we bought them we unboxed them and we endured tech support hell and now
finally after three weeks of waiting
we're ready to share the performance of our fifteen hundred dollar gaming
systems in both gaming and game capture workloads
but not before we share with you some
interesting discoveries that cropped up while we were taking a closer look
at these machines because uh
oh boy there's far more here than meets the eye
thermaltake's a500 has a modern minimalistic design with brushed
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okay uh i know
i am just as psyched to find out which of our rigs produces the most FPS as you
guys but we've actually got some other really
really important stuff to go through here first
let's start with alienware
so this thing shipped with a reasonably recent version of Windows 10 built 1803
and needed very few updates in order to get up and running the theme wallpaper
and boot logo were all set so you'd know that dude you're getting a doubt
excuse me i mean alienware and bloatware
didn't look too bad um so let's see here
we've got updater mobile connector customer
connect alien effects whatever for lighting and overclocking control but
let's come back to bloatware later first something got weird
this system uses over four
gigabytes of RAM at idle that is double
our other machines and after we manually killed any and all
alienware slash dell processes it barely
budged then we subjected the machine to a CPU
stress test and this is even weirder normally
this kind of stress test loads up all of the cores to the hilt but on this
machine the load fluctuated
not only that but the CPU would boost to
4.5 ish gigahertz hit temperatures in the high 90 degrees celsius then do this
weird thing where the cooling would rev up super hard then the temps and the
clock speeds would go down rinse and repeat
what because like if the processor can't handle the
standard load why on earth do they have
overclocking support well to see how bad that would be
we fired it up and wait are you sure you got this right
this is bizarre this shows that the CPU
while overclocked neither overheated nor
dropped below 4.3 gigahertz that is the
max 6 core load per Intel spec that
means that enabling oc stage 1 was
faster and cooler than the out of the box
settings and not to mention essentially required to get the processor running
the way that it was supposed to to begin with
stage two was not as rosy with our processor shooting up to 4.8 gigahertz
occasionally but then quickly toning itself back down to 3.7
okay what made this even more puzzling was
that after we disabled the software oc
that weird turboing up and overheating behavior completely disappeared
and that's not even the end of our software and firmware and whatever
issues with this box but we really need to move on to hardware now
so our graphics card is a standard issue gtx 1060 that behaved entirely
predictably minus the driver set from six months ago
so that's all right but there are some
issues here that we missed during the initial inspection first we found that
the machine had a sloppily wired wi-fi module
then we noticed that while the box said
NVMe our configuration is actually equipped
with an m.2 drive that uses SATA rather
than pci express meaning that there is no performance benefit over a
traditional two and a half inch drive now our invoice was marked correctly
it's not false advertising or anything like that it's just
kind of a drag anyway much more interesting is the
topmost pci express slot that runs at only 8x electrically rather than 16x no
matter what we did and that our
multi-GPU approved power supply only has
385 watts combined on its 12-volt rails
with no 80 plus certification whatsoever now given that this machine already
pulls around 300 watts from the wall under a combined CPU and GPU load
calling that sli capable is misleading at best
one positive note is that the power supply fan does stop under low load and
our machine idles at just 26 watts furthermore after the rev up throttle
down behavior magically disappeared the system would only hum up under load with
no sharp fan rev ups those naked vrm modules that we were
concerned about before by the way those did not end up heating up pretty much at
all and finally when it comes to the UEFI bio settings they were about as
sparse as you'd expect with a pre-built machine like this with no option to save
a profile and SATA mode set to raid which then disables BIOS recovery from a
hard drive which is enabled by default so i guess all we can really
say is uh
let's move on to the hp omen unlike the alienware our hp omen ships with Windows
10 version 1709 from over a year ago
so between that and replacing the graphics driver from
five months ago it took over an hour to
get this thing updated out of the box
note is that the issue with games running slower off of the hard drive
versus the SSD that we encountered while using this machine in our walmart pc
video has gone away so that's good and we were also pleased to
see less than two gigs of our RAM being used at idle that is half of the
alienware onto software the so-called omen command
