Now Walmart doesn't sell their gaming PCs in Canada,
but there's no way that that was gonna prevent us
from getting our hands on the next generation
of overpowered gaming PC.
Now, I have heard through the grapevine
that the Walmart gaming desktop PC, as they call it,
might not be all that it was cracked up to be,
but I have intentionally sequestered myself.
I have not watched Gamers Nexus or Bitwits content on this
so that I can experience it for the first time
in all of its glory for myself.
Now, Ivan, you have already peaked under the hood,
have you not?
Don't spoil it.
And this video is brought to you by,
huh, no, I'm just kidding, the be quiet! Silent Base 801.
It offers great usability and utilizes noise dampening vents
to keep your PC quiet.
Check it out on Newegg at the link in the video description.
Now, my first impressions of Walmart's overpowered lineup
of gaming PCs was, what?
Followed shortly by, dang,
those are some pretty good specs for the price.
Like, that's very competitive, much better than I expected.
Also, the configurations made a ton of sense to me.
It was almost like they had gone out of their way
to find someone who knows what the crap they're doing
to configure their systems for them.
I mean, i7-8700 processor, okay.
It's not a K, it's not overclockable or whatever,
but like, that's fine.
It's a prebuilt.
GTX 1070, 16 gigs RAM, 256 gig SSD.
Like, it looks like the kind of thing
that I would put together for, you know, $1,500 or so.
Opening up the package, we get a,
actually not terrible looking quick start guide.
Certainly seen worse.
Connect your power, connect a HDMI
or a DisplayPort on the graphics card.
They specify which one to use,
but they don't actually have a great,
they don't have a great diagram of that.
Oh boy, that's not right.
Connect your PC through an Ethernet cable
to hardwire your device.
Not particularly descriptive.
Spelling mistakes.
Oh, I didn't even notice that.
In terms of accessories,
we've got a adequate quality looking power connector,
a piece of Velcro, like double-sided Velcro stuff,
presumably for stashing this somewhere,
and then you can grab it off with Velcro, I guess.
That's your RGB thing.
Okay.
OP posters to hang in my room,
because I'm OP like that.
Like, what is this?
Is this, this is water.
Oh, okay.
So you're going to be like overwhelmed
by the OP-ness of it,
and you're just going to be like, oh.
Did you just say overwhelmed by the penis of it?
OP-ness, OP-ness, OP-ness.
OP-ness.
This is a pretty cookie cutter sort of vinyl decal here,
but it's better than absolutely nothing,
which is what a lot of system integrators do.
These are more expensive than you'd think.
So to make our performance test as fair as possible,
Ivan has actually sourced an identically configured
pre-built system from those HP guys,
so that we can get some idea of whether it performs
as expected out of the box.
Let's start with that.
Although one thing that does give me pause
before I even get that far is the non-powder coating
on the back.
I mean, I don't know,
I don't know if you can see it,
but it's a non-powder coated power supply.
It's just got like a simple gray back.
I remember asking a power supply manufacturer
how much it costs to powder coat a power supply.
And I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood
of like tens of cents.
So it's not usually a good sign
when they save that tens of cents on an aesthetic coating,
even though in fairness,
it doesn't contribute to performance.
We're going to have to look at it a little more closely
once we open it up.
Actually, this is bizarre too.
A USB-C on a little like daughter board thing here.
And why the hell would they put it way up there?
Now, just to double check,
this is configured the same as this?
Are there any key differences?
No, which is why specifically I picked this system
to go head to head.
And price difference is about a hundred bucks.
This is 1400, this is 15.
Okay, here we go.
It's got RGB.
Color changing works as expected.
Oh, on the back, the back fan is RGB too.
Okay.
Mmm.
What can happen sometimes in shipping is...
Okay, well, I've never seen it like that before, like-
have hides i contract.
Yeah,
this just looks like they outright forgot to plug it in.
Like, I'm trying to think of what the workflow,
wow, that is the cheapest looking motherboard.
Maybe not that I've ever seen,
but wow.
Is it ever close?
You know how they say,
first impressions?
Last a lifetime.
This is not a good first impression.
Holy , I just noticed
that the only onboard video output is VGA.
