Well, Lylok, you've done it again. I don't think the PCB will be troubling us any time soon.
Quite indeedily, Pluton. Quite indeedily. But just tell me, how did you manage to crack the case?
Ms. Kateson's got her shawl back, and you've managed to determine which of our pre-built gaming computers is the best.
Well, it was quite elementary. You see, it was near the end when Scotland Yard examined our pre-configured computing machines.
Adele, we meet again. And this time you're very similar to last year.
The XPS8960 still requires a screwdriver to access the side panel, but is otherwise mostly tool-less.
You get two fans, front and rear, with space for a third, along with decent cable management, including pre-run cables for adding a hard drive,
as well as a GPU brace that could probably survive an earthquake.
The proprietary Z690 motherboard will cause some headaches if you want to upgrade the power supply later, which you may very well want to do,
but is well-featured with two M.2 slots and on-board Wi-Fi.
The only major quality complaint that I have here is the cheapo flower-type CPU cooler.
There's a Core i7-14700 non-K under this thing, and that would live a happier, cooler life with even a basic tower heatsink,
like, oh, I don't know, the one that they give you if you ordered the K variant of that same CPU.
Otherwise, the specs are about what we would expect at this price, except for the 460-watt bronze efficiency power supply.
At least Dell's system arrived fully intact, though. I don't know what happened to our iBuy power system and shipping, but aside from the thumb screw that was lodged in the I-O,
upon closer inspection, we found that nearly all of our motherboard screws were loose, and two of the ones that weren't were cross-threaded.
As for the case, it's not particularly tool-less, but it's also not difficult to work in, and we got four 120mm ARGB fans,
though they use a proprietary connector, which is a bit of a downer, and for some reason, we're not configured to sync with our motherboard, or even to each other.
Cable management is decent, with nothing loose or hanging around, and this time, we got a much better CPU heatsink with what looks like an iBuy power badge to Hyper 212 ARGB tower cooler.
You guys were so close, you just had to screw down the motherboard.
Oh well, as for specs, we got a strong CPU, dual-channel memory, and ample storage.
Too bad there was a little mix-up with iBuy power's unauthorized reseller on Amazon, and we didn't get the 4060 Ti that was supposed to be in this system.
Moving on to main gear, the MG1 case is largely unchanged since our previous secret shopping spree, and if tis not broken then, nay, it need not be fixed.
With that said, a filter behind the removable faceplate would be a nice touch.
Cable management was a strong point, though, with no shortage of zip ties, though that might be a pain point when you're upgrading later and you have to start cutting them off,
and we got a beefy RGB fan controller requiring two SATA power connectors that supports six fans and up to eight ARGB headers for extra lighting strips or effects.
It also appears our case power switch is routed to it as well.
Curious, another odd choice was the anti-seg GPU bracket.
It was a nice touch to have it in there, but the way it's mounted made replacing the graphics card in the system a bit of a pain, so be prepared.
Main gear is our first competitor to go AMD for the CPU, which we all know is good for gaming,
but the chip that they chose has literally one third as many processing cores as the last two systems we looked at,
and while main gear chose some of the highest clocked memory in this round, the high-rated latency means they might not get as much performance benefit from it.
As for the rest of the specs, the main standout was main gear selection of an SSD with AD RAM cache.
Generally, these drives perform better and last longer.
As for cooling, we got four 120mm fans and what looks like a Hyper 212 Black Edition, so you probably won't need to change any of that out anytime soon.
Speaking of change, I'm happy to report that StarForge has gone through quite a bit of change.
Gone is the deep-cooled CG650 from last time, and in its place, we have the beautiful Phanteks XT View,
a gorgeous and mostly tool-less case that's easy to work in.
By the way, those of you who suspected that StarForge's fans were all set to exhaust were hoodwinked by their use of reverse-blade intakes.
There is an additional 120mm fan that is exhausting out the rear, but the rest of them are all daisy-changed together for some positive pressure goodness.
Curiously, this case does include an RGB controller, but StarForge opted to plug into the motherboard for control instead.
Another thing they didn't use was the case's included mounting hardware.
They clearly used something to assemble the computer, but we were left with the full set of screws and zip ties.
Not that we'll need them since the cable management was solid.
I'm still not a fan of this uncapped ARGB cable that could short out on something,
and some of these SATA cables could be tucked away a little nicer, but it's not bad at all.
We need to talk about the CPU cooler, though. The contact frame that's included with their Arctic cooler is a nice touch,
but StarForge, you might want to let your techs know that you don't need the full tube of thermal paste,
and ours, while secure enough, was actually not torqued down all the way.
