an i7 gaming computer for only
$400 16 gigs of RAM RGB and there's only
one left I'd be stupid not to buy
it this might not be you but there's a good chance that someone you know is at
risk of spending their hard-earned money on a decade old gaming PC without
realizing it Glam Furbish dressing up
e-waist with pretty lights and glass side panels has turned into a big
industry and that's not inherently a bad thing I'm all for keeping these machines
operating rather than sitting in a landfill but only if they're upfront
about it and the price is right and I just do not feel that way about the
machine that we bought from Penny CC on the one hand they actually shipped
us better Hardware than what was listed in the item description but on the other
hand the presentation of it is clearly designed to prey on people who associate
are GB with performance and who don't keep an Intel product naming guide with
them at all times for example the listing omits inconvenient details in
some places and it makes the system sound much more capable than it really
is so I'm asking you guys please help me
stop people from buying this stuff and
in a moment I'm going to show you why that's so important and I'm going to lay
out an alternative that will get you better performance at a lower price
price I'm also going to lay out our sponsor build Redux build a fully
customizable gaming PC suitable for any budget just pick your favorite games and
see how they perform using their online pc Builder head to the link below and
create your new rig today let's see what
400 bucks gets you these days plus shipping first up a Wi-Fi dongle
complete with antenna second up just about the flimsiest PC power cord I
think I've ever seen though I would expect it to be functional and we get
some packing foam and of
course a computor not bad on first
glance obviously a brand new case you can tell from the peel on the side
panel no obvious issues when it comes to build quality all the cables are tidily
managed or even zip tied together all screws installed exactly where they
should be no obvious configuration errors got dual Channel memory for
example and it looks look like they
actually upgraded us this is not a GTX
660 and is in fact a 970 from PNY and
that might not be the only upgrade while the motherboard is obviously a little
dated it's the classic white PCI slot
here the cooler is new and the socket of
this board doesn't even match the CPU that we ordered meaning maybe something
better to their credit this appears to be a brand new Corsair 600 power supply
the peel is still on no ooh maybe there's some dust on the
grill no the power supply is not new so
who knows what power supply you're going to get o that was one of the things we
had down as being points in their favor actually yeah there's dust in the
crevices of these cables too okay another thing we had as a point in their
favor is the case though I think this is
a bit of a mixed bag on the one hand it's a modern design with four included
fans RGB tempered glass all that good stuff on the other hand I have no idea
what they spent on this thing since it's out of stock everywhere but however much
it was it was probably too much and
we'll talk a little bit more about that later but hint number one is this
internal USB thre header that is just hanging here loose and the fact that
this system is so old it doesn't have
USB 3 at all enough chitter chatter for now though let's find out what's in here
oh East that's not nice that was Labs that
wasn't me Labs calling it e-waist I mean that's not that bad a
core i7 2600s that's another big upgrade
or at least it sounds like one while the
model number changed a lot from what was promised to us it's actually only a
little over a year newer and not a lot
faster but the good news is this is a great opportunity to highlight how easy
it is for people to get bamboozled most people's exposure to CPU nomenclature
isn't going to go much deeper than yeah I core i7 I heard that's good for
gaming and unless they know the importance of the IPC of a processor
architecture it would be easy even for
someone who's trying to do their due diligence to compare this to something
modern and think oh well you know I
guess yesterday's i7 is just today's
I3 and then pull the trigger on a system like this but that isn't just not the
case or maybe it doesn't matter our GPU
upgrade could make up a lot of ground here though again we see the same
confusing product naming schemes working against the consumer while it seems like
we jumped three product Generations 600
and 700 series were actually based on the same family of chips and then 800
was skipped meaning that going from 600
to 900 was only one generation the good
news though is we also stepped up a whole class from a 60 class to a 70
class card meaning that we landed a GPU here with double the vram and a lot more
processing power maybe this thing can game
okay that is totally usable and just like pcmr would say it doesn't matter
what you drive it's that you drive what you got oh sorry that was cazer you know it doesn't matter someone said it hoodie
t-shirt water bottle desk pad and enamel pin the point is the best gaming machine
for the job is the one that you have let's give it a
shot uh did it take that long for my Spartan to pop in this may actually be a
problem wow it took that long for the modes to
load uh while this searches I guess we
can talk about Labs results a little bit Esports titles like CSG go DOTA and
Rocket League actually all run fine but
as soon as we go past that we get into some false advertising a little bit see
there are some newer games on the list that's advertised by the seller like
fortnite Apex Legends and GTA 5 which
isn't really new but is fairly demanding
which are going to struggle on this machine and there are a few reasons for
it for starters while the ad does
clearly state that they're using a mix of new and refurbished Parts I think
it's a little disingenuous to say that a new case and a new stock cooler is a mix
of new and refurbished Parts every piece that contributes to Performance is used
and one of the worst pieces is our storage drive a spinner that I just
wouldn't be comfortable putting in a system that someone's going to rely on
crystal disc info pegged it at
24,7 168 hours of power on time or a