I mean, not that it matters.
We wouldn't be using the onboard video,
but like, what year is it?
Oh, the year's right here.
Manufacture date, October, 2018.
No, I didn't go back in time.
I just thought I did,
because that was a VGA connection on there.
All right, what game are we starting with?
Or should we just start with like a CPU stress test?
Cinebench?
Yeah, as the synthetics.
Okay, Cinebench.
Okay, we're in the home stretch here,
and this is about as neck and neck
as I think I could imagine it being.
Okay, yeah, 199 for the Walmart overpowered PC,
199 for our Omen.
Okay, now let's try multi-core.
Interestingly, our overpowered PC
actually came out ahead in this one, 1312.
Whoa, you want to punish it.
All right, fine.
I mean, it's fair.
IBT is a fair test.
So I'm gonna open Task Manager as well,
just so we can verify that our CPU is 100% loaded.
Okay, so right now I'm at 4.28 gigahertz.
What are you at?
4.29.
4.29, okay.
Keep in mind, this has a per-core monitoring as well.
Okay.
My system took longer to start the test.
No, it's being hit now.
It's all loaded into RAM.
I'm at 4.1 gigahertz, so I'm running faster than you.
So have they configured this system
to use an all-core turbo on those VRMs?
Now, the thing to note is that our Omen desktop
is actually adhering to Intel's spec,
while this one is technically kind of overclocked
in a way that some aftermarket motherboards
will be configured out of the box to operate.
Something to note though,
is that while ours seems to be working fine,
all cores loaded stress test, your mileage may vary.
We might get a really good CPU
that handles all-core turbo just fine.
Your system might be unstable.
I mean, we can only judge what's in front of us though.
And so far, this thing is managing 4.1 gigahertz,
all cores loaded on its 8700.
And with temps that are in the 50 degree or so range.
So to put that in context,
that's probably about 35 degrees above average.
So that's a little bit of an ambience.
It is pretty chilly in here today.
No!
The front ports are all USB 2.
That's why they have that weird USB 3.0 thing on the back.
What, why would they?
How can you ship a system in 2018 with USB 2.0 front ports?
That's why they had the internal header free
for that weird thing at the back.
They don't have front USB 3.0.
What is this?
Why did they create four partitions?
Why did they create four partitions for the hard drives?
What possible purpose could that serve?
They do know that partitioning a hard drive
doesn't do anything, right?
Like with respect to reliability, ease of organizing files.
Why would you do that?
Maybe make it easier for people
to compartmentalize their files.
Like I'm having-
It's called a folder!
Now we're not judging game loading times here just because,
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is installed
on a hard drive here and an SSD here.
So let's ignore that,
but that doesn't affect gaming performance.
Oh, we were wrong about that.
So I don't know, maybe it's to do with the fact
that we're loading new scenes of the game so frequently.
Anyway, the point is we've got all our games
on the SSDs for both systems now.
Let's click run and let's see them side by side, baby.
Everything's looking pretty normal so far.
This one actually seems to be maybe running a touch faster,
but I don't think so.
Holy crap.
So I went to change the color
and it turns out there's like a bazillion different patterns.
If you keep pressing this LED thing,
like I swear I've been through 50 different patterns
at least already.
What the crap?
This is about as RGBed out as I think it gets.
Like, what is this?
I will give them credit.
The system actually looks pretty sharp and pretty clean.
I mean, for now.
The only issue is that these intakes
are completely unfiltered,
so it's gonna look like ass pretty quickly.
But anyway, anyway, we got it.
It comes down to the results.
Let's have a look.
Average FPS, 86.
Mins look reasonable.
And things do not get any better in Assassin's Creed Origins.
This is at ultra 1080.
So everything looks fine.
63 FPS compared to 71.
Okay, yeah, that's an improvement.
But if you look a little closer,
the CPU frame times are 15 milliseconds.
Whereas our CPU over here is nine.
So you can clearly see the GPU is the difference.
So that's where our frames per second
actually isn't that much higher over here.
But our CPU is performing way better for some reason.
Okay.
So bringing us to our last one, Deus Ex.
Same thing here.
If all we look at,
this is exactly why you can't just trust average frame rates.