As for the heatsink, some of you noticed that it was a skew after I ripped out the packing foam,
but I'm happy to report that while it looks a tad wonky, it didn't seem to affect performance.
Under our cooler, we find our most pedestrian CPU yet mounted to the most bulk of motherboards we've seen yet,
along with some other kind of mediocre stuff. Except for the GPU.
Our only Radeon card this round is an RX6650XT8 gig from three years ago.
We'll also be exploring the performance of this system with the 7700XT upgrade
that we would have gotten for the $300 we had left in our budget,
but our value calculation will be based on the system that they sold us.
Next up is HP, with a new case that sports these nifty, stealthy Wi-Fi antennas
and a perforated front panel for better airflow for our dual 140mm intake fans.
We've got a 120mm exhaust in the rear, and all three fans are wired directly to our motherboard headers
instead of into the perfectly good RGB fan hub, where they did decide to route the RGB cables for the fans.
Cable management on the back isn't terrible, but on the front, come on HP.
Either use a nicer case with the power supply shroud,
you know, like the one you sent us last time, or just take a little bit more time to tidy this up.
On the plus side, unlike Dell, HP has basically no proprietary weirdness going on
that would prevent you from changing parts or upgrading in the future.
And upgrade in the future, you shall. On paper, this is our weakest system yet, pretty much across the board.
Okay, I guess the slightly less basic CPU cooler and the 500W power supply
are technically ahead of Dell, but not by much.
CyberPower's case is designed by Coolermaster and resembles a Masterbox 5 Lite,
but with some better ventilation at the front. It includes four 120mm RGB fans, though surprisingly no RGB fan hub.
Cable management is mediocre, no thanks to the board or the case,
but at least they tried, other than this unholy chain of 4-pin Molex connectors for those fans.
Where they could have tried harder is the specs, decent CPU,
and surprisingly this 600W Apivia power supply didn't fail our testing, more on that later,
but a single 16GB stick of memory in 2025 and this subpar flower cooler?
We didn't do formal acoustic testing, but I can tell you this one gets pretty loud,
almost as loud as the Dell. Wrapping up our physical evaluation, in third place we've got CyberPower,
though I wouldn't mind some more amenities, especially front USB Type-C.
As for the win, I've got to give it to Manegear overall.
StarForge did a great job with cable management and packing in the Phanteks hardware was a nice touch,
but Manegear looked ever so slightly cleaner,
not to mention they didn't go overboard on the thermal compound.
Of course, everything we've talked about just now, including the over application of thermal compound, is just looks.
I've got a feeling that the beauty of these machines might be only skin deep
and the order might change when we look at performance and value.
But first, software. Well Dell, how up to date and gaming ready are you this year?
According to my report, the BIOS and Windows versions were both from November of 2024,
so just a few months before our ship date. However, our GPU drivers were from July.
Like, of 2024!
Resizable Bar, an important feature for modern GPUs, was enabled,
but we found no trace of XMP memory overclocking in our antiquated looking BIOS.
With that said, our memory was running at its maximum rated speed of 5600 megatransfers per second,
so I guess that's fine.
Our recovery environment and ability to refresh the PC were both configured properly,
and while there were some Dell applications pre-installed,
they were for the most part not configured to start up without permission,
so we only had to remove McAfee during our de-bloating step.
Let's move on to iBuyPower. For those who missed part two, this is the kind of weird PC
that Miss Kateson accidentally bought from an iAuthorized third-party seller on Amazon
when iBuyPower directed her to get the system from Amazon rather from them directly.
And this is an odd one. Our BIOS isn't too old.
It's from September of 2024, but our Windows install is ancient.
I'm talking a 22H2 build from a year ago.
So, I mean, it's been getting security updates since the latter half of 2022,
but come on, 23H2 has been out for kind of a minute now.
And our Intel management and GPU drivers are both similarly out of date.
Looks like someone hasn't been updating their prep image.
Thankfully, not only does the recovery environment work,
an improvement over last time for iBuyPower, but there was zero bloatware and no odd folder remnants on our drive,
both of which are nice to see. But wait a tick.
What's this? Oh, iBuyPower, how could you?
XMP is disabled out of the box
and our CPU cooler tuning is set to a lowly 65W.
Rebar may be on, but you guys aren't getting any points for that
since this MSI board enables it by default.
What a mixed bag this has been. Let's see if main gear can do any better.