little under 3 years which for an
Enterprise Drive might not be a huge deal but for a consumer Drive absolutely
is wow this is not a lot of
fpss come on oh
boy um maybe we can tweak the details a
little come on come on get him wow it took me a while to figure out he was
dead but yes I got him oh no
I and I can't even blame that on our
hard drive even if it was in tiptop shape the CPU and RAM in here just
aren't fast enough to keep up with anything but older games there has been
a lot of advancement in CPU design that isn't really obvious on a basic spec
sheet and this is one of the reasons that our lab's website project is so
important guys maybe pick up a desk pad help support the team because making
matters worse as our chip continues to age we're going to reach a point where
Modern software simply refuses to run on
the GPU side NVIDIA hasn't officially sunsetted support for the 900 series yet
but based on how long they supported the previous generation the announcement is
pretty much due any day now and then on the CPU side of of things if we go back
just a couple more Generations there are
chips that are missing x86 instruction set extensions that are required for
smooth operation or in some cases operation at all in modern titles like
Apex Legends thankfully that hasn't happened yet with our 2600s we were able
to Benchmark total Warhammer 3 cyberpunk
modern games like that but it's a matter
of time before that changes I think my big BG issue here though is just the
price as a Savvy Shopper you can pick up
similar parts for well under 300 bucks
without paying for a brand new lipstick
case around the pig components and you
probably won't need to pay shipping either depending on how active your
local Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist is I mean don't get me wrong I fully
endorse keeping aging Hardware running
for as long as possible we even did a video recently showcasing some of the
amazing deals that are out there right now on used Hardware but if you're
spending upwards of $400 on a new to you
PC you can do a lot better than this to
highlight how bad it is even buying almost entirely new parts we came in
around $400 while we've still only got a quad
core processor with hyperthreading the same amount of memory and that same used
gtx970 our 12 gen core I3 has more cash
avx2 for better integer calculations a slew of Advanced Technologies like
gaussian and neural accelerator 3.0 to help with audio and speed Centric Ai
workloads and it's going to be getting security updates for years to come and
and it runs on a newer platform meaning that I'll be able to get the most out of
say a new CPU or a new GPU even if some
money comes my way and we didn't even put in the script the fact that it'll
have support for USB 3 and m.2 drives to
put the performance difference in context guys we ran our factorio
Benchmark and cin bench on our poor
struggling 2600s and well the numbers
speak for themselves our single core score didn't even crack a th000 points
and multicore is just shy of three guys
a modern I3 12100 is going to get you
closer to 1,600 Point single core 8400
multi I mean that is the kind of difference that you can really feel even
in day-to-day use we've got an entire video about how gigahertz doesn't
actually matter but obviously not everyone's watched it and I don't even
blame them for seeing core i7 gaming computer and hitting the buy button
because a lot of it boils down to terrible marketing practices and the
obfuscation of real tech specs from the big players I mean think about it when
you walk into to a computer shop today and look at the box for say a CPU it
barely lists anything contents Intel
processor with thermal solution really
that's all you're giving me oh no okay I get this to a lay person indecipherable
product number and 20 megabytes of cash
no clock speeds no core counts even it's
obvious from the prioritization here the only thing they want you to know is core
i5 uh oh by the way that 13th gen
something like that I mean AMD is a fair bit better at least on this little
sticker If you look closely at it you'll find cores threads boost and base
frequency but it's clear what the trend is and I don't see this getting better
anytime soon with the core Ultra Rebrand
announcement I was really hoping that Intel would use this opportunity as a
fresh start to clear the air for the average person but nope it's basically
just we've taken the Bold step of removing your eye you're welcome I mean
I called this before and I'm saying it again we are going to be stuck with the
same issues we've got today and I know that most of you guys watching this
video can probably tell the freaking difference between you know a core i7
13700 k and a core i7
2600s most of you you guys are going to look Beyond just Intel Core i5 must be
good for gaming I know you guys are going to drill into the true specs but
based on the sales numbers for these things a lot of people won't and this
isn't what I wanted in terms of keeping things out of the landfill because all
we're really doing is sending the original case that was housing all of
this stuff to the landfill and then buying a new flashy shiny one
unnecessarily it's going to keep happening guys at $400 we're in that
magical console price Zone it's got
flashy RGB and a cool tempered glass side panel to make it look like a legit
gaming computer it's just with stuff
like this you're not getting the performance that you're paying good money for so mark my words in another 10
years we're going to see the exact same thing a core Ultra 7 gaming PC with a
2060 and 32 gigs with I don't know
electrol luminescent wire case or whatever the fashion is at that point
all for the low low price of around $400 and if I'm still around and finding
these craptastic deals I guess I'm just going to have to make another video
saying the same dang thing if you guys
are looking for an affordable system like this I'm not linking this thing but
we will have our parts list down below and we're also going to throw our POV
build guide which is probably the easiest one to follow along with so you
can put it together yourself uh or if you liked this video you can check out
why gigahertz doesn't matter that's another good watch that can help explain
why uh this thing sucks as much as it does