center commands almost nothing except for enabling dual
force mode to send low priority networking traffic over the integrated
wi-fi and then higher priority packets over Ethernet but i mean given that they
both terminate at the same modem i'm i'm having a hard time understanding
what the point of that is also of note our omen included mcafee
antivirus so if you want to uninstall it
john says hi
now here's something weird our 8700
non-k processor boosted to about 3.5
gigahertz with all core turbo now this is well below the 4.3 gigahertz
all core boost that gamers nexus measured for this CPU and only 10
above base clock now why hp might have handicapped the CPU
frequency in this way is not clear but what we do know is that this can only
hurt it when it comes to performance moving on our graphics card is a bone
stock gtx 1070 with as expected behavior
and then finishing it up in here we found a wi-fi module that we actually
didn't notice during our unboxing also it turns out that our power supply
is rated to 470 watts max on the 12 volt rails with 80 plus certification
so far more sli ready actually than the one
in the dell moving on to the BIOS well
actually you just don't get to pressing f2 at boot takes you to a diagnostic
screen for just about every subsystem in the omen from CPU and RAM to usb and
keyboard then going to advanced reboot yields a mostly useless gray on blue
setup screen straight out of the 90s all right
let's move on to the eye by power rig now then which is apparently
so advanced that janice is not even worthy of opening it and you're not able
to help me through that not my ability to
mimic your ability to look inside a computer if you're not familiar with the
part it's going to be very difficult to do anything inside of the pc
while this one shipped with a recent version of Windows 10 the machine still
did require quite a few updates and the
graphics driver here is the oldest one
yet i mean i guess that's uh what they had
rolled into their os image and they just haven't bothered to update it i mean
frankly back at ncix we did a lot of stuff wrong
we did but we did regularly update the bloody
graphics drivers for our gaming systems like
i with that said this behavior doesn't seem that
surprising given the clap it together and ship it overall build quality that
we observed there were zero changes made to the UEFI BIOS so that means no
optimized profile was saved even though the option is present on this
motherboard and in practical terms this means that while our invoice boasted a
free upgrade to 3 000 megahertz RAM you can see it in there it's all shiny
ours was only running at the default 26
66 megahertz don't get me wrong everything worked and
it was stable with our CPU boosting to 4.3 gigahertz max across all cores as
expected and our graphics card was factory overclocked with idle RAM usage
that was normal it's just that we didn't really get a
you know we care a lot vibe from the
overall build quality like
again this kind of sort of sloppiness
doesn't affect performance which we will see is definitely a strong point for
this system but not even one of the CPU cooling fans
is plugged into the CPU fan header they put the pump there when there's an empty
pump header right here
i mean why and like we found a grand total of
exactly one zip tie and
one twist tie in the entire system
let's move on to the next oh
so this is what you get for
1500 us dollars from origin pc
a core i5 processor and a gtx 1050 ti
i mean at this point it almost doesn't really matter what else they do right
does it but for the sake of completeness let's
take a look the os the machine shipped
with was recent and so was the graphics
driver that shouldn't be worth bonus points but apparently it is
idle RAM usage was sub 2 gigabytes another good thing but we did notice
that when we looked at the UEFI settings that while our xmp 3000 megahertz
profile was enabled for our RAM the speed field was left on auto which
for some reason caused it to clock in slightly lower at 29.33 to origin's
credit even though only that one setting was tweaked on the machine it was saved
into a profile which we could load onto it for our performance testing
but profiles are only as useful as how
enabled they are we've really hoped that our tech would prompt us when we called
them for tech support to load the profile after that whole only half the
RAM is being detected incident but he didn't looking under the hood we found
cable management that on the surface looked pretty good until we noticed that
our pump was powered via molex
which means no speed control and no
warning if your pump dies and then making matters worse we notice
that there is an available header on the motherboard that they used that they
plugged the front intake fan into instead
then this is the worst thing yet we came to the pass-through power cable that
connects the rear plug on the back of the actual system to the power supply
inside because it's got a really unusual internal layout
this here uses non-soldered
hobby grade connectors and on our machine the metal contacts were slightly