Considering their BIOS, Windows, and driver versions are all from 2025,
most from the very same month that we ordered the machine, I'd say they have.
Expo memory tuning and rebar are both enabled.
There's no antivirus or additional bloat to remove and no random leftover prep folders.
Magnificent. But it's not all good news.
Our system had a little tiny overclock that was pre-applied.
Nothing major, just a PBO boost of 100MHz
and our curve optimizer set to all cores with a minus 15 offset,
which sounds fine. It's just that it didn't work.
We did try a few adjustments, but our system outright refused to boot with these settings enabled,
so we ended up turning them off, keeping only Expo enabled for our testing.
Sorry, main gear. While I do believe you that it probably worked during QC,
alas, tragedy must have struck the system somewhere along the journey,
which highlights the pitfalls of factory overclocking systems.
What about Starforge, though? Well, it appears they've done the opposite of main gear
and updated very little. Our BIOS and GPU driver versions are from late 2024
and Windows hasn't been updated since late 2023.
Oh my goodness, and the Intel Management Engine driver is older still.
Pity. They also left a slew of leftovers on the system,
like wallpapers and animations. But on the bright side, look,
outdated Windows and drivers can be dealt with by the user
and there is very little bloat otherwise. And XMP and Rebar were both enabled.
Moving right along, let's talk about the system that almost didn't get here.
HP is an odd duck this year. The BIOS version of our machine, F.08, isn't available from their website,
so we're not sure when it's from, but we appear to be just one revision behind F.09,
which released earlier this year, so it's probably from 2024,
like our Windows version, chipset, and GPU drivers.
But if you look closely at HP's website, you'll notice that we're on the latest versions of some of these.
HP, are you suggesting that AMD's most recent chipset drivers,
after multiple new CPU launches, are several months old?
Inconceivable. No, though, actually inconceivable.
What this means is that HP is not only not updating the images that they use to install their systems,
but they aren't updating their own driver database and website,
for shame. Also, while Rebar was enabled,
our recovery environment works, and they've left no sysprep traces,
they failed to enable XMP and had a bunch of unwanted software installed,
like Dropbox Promotion, MyHP, Omen Audio Control,
and Gaming Hub, and, huh, McAfee.
We removed McAfee before testing, by the way, per our standardized process.
Finally, there's CyberPower. Their BIOS is fairly recent.
XMP and Rebar were both enabled, their recovery environment works,
and system prep was nice and clean, which puts main gear on top,
and cyber power in a clear second place when it comes to system prep,
with Dell making a surprise podium appearance
thanks to their non-ancient software. But, who will win the all-important
gaming performance carriage race?
This is it.
This can't be right. Do my eyes deceive me?
Dell wins?
I mean, I know that a 4060 Ti is better than a 4060,
but look at this margin of victory!
And what a fantastic writing instrument!
Get yours today at LTTstore.com.
At 1080p, it's nearly a clean sweep.
Red Dead Redemption 2, F124,
Cyberpunk, Alan Wake, Dell demolishes the competition
when it comes to pure gaming performance.
It's not even really close.
They do suffer one loss in Dota 2, where main gear's choice of a Ryzen processor,
one that is cooled properly, not to mention quieter,
helps them out in this CPU-bound game, and iBuyPower manages to pull ahead
simply by, again, properly powering and cooling
that same CPU Dell is using, but the rest of them, hey,
a W is a W, and they're all Ws.
As for our clear losers, Starforge lands at the bottom of the list,
more often than not, with HP, main gear, and cyber power
trading places for second and third worst.
What's particularly interesting is the ray tracing testing we did.
Yup, that's the RT performance that you can expect out of a 6650XT, alright?
It was a modern card at one point,
but AMD's newer cards are a lot better in this regard.
At 1440p, it's more of the same. Dell loses to main gear and iBuyPower in Dota,
and then crushes them, along with everyone else, in every other game.
That 4060Ti is putting in the work.
It's a real shame that our iBuyPower system didn't come with one,
especially when it was supposed to.
Whether the blame lies with iBuyPower, or with Amazon's crummy marketplace model,
it has clearly hurt them here, as you'll see when we do our
what could have been analysis later.
Of course, raw performance doesn't tell the whole story.
There's also the question of value, and here Dell's victory is still a victory,
but not as clearly so. In Alan Wake 2, Cyberpower dethrones Dell,
in Cyberpunk 2077, Dell wins by less than a dime,
iBuyPower and main gear come out ahead in Dota 2,
and then Dell wins by about a dollar in F124,
and by about a quarter in Red Dead Redemption 2.
