zip tied the extra slack on the CPU fan
nice speaking of the CPU fan underneath it as you might have guessed is another
ryzen CPU specifically a 3600 x 6 core
under our y cruncher synthetic load it maintained a reasonable 80 degrees with
all core boost clocks around 4.1 gigahertz just like the 3700x in the eye
by power system and that is right about what we'd expect
infer mark the not factory overclocked GPU boosted about 100 megahertz over
base with temps in the 80 degree range what's interesting here though is that
while the actual margin that main gear charged us that is to say the price over
the parts cost is nearly the same as origin they managed to deliver a better
overall spec system by quite a lot which
should theoretically perform noticeably better i do wish they had
opted for an NVMe SSD for a system in this price range but other than that
it's a pretty nice build if you can swallow what basically boils down to a
350 build and service fee so in summary this
video is pretty long already so if you want to see all the specs hit pause
now the main highlights for me are hp and i
buy powers inclusion of an rtx 2070 super GPU and NVMe boot SSD and that's
all without making crippling compromises to the config elsewhere another standout
was main gear and ibuypower's use of AMD processors to deliver better bang for
the buck remember guys the motherboards are also typically more affordable at a
given feature set if you go team red many of our manufacturers ended up
wasting money on things that i wouldn't consider necessary like liquid cooling
on non-overclockable cpus or origins
inclusion of an overclocking capable motherboard with a locked CPU
surprisingly though RGB didn't end up being an obvious value killer with
ibuypower managing to include as much or
more RGB than anyone else while also shipping the best spec machine specs are
cool and all how do they perform
to no one's surprise i buy power's superior config offered
the greatest performance overall with the hp and cyber power systems trailing
slightly behind depending on the game we can easily see the benefit that AMD
cards have in f1 2020 as cyberpower's 5700xt managed to outperform even the
2070 super equipped machines and then was on par in modern warfare so if you
don't care about game streaming or features like rtx voice it's a pretty
solid option it's also clear that hp's power
limitations did hurt them here even in real world applications because we would
expect it to perform on par with the ibuypower system or even better
considering its Intel CPU but it didn't
as for our main gear system it held a respectable lead over both the dell and
origen who no surprises here both hovered near the bottom
as for streaming though to test the CPU encoding capacity of each system we set
up every machine to encode a six megabit 1080p 60fps x264 stream of the f1 2020
benchmark then one by one increased the encoding quality until the encoding
process started to drop frames unsurprisingly our cyberpower ibuypower
and dell systems were all able to record with the x264 slow preset without any
hitches while our main gear system pulled out a reasonable max preset of
medium as you might have predicted based on the issues we had with power throttling on
the hp it couldn't push anything past the default very fast preset yikes
oh and the origin system capped out at fast which
makes sense given its piddly core i5 10400.
now it's time to crown a winner for the second time in a row i buy power
is taking home the prize when we last secret shopped them their tech support
was a bit of a nightmare and it's definitely improved they technically
didn't get our system booted during the call but they at least diagnosed the
problems and they offered us an rma to get them fixed
and just like last time it's very hard to find fault with their recommended
config for the money in second place i
expected to have hp but due to the
severe power limitations that crippled our system's performance even in gaming
that crown instead goes to cyber power
i still think these guys have a lot to learn when it comes to their pre-sales
experience but for a company that seems to sell predominantly through other
retailers like amazon and best buy i can kind of see why it might not be a
priority for them during our tech support calls they provided video
tutorials which was nice but their technician's refusal to stay
on the line to guide agent sarah is honestly unacceptable in my book and
also what is this cooling layout who designed this thing
it's just weird i mean i guess the computer stayed cool enough but it's
going to be a dust nightmare in the long run in third place we've got main gear
their ordering experience was great as long as you can accept the fact that
you're buying a more boutique system and paying a premium for it their customer
service experience was second to none their build quality was excellent and
while they clearly can't compete with a high volume manufacturer like i buy
power on price if you like a quality product with great
support a main gear might still be right for you in fourth place we've got hp
seriously guys you were so close to awesome the tech
support was solid the ordering experience was solid but you done goof
the part that actually matters performance
please hp figure out what it is that is limiting
the power delivery or or i don't know what it is fix it fix it
for good in fifth place origin pc their ordering
and customer service experience was flipping awesome it's just that it's
only natural for the worst performing system out of the entire competition to
end up near the bottom yeah it's well built and it does come
with 24 7 customer service so i guess if you decide to set up your new rig at
three in the morning and RAM sticks need receding that might be useful
so like main gear then if you want tech support reps that sound like they really
do enjoy talking to you origen could be a great choice
but you have to understand that you are not getting the best bang for your buck
even among the boutique builders at least not in this price bracket last and
definitely least dell you guys straight up scammed me out of
several hundred dollars by selling agent sarah warranties she explicitly denied
wanting multiple times it's at the point now where i would
strongly recommend that anyone that's bought a pre-built from dell in the last little while double check your invoice
to make sure that they didn't tack something on there that you didn't know
about it because i am still [ __ ] livid about what happened here dell
you suck and you know what else sucks
you for missing out on the LTT xd brand
special edition sticker bomb and Linus face drop do better next time yep i am
literally advertising a dbrand product right now that you can't buy and they've
asked me to rub your face in it so there you go you can't have it anymore
this what a weird sponsor those guys are
right so that's it we've wrapped secret
shopper two thank you guys so much for watching i sincerely hope it won't be
two years ago before the next one but these things are honestly um absolute
butt ton of work so uh i'm not gonna make any promises make sure you're
subscribed though just in case we do it oh if you guys are looking for something
else to watch now go check out the previous secret shopper it was great