87.8 versus 88.2 over here.
But the minimums are over 10 frames per second lower.
That is like 15, 18%.
Probably about 15%.
That is nuts.
Okay, let's get the HP out of here
and let's tear this thing down.
So we'll take this.
No, no, it's fine, we can leave it here.
Now, this will be the first time
that we're taking off the other side panel.
So there's a few things I really don't like here.
Number one, that is a single 16 gig stick of RAM.
I understand the argument to be made for upgradability,
but single channel memory.
Oh, I wonder if that's what's killing our CPU performance.
Anyway, single channel memory
cuts your bandwidth effectively in half.
Also, these wires,
I don't know what better way to describe them than as pinner.
These are really thin wires.
These are providing all the power for your motherboard.
We do get an eight pin connector for our CPU.
So I guess that's probably a relatively good sign.
Look again.
Wait, what?
Oh no, nevermind.
It's an eight pin connector on a four pin on the board.
Can they get something right here?
Okay, that's far from the worst cable management I've seen.
Like this is the weird thing about this whole thing.
About this whole experience
is that there's these sprinklings of competence,
but then somehow they've ended up with an end result
that is underperforming for the hardware that's in it
by this very significant margin.
And that just has these confoundingly stupid errors.
The hot glued on the USB three connector.
Why would they do that?
That's not even a connector
that is generally known to come out.
If anything, these things can be so hard to remove
that you can end up ripping the housing off the board
when you try to unplug them.
What a strange thing to do.
And then they didn't even hot glue this one.
It's what like, there's just these weird
sort of moon logic things going on here.
Where like, if we see this as a concern
that needs to be rectified by hot glue,
why is it a concern here, but not here?
Why is it a concern here, but not here?
It's the same connector.
All right, it's not super light,
but it's also a great wall unit
who aren't really known for making amazing OEM power supplies.
So it's a 500 watt unit of which 21 of the 45 amps
on the 12 volt rail are dedicated to the CPU apparently.
And then you've got 24 amps leftover for IO,
whatever that means.
So it's a two rail power supply,
which means that you can't have any more than about,
300-ish watts.
Now there is one more thing
that we can have a look at here.
Let's see how good of a job they did
of their thermal compound application.
Frankly, I don't know what to expect
because some stuff has been done
to a reasonable degree of competence.
Like the cable management, honestly,
considering that the parts for this system
only come to about $60 less than this completed system.
So they're only charging us 60 bucks for assembly.
Like that is definitely a 60,
$60 assembly job for sure.
I consider it quite adequate.
But then there's other things
like not having the graphics card plugged in
that are just unbelievable.
Yeah, no concerns there.
This was probably the pre-applied thermal compound
on this heat sink though.
So it's a little bit of a heavy application,
but it's quite thin where these direct contact heat pipes
actually touch the integrated heat spreader.
So I really, I mean, I have no concerns there
and I didn't see anything about the thermal performance
of the system that raised red flags.
And that's the thing, is I think,
the bottom line here is that I just,
even though they're not really making
a huge amount of margin on this thing
and they're not charging an unreasonable amount
for what you get,
there's just these gross errors in the configuration of it
that make it impossible to recommend.
USB two ports on the front panel.
What is that?
And the motherboard, it needs a significant upgrade
so that you don't have to give up performance
in order to get upgrade ability.
You should be using a proper board with four memory slots
and while you're at it, a little bit more expandability.
Like what it really feels like to me
is that they blew the motherboard
and power supply budget on RGB lighting.
And I get that RGB is for gamers,
but first and foremost,
gamers need performance and stability.
And right now this system just has too many red flags
for me to possibly recommend it.
And this whole thing is unfortunate
because I had really wanted to be
the contrarian, you know,
I thought maybe Steve was being too nitpicky or something.
Not that Steve would ever nitpick on it, you know,
a minor technical detail, not Steve.
But I thought maybe he was being nitpicky
or something like that,
but I'm just in a position where I'm just not comfortable
telling anyone to buy this thing either.
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See, I was gonna be like smart
and give you a hint about like city new performance.
What were you before you met Yvonne?
What, what, sorry?
What were you before you met Yvonne?
Single?
Channel?