Still though, what an upset!
These results are really going to make the overall pick
a tough call this year.
Now, while Miss Katesen did specify
that the system was for gaming, we thought we'd take a quick look at productivity performance.
In our most GPU intensive test, Blender,
StarForge is way down at the bottom, thanks to their lack of hip-RT capabilities.
HIP is just AMD's version of CUDA rendering,
and hip-RT is the latest version of it that utilizes ray tracing, but I digress.
Dell is the clear winner here again,
but that is their only win in productivity.
In Cinebench 24, iBuyPower is on top in multi-core,
and tied with Dell in single-core, while StarForge hangs out at the bottom.
And in AV1 CPU encoding with Handbrake,
Dell performs admirably, but loses to iBuyPower with StarForge on the bottom again.
My detective skills are intuiting a pattern here,
and X264 encoding tells us the same story
as does PugetBench's Premiere and DaVinci Resolve benchmarks.
Maingear manages to take second place in Photoshop, but other than that, their performance
wasn't much to write home about. Yet, if we examine the cost of our systems,
curiouser and curiouser, iBuyPower once again looks like a solid value proposition
winning multiple rounds here. As for the worst value of the pack,
HP, I'm sorry, but it's very clearly you.
You are consistently at the bottom of every chart we're flipping through right now.
Overall then, as surprising as it might be,
Dell looks like the top pick whether you're looking at pure performance
or performance per dollar. But value and performance
aren't always number one in people's hearts. Some of you out there care about thermals
or care about whether or not your power supply is reliable.
To test our GPU thermal performance, we stressed our graphics cards with 4K F124
and I'm happy to report that across the board,
our system builders chose cases that do offer sufficient airflow,
at least for the weak GPUs that we ended up with this round.
Out of the whole bunch, StarForge performed the worst
with still a totally adequate 75 degrees Celsius average
and a max of 78. As for the rest of our builds,
we're under 70 degrees on average with our coolest systems being the Dell
and CyberPower at just 63 degrees average,
though they were by far the loudest.
As for CPU temperatures, things aren't quite as rosy
for some of our competitors. Dell even managed to hit about
70 degrees Celsius average during 4K gaming,
which is a scenario that tends to be less demanding on the CPU.
So what happens when we run Cinebench machines?
Well, as it turns out, the boards really try to juice
these processors, at least at first.
iBuyPower and Dell were the only systems to reach over 200
watts of power consumption during their Cinebench run,
but they quickly realized that they can't handle that and throttle down to some pretty
unimpressive speeds. Yes, 3GHz is higher
than the advertised base frequency of this chip, but boy
is it ever a lot slower than the maximum turbo,
and Dell's average is even worse at just 2.88GHz.
For those of you buying an iBuyPower system, there's clearly thermal
headroom here based on our average temperatures, and you can adjust the power limits
to get a little bit of extra performance out of your purchase, though
that will take some tinkering in the BIOS, which you, the typical LTT viewer,
might be inclined to do, but the average purchaser probably won't.
As for our hottest system, it ended up being main gear
at a sweltering 92 degrees celsius average, but
to be fair to main gear, that CPU is pinned at over
5.1GHz for the whole test, and like it or not,
92 degrees is below AMD's TJ Max.
So, I don't know about you guys, but I would rather have
the hotter, more consistent running system over the one that's running cooler,
but not living up to its potential. Either way, I think
the win here has to go to Starforge. Whether it was their abundance of thermal
paste, the contact frame on that Arctic cooler, or it just being
an older CPU, it was only 700MHz from the max boost on average
while sticking to around 51 degrees celsius.
So this mediocre performing system will at least last you a really
long time. Something else that might last you a long time
is the 460W Platinum power supply from Dell.
Don't get me wrong, it's only 460W and the proprietary connections means
you can't build another computer with it, but when we ran through the light version
of our PSU tester, we confirmed that it is highly efficient with 115V
and 230V. We were so convinced that the results weren't
correct that we went digging for the 80 plus test that confirms our findings.
Incredible. iBuyPower used a high power
J600GD F12S 600W.
Very cool. This one tested poorly at 2% load efficiency,
but this was otherwise a solid contender and mirrors our MSI and cooler master
units for the rest of our load points. Speaking of which, Manegear and Starforge
both used the same power supply. The MAG A650GL from
MSI. These were the best power supplies out of the bunch, featuring
good load regulation, efficiency rating and low voltage ripple or noise.