exposed with no power off switch available at the back of the system that
means that while it would be unlikely these can slip off and someone could
accidentally bridge those live wires full ac power with their fingers
this could and should be done better
let's move on to main gear first we need to make a correction here
during the purchasing part of this system the rep mentioned the two-year extended
warranty and we laughed oh here comes the
warranty pitch well he saved it for the last you know
oh man he mentioned it because it was free and
that's a good thing but we were mostly laughing because we'd
sat through so many warranty pitches in the last two hours
we should have corrected ourselves because free is free baby so thanks to
our commenters for noticing that as for the machine itself well the
software side was virgin other than a custom boot logo wallpaper and a red
theme both the os and the graphics driver were recent and our gtx 1060 was
a factory overclocked version the processor clocked itself at about 3.9
gigahertz on all six cores this is exactly what we would expect for a ryzen
2600x and we noticed that the machine had its high performance power plan
enabled by default this would help explain why it had the highest idle
power draw out of our competitors at around 50 watts but that is considered
best practice with ryzen processors the UEFI did have a factory settings profile
set but there was really nothing in there that would affect performance just
a couple of networking related settings and boot mode forced into UEFI only mode
a closer look at the insides revealed that
well in terms of issues we had a really hard
time finding fault in this build they
even cable managed the back side of the motherboard tray
digging deeper the power button was
slightly off center i guess but that's more of like a case qc issue and
actually no this was one the hard drive SATA cable clicked when we pushed on it
meaning that it wasn't actually in a hundred percent but the drive was
detected and did work out of the box and
given main gear support if that did come out in shipping i'm sure they would have
been able to help us with it pretty quickly
so then you want to line them all up here i guess let's finally do it for you let's
summarize the specs of all the machines
we ended up with alienware shipped
with a liquid-cooled 8700k processor
16 gigs of 2666 RAM a stock gtx 1060
with a 128 gig SATA os drive coupled with the two terabytes of storage and it
was powered by a multi-GPU approved 460 watt power supply
hp shipped our omen with a 9k 8700
processor with 16 gigs of 2400 megahertz RAM a vanilla gtx 1070
a 256 gig NVMe drive they were the only
one to ship an NVMe boot drive weren't they and two terabytes of mechanical
storage they also threw in a decent 80 plus 500 watt power supply and they had
a 200 canadian 150 us promotion at the
checkout it should be noted we bought all of these systems though during
Intel's gamer days promotion so every si
had the same opportunity to take advantage of that i buy power jumped the
gun smartly selling us a pre-order of the core i5 9600k
before it was formally shipping they cooled it with an aio water cooler threw
it in an MSI z390a motherboard loaded up
16 gigs of 66 megahertz RAM and through
a 240 gig SATA os drive with one
terabytes of storage in it we got a factory overclocked gtx 1070 the most
powerful graphics card out of the bunch and that was powered by a quality 750
watt power supply that we got upgraded to for free
on paper this one should be the fastest system
for gaming origin oh origin we got a liquid cooled
core i5 8400 with a gtx 1050 ti and 120
gigs of SATA SSD storage with no extra
mechanical storage for our game library the power supply is a high quality 450
watt unit but the fancy z390 overclocking capable
motherboard even though it's its quality
doesn't make sense for this config our CPU doesn't support overclocking
honestly this config is a total dog's
breakfast finally maingear sold us the only AMD
system in the lineup with a 240 millimeter aio cooled ryzen 5 2600x
this could end up very interesting because we did specifically mention to
everyone on the phone that we wanted to not only game but also record our
gameplay for youtube they went with an MSI b350m pro vd
motherboard with 16 gigs of 2666 megahertz RAM a 256 gig SATA os SSD a
one terabyte storage drive and a factory overclocked gtx 1060. all this was
powered by an evga 500 watt power supply and of note is that the 200 us dollar
discount that was applied to our checkout due to Intel's gamers day's
promotion was something we were able to take advantage of however that works for uh
an AMD based configuration okay
so which one of these is the fastest for gaming well in a
massive surprise to no one i buy power
and hp omen dominated our suite of gaming benchmarks
with ibuypower edging out its closest competitor pretty handily thanks to its
factory overclocked graphics card and the fact that its CPU was turboing
correctly i mean you want your CPU turboing
correctly that seems like a good idea right who knew
main gears machine and our alienware aurora then traded blows thanks to their
