Costco's electronics department used to be pretty much TVs, some iPods, and a
mobile phone [music] kiosk. But the last time I was here, I couldn't help noticing that they have so much more
now. They've got gaming PCs, gaming monitors, and even all kinds of gaming
peripherals, which got me wondering, is Costco the new cheat code to get a
gaming PC at a fair price? Or is it a trap for people to be lured in by the
convenience of getting their giant slab of meat and a lean, mean gaming PC in
one, admittedly, pretty arduous trip. To find out, David and I are here at the
local Costco with one simple goal, to walk out with the best deal we can get
on a gaming PC. And maybe food samples.
I love Costco. I hear that they love you, too, Linus. Just like I love this
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to get started today. Welcome to Costco.
I love you.
Hey. 100 bucks off Apple Watch, no deals on
gaming PCs. But we do have some options. That's a
card you want to take. [music] Why buy computers at Costco, Linus? 90-day return policy, free tech support, 2-year
warranty, and okay, this >> Free bloatware, yay.
>> Okay, well, we're buying a computer, so >> So, I'm going to grab one of these. And
then, in terms of our options, we've got AMD with a Radeon GPU and Intel with a
GeForce GPU. Both are a pretty similar class of machine, which makes the
difference in price a little bit confu-
This one's got 32 gigs of DDR5. That's
on top of having a higher class CPU, not to mention a GPU with 16 gigs of VRAM.
Meanwhile, over here, we've only got a single 16 gig stick.
With actually also a lower tier cooler,
not to mention a little bit less RGB. [music] One extra side of glass panels,
though. I mean, yeah, that's true, but I'd
rather have the mesh to be honest with you. You think it's the same power supply in
both? Hard to say what power supply is in here. >> I mean, the boxes are right here. Does
it say on the box? >> Costco only gives us so many specs. Let's have a look. This is the Oh.
Wait, what? >> even have any of the AMD ones in stock?
Sorry, the specs are on the other side, I think. Nope, that's the Intel GeForce one.
[music] No.
Intel GeForce. Do you think I could get a deal on a floor model? We can ask. It
didn't even occur to me to like ask if someone can help me with my purchase. I
mean, it's Costco. Is that a thing? So, there's two machines there. I couldn't
find any in stock of the higher end one. Um I believe that's the only one left.
Is there a deal if it's the floor model or no? No, if it's a deleted item, like
we're not going to carry it anymore, then they'll mark it down. We're going
to get more stock of it then. Got it. That makes sense. This doesn't have the
Death Star assignment yet, so Right. >> that, then it'll be marked down. So, in
a nutshell, I'm going to do my bro a solid over here. Wait, did he say that this means
[music] that it's an UL A? >> I think he said the Death Star. Oh, this
could be pretty cool. But, before we try to negotiate a deal on it, I want to see
how these systems compare to just shopping online. Oh, don't forget that
that's in Canadian money. Oh, right. Yeah, so this is more like a
G, and then this is more like 1,300 bucks. And there it is, a 14 400F
with an RTX 5060, 16 gigs of RAM. Wait.
This is DDR4. So, we are saving about 30
US dollars compared to this Stormforce system, and we're getting [music] more
expansion slots because we've got an ATX motherboard. With that said, we are
giving up a little bit of capacity on our power supply. And also Ew, is that a
Raidmax? Here's a slightly better CPU, a little bit more RAM, but still a 5060
for, you know, couple hundred bucks more. All in all, it looks like we're
well within the range in terms of pricing. Let's try and get a deal. Hi.
Long time fan. Buying a PC. Do you know if we can get a discount on it? I'll do
it for you. Oh, okay. Awesome. Thank you. Don't Don't like tell them who we
are or anything. Just I just want to be a normal customer. I don't want anything
special though. Okay. Okay.
>> [laughter] >> 10% that's our normal. 10%? All right.
We got our deal. It's their standard 10% discount compared to the retail price,
which means that we are only paying $275
for an additional 16 gigs of RAM, an
additional 8 gigs of VRAM, not to mention a better CPU, and probably
a better power supply. However, the one thing giving me pause
is DLSS 4.5. If I hadn't tried it, I'd been like
I'll take the superior raster performance, not to mention AMD's fine
wine driver development. Well, turns out NVIDIA's got some fine wine of their
own. And DLSS 4.5 is freaking awesome.
However, I could probably rip a stick of RAM out
of this thing, sell it, sell that GPU, and get an NVIDIA card if
I really wanted that. I think this is the one we got to take.
>> I agree. Which isn't to say that this is a bad deal, but I like this. This is not
my favorite thing about buying open box items.
Okay. There we go. Let's return [music] our cart. We'll be the one Costco customer
ever who returns their cart. There's dozens of us.
The specs and price actually looking really solid, but
we still don't even know what brand of power supply we have. We don't know what brand of SSD we have. I'd like to take a
closer look. I'll now start by getting a little bit of this dust off the machine.
That's a small price to pay uh when you consider that versus our comparison
system, >> Mhm. you're saving about $300.