Excellent selection. HP also chose well with their cooler master
PSU. It matches the 80 plus gold rating and has mostly
average voltage ripple and voltage regulation. A little high on the 3.3V
but nothing to be concerned about. Which leaves us with cyber power
and the Apevia ATX PR 600W. We didn't have a lot of faith
in this one and while it didn't explode, we were right to doubt it. It's not
efficient and doesn't stay above 80% efficiency at 100%
load. We're not sure if this is just one bad unit or maybe 80 plus was sent
a golden sample when they validated it for their rating. But it's not great.
It's a clear tie here between Manegear and Starforge with HP as a runner up
and I buy power with the honorable mention. If you buy from them, it looks
like you'll get quality power supplies that should last you for years to come. And while
the Apevia unit and the cyber power system isn't great, at least it uses standard
parts. I'll take that over the low wattage, proprietary Dell concoction
any day of the week, even if it is quite efficient indeed.
Which leads us finally to a section we're calling
alternate reality. No, not VR performance
testing. VR hasn't been invented yet in my time.
I'm talking about the timeline where we accept Manegear's offer, get
the right PC for my buy power, don't have our order canceled with cyber power
and spend our full budget with Starforge.
Well, as you can see here, our productivity results don't change much.
We mostly see the cyber power PC make some great strides, thanks to its
stronger CPU, but these gaming results are something else
entirely. It turns out that Starforge is the beneficiary of
having a, yes, much much better GPU
than the RTX 4060 Ti, allowing them to win in almost
every test. With that said, when it comes to ray tracing
which is becoming more and more important, it's astonishing
just how much better those third gen RT cores are in NVIDIA's
40 series GPUs. In Cyberpunk 2077, 1080p
RT on, our Starforge 7700
XT alternate reality system still manages to lose
to our unchanged Dell XPS. And while the 4060
Ti upgrade on some of our other systems certainly helps here,
our Dell still manages to stay on top when it comes to
pure value. Also, while we don't have the same
120mm AIO that you would expect with the upgraded cyber power,
take a look at these thermal results and please do
yourselves a favor and avoid them. Unless you're buying a lower
NCPU and trying to fit everything into a smaller case, these
single fan AIOs are never worth buying thanks to their poor
performance. You're better off either just strapping on a proficient
air cooler or stepping up to a version with a 240mm radiator.
With that segment out of the way then, it's time to declare the winner
which will not be based on alternate reality, but only based
on what we actually received. Well, Lylok,
who was it? You may not like it, and I may not like
it, but this is what peak performance looks
like. No. Dell came first in gaming performance
both in raw performance and in value, and they also
won in our productivity suite and while performance isn't everything,
it is a lot. The customer support could
have been better as well as the ordering experience, but those are
hopefully one-time events that you can suffer through one time.
I would say the main knock against our little XPS
that could here, and it is a big one, is that if you want something that not only
looks like a gaming computer, but can be easily altered and upgraded
and tinkered with like a gaming computer, good luck doing anything
with this proprietary board, weird CPU cooler mounting, and
460W power supply that, frankly, we were amazed
didn't blow up when Constable Lucas was testing it. With all
of that said, as a set and forget gaming box, darn it,
I just can't argue with the evidence. For a runner-up
and system that I would be more likely to pick, it's a tough call.
If we'd received the right system for my bi-power
directly, they'd probably take the silver medal, but that loose motherboard
and the dodgy purchase experience ...
As for Starforge, if we'd gotten the 7700XT, there's a solid chance
they would have won the whole thing, but based on what we actually
got this year, I think second place has to go to cyber power.
Purchasing from them sucked. What are you calling for?
What are you calling for? I want to buy the f***ing computer!
But customer support wasn't bad, even if they just directed us to a video
and at $1100, it's really hard to beat this machine.
I guess you're right, but I have to say that this year just didn't
excite me as much as it normally does. These new fangled computer gadgets
seem to cost more and more each year and these 60 class cards
seem to go less and less far each year.
What do you say next year, or two years? We up the ante.
Let's butter our bacon and buy some $2,000 gaming doohickeys.
Excellent. We'll need a sponsor though. Thank you all so much for watching.
If you want more Secret Shopper, check out the last time we did, I can't believe Del won this year.
It's first time for everything. But that? It's first time for everything.
I don't know how they did it. He walked into my office for script review,
okay? And he goes, you're not going to believe who won. How many guesses did it take me?
Four or five? At least four.
He did not want to believe it was Del.