similar grade of graphics firepower in the next tier down
and as for our origin chronos well
it didn't manage to break 60 FPS in any
of our gaming tests aside from cs go
also for the sake of completeness we actually
tested the origin machine with both the core i3 that fit within our budget and
the i5 that they up sold us to make theirs not only the worst performer in
the bunch but also the most expensive system that we purchased
now on to recording videos to post to youtube now this is presumably what led
main gear to recommend a six core 12
thread AMD system now we never mentioned streaming so we
were actually kind of hoping for someone to recommend using
shadowplay because it mostly just works and comes with very little performance
penalty if you want to just you know cut together your frag vids
but no i think everyone kind of assumed we were streaming
anyway on to testing we set obs to the
same 1080p 60fps 3500 megabit per second
cbr settings on all machines and then we
just kept cranking the x264 in code quality until we started dropping frames
which actually brings us back to alienware did what
so check this out regardless of encoder quality our aurora
dropped a savage number of frames and
spit out rendering errors so the benchmark that we chose would run
at 60fps like so our game was fine our
CPU usage remained reasonable and yet
the end recording was unwatchable
every single time
and this behavior persisted even when we
switched to the nbank NVIDIA encoder which has nothing to do with the CPU so
ivan's like racking his brain for a week on this stupid thing trying different
settings recording to a different drive resetting and reinstalling the software
using a different graphics card out of our inventory and even going as far as
asking one of the key obs devs what the heck is going on here
finally we relented and popped one of our bench boot ssds into the aurora only
for it to immediately stop having the issues
but then the mystery goes deeper still because we tried our alienware os drive
in another similar spec test bench machine and continued experiencing the
same issue so while we do not know what
precisely is going on we've done our diligence and we've
managed to deduce that something we're
pretty sure is just broken in software on our
alienware machine maybe it has to do with the high idle
RAM usage on to the rest then our main gear machine hung in there until the
medium quality setting that's our best result with our hp omen coming in second
i buy power came in third as expected starting to lose frames at the faster
preset when it came to CPU encoding and then as for the chronos
well she did it right
what were we really expecting on a system that couldn't hit 60fps in the
first place so what's the takeaway from all this
when it comes to raw gaming power for the price
i buy power took the prize that is if you're comfortable with their
quality tech support but that also doesn't necessarily mean that
hp lost thanks in part to their promo price they
put up a surprisingly good fight when it came to gaming performance
and there were aspects of this system that don't directly impact gaming but
are certainly benefits like the NVMe boot SSD versus a cheapo SATA one in the
i buy power rig not to mention the carrying handle the excellent i o and
the handy easy hard drive upgrade slots
now their tech support was far from perfect but they weren't dismissive or rude to
us and they did eventually solve the problem
after those two we would have a tie for second
if alienware could get their pre-loaded os figured out
and also if their pre-sales and after sales support weren't both abominable
across the board now i'm sure alienware would say that we
got unlucky but here's my response to that between all the call transfers that
we went through i'm pretty sure we talked to probably half a dozen people
who worked there and every single one of
them was worse than both of the people that we talked to at main gear
so there's just no contest here main gear comes in third
speaking of no contest origin pc
they did do some things well their staff were polite competent and helpful
but at the end of the day this was a pretty simple transaction
wii u fifteen hundred dollars give you
us gaming pc send and while they did a
good job of taking our fifteen hundred dollars i would argue that they didn't really
hold up their end of the bargain
is this a gaming pc well it's a gaming pc but certainly not
for fifteen hundred dollars so
i guess that i guess that's it right are we done
for this season for this season oh lordy are we doing this again
boy this was time consuming but uh we really hope that you guys have
enjoyed it i know ivan's been tearing his hair out but i mean was it fun at
least yes it was
you know you know you know it was actually it was a lot of fun to go through this um maybe we'll do something
like this that's similar in the future leave us a comment in the video description uh with with what you guys
would like to see us secret shop you know
lynum tech investigator and stoy ski and
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