>> Really? >> And that's using the same parts or very
similar cheaper parts. >> So, that means even without our 10%
discount, >> We would say >> got a great deal. Without the discount,
it would still be $140 cheaper. >> And we get the extra year warranty from
buying through Costco. >> Yeah. Now, the sales rep did actually
point out to us that depending on our individual components, they may carry
longer warranties. Just uh don't tell the manufacturer that you pulled it out
of a pre-built system. It is worth noting though that while our Costco system is competitively priced with our
comparison system, these are not necessarily the exact parts that we
might have chosen if we were starting from scratch. I mean, they're not far
off though. >> Uh you might want to take a look at this SSD. Have you heard of AGI before? AGI?
Yeah. Yeah, that's uh what is it? Artificial [music] General
Intelligence? It's an AI SSD. [laughter]
No, I've never heard of AGI. Are they good? I have no clue. It's a Gen4 drive.
So, that's something. No DRAM cache though. Mhm. Realtek controller.
>> For a gaming system, it's totally acceptable. Now, it is worth noting that
our comparison system is just following the same broad strokes. That is a
beefier cooler on both our CPU and GPU, but those are not going to affect our
performance comparisons. We're not going to be looking at temperatures. Other
than the SSD or the lower-spec, but still adequate coolers, I don't really
see where iBuyPower cheaped out on this. >> No, that's an MSI motherboard.
>> Not only that, but this is a pretty reasonable spec one. It's missing the
VRM coolers, which you often see on these system integrator boards, but look
at the IO. That's good. >> Yeah. 20K USB-C. we've got 2 and 1/2 gig
LAN. I believe this is Wi-Fi 6E. Let's
double check that. PRO B650-VC
VC >> Cooling overview.
Chipset >> [laughter]
>> The front fans COULD HAVE A LITTLE bit more access to fresh air flow, but there
is some mesh here and we actually did a video recently exploring just how much
space a fan needs in front of it in order to draw fresh air in and this
[music] is maybe not optimal for noise, but should be okay for cooling. Show me
the qual. No, you know what? The cable management,
I'm totally fine with. Commodity system
Yeah. >> It's zip tied. Nothing's going to come
flying around during shipping. I'm okay with that. But this power supply is not
inspiring a ton of us. >> box of mystery is >> as it's not Raidmax, I'll be
I'll be okay.
Oh, you know what? I have a cutter in my tech sack. When's the LTT cutter coming?
I mean, we should probably do one. Uh it's just figuring out, you know, how
you differentiate on a thing that [music] cuts things. I don't think we necessarily have to like innovate on it
a ton. I think as long as it's just a good one at a fair price.
What the high power I [music] mean, I'm going on
the 80 plus site right now and I'm going to see [music] if this is actually 80
plus gold certified. What's the over/under on that?
>> There's no chance that this is actually gold certified. No way. >> Hold on. Hold on.
HP1 J600GD-F12SC
80 plus gold certified >> Yeah. >> No way!
Back in 2019? Okay, so it's an older design, but
technically an efficient one. Being efficient doesn't necessarily mean that
it's the world's most amazing power supply, but it does mean that it is
efficient. >> This is the strongest fan retention clip
I think I've ever encountered on a tower cooler. Oh, there's some nice dust
there. Which is a good thing actually for systems that are going to be
shipped. Okay, very nice. Full coverage, not a
ton of extra to seep out and gunk up my CPU. Good job. Enough poking and
prodding at it though, let's play some games. Say what you will about the
quality of included peripherals. This is just add monitor. Keyboard,
mouse, tower all included. And it's significantly better than a lot of OEM
peripherals that I've seen. Hey! >> Hey, there we go.
>> That RGB strip doesn't look so bad. >> Yeah, I mean, it's easy to hate on
pre-builts. You know, you should build your own. And there are times when you
should definitely build your own. I mean, we're both huge advocates for
scouring the internet for second-hand deals to get the absolute best bang for
your buck. But if you want new stuff, I'm feeling pretty good about this.
What? Go ahead and roll. Who is Who is Darren DeYoung? Did
someone just like take it home and use it for a bit or is this I'm guessing
that's just one of the employees did it and it's easier to just use his personal
account and not worry about it. I would think iBUYPOWER would be
way too experienced for that though. Do you think someone bought this one and
returned it? I don't think so. >> I'm looking up Darren DeYoung. Darren
DeYoung Windows 11. Woah! Is this a thing?
>> It must be a thing. Is this a thing? Who
is he and how can I bypass this demo stuff?
Woof, that should have been wiped before buying it. Was it an open box computer?
Darren DeYoung retail mode. So, this is a thing. It's retail mode. Apparently,
to get rid of Darren, we just have to click five times on Windows 11 home
here. Oh. Look at that.
Wait. Where did I get the idea that the 960 XT had 16 gigs of VRAM?
>> There is a 16 gig version. >> [snorts] >> This is exactly what I'm talking about.
Cuz I even did a take where I was like, "8 gigs of VRAM." And then I looked it
up and I corrected myself cuz I was like, "Oh no, the 960 XT has 16 gigs of
VRAM." >> Okay, that makes it a little less good of a value. Let's make that calculation.
This is why I keep talking about this
kind of deceptive product naming where you don't put all of the specs right in
the [ __ ] specs. Yeah. It's especially deceptive in pre-builds because it's
really hard to look at this and be like, "Is that the 8 gig? Is that the 16 gig?
I don't know." Oh. You can't like easily read the part number through the window?
>> Nope. Here on AMD's site, they literally denote 960 XT and 960 XT 8 gig. That
wasn't on the product card, which might not have happened if we were shopping
somewhere that focuses more on technology rather than, you know, at
Costco. I'm pretty annoyed right now. That's not cool. How does that affect
our value calculations? We lose about $80 on our comparison system when it
goes down to the 8 gig model. So, we're still up like 250,
60 dollars. Okay. So, it's still a good value and we're still out ahead, but
we're not as ahead as I hoped we were. And it always feels like a better deal
when I was fully informed rather than getting a rude surprise after the fact.
I looked up the model on iBuyPower's website and it does have the full specs
including their 8 gig card. Okay. So, it's at least partially on us.
Definitely wasn't on there. It managed to fool three of us. Yeah. Which is
exactly what it is designed to do.
Just occurred to me, we're running our game library off of an external drive
and I realized that I don't know if the cable that it's attached to is any good,
but conveniently, we have a bin of LTT
cables here and it's super easy to tell what the
capabilities are cuz they're printed right on the ends.
lttstore.com Okay, let's start with Expedition 33.
Oh, okay, well, this is great.
Whoop, little hitch there. Your 1% lows are not so good.
>> Yeah, they're really not. Maybe it's just shader compilation stutter? This is
a pretty darn smooth experience. >> I bet you could optimize it a little bit
and hit 60 more consistently, but with VRR, this 1% low of 50 plus, super
playable. >> Oh, yeah, totally. It's not a light
game, especially when you turn it up. Yeah, UE5 is heavy as F.
>> Yeah, I'm going to be honest with you, this is this is so very, very usable.
>> It looks really good. >> Okay, I did get a stutter there, right as I was doing the quick time event.
That was a little annoying. Yep, so it's dipping down to like 45 when there's a
bunch of effects on screen. So, I would want to tune it a little bit more, but
still I'm at like 1440p in terms of the
native resolution that it's rendering at before upscaling. FSR upscaling
actually pretty decent these days. >> Yeah. That looks pretty darn sharp.
>> Pretty good. >> And I'm still at medium details. So, that I have a lot of room to continue to
tune this if I really needed to. >> Should we compare it to our comparison system? Is there that much to compare?
>> No, you're right, cuz it's the exact same system. >> Yeah, I was I was been kind of thinking
about that. Like, what was the point of the comparison system? Yeah, it was going to be it was going to be if we
could build something better for the same price. >> David. >> Well, you know what though, we wouldn't
have been able to do much better or better at all. We can't.
>> So, that's probably why your brain flubbed. Mhm. >> is no better.
>> No. So, yeah, purely illustrative.
>> And time intensive for this gentleman
over here. Uh what else what what do we want to look at? What else we got? >> Cyberpunk. I don't know. You got the
whole library there now, so >> the whole library on this computer. I
got the whole library on this computer. I got the whole library on this
computer. Okay. Thank you for indulging me. Right out of
the gate, default settings in Cyberpunk, we're getting 50 FPS average.
Unfortunately, we're getting lows down to like 25, and if you feel it It's not
great. >> She's not She's not responsive. I think we can do better than this.
>> Yeah. We don't need to go quite to Steam [music] Deck, but I'm thinking
>> you go mid high. Medium. You think we can go high?
>> Yeah, just no ray tracing. With fidelity effects? Okay. All right, sure. Our
averages are the same. Dips not quite as low, but still pretty low.
>> Yeah. I mean, that's what 8 gigs of VRAM is going to do you. Are we at 4K quality?
So, it's doing native 1440p? Yep. Let's go down to 1080p. Oh, yeah, there she
goes. Now [music] we're smooth and realistically
Okay, there there's some odd behavior, but it's not bad.
>> No. Especially considering this is an 8 gig card. The stutter that we're seeing,
especially at higher resolutions, is probably down to having 8 gigs of VRAM,
but for the price this is still going to be a way better
experience than the Steam Machine. Oh, yeah. And when you look at what the
estimated pricing is for that We have a better CPU. We have
upgradeability. They have RGB. A ton of upgradeability and a better GPU. Yeah.
Yeah, this thing is pretty darn sweet. >> nice little platform, actually. I didn't
stop to think, right? Brett Ham 5. Yeah.
This is a nice little starter machine
for someone who's on a bit of a tighter budget today >> Yep. but might want to upgrade CPU, GPU.
They should upgrade their power supply if they put a better [music] GPU in
here. This is a This is so playable. It's so playable. So usable. You could
tweak it a little bit depending on your sensitivities to visual artifacting, but
it's This is good. >> I could easily play this game like this.
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and sign up today. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not
check out the time that Linus and especially David got like the best deal
ever with the PS5 killer. Oh, yeah. That
video made people like kind of [music] mad because David is so good at deal
hunting. We had to change internal policies for
how we handle videos around used hardware. Deals are out there.