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Sites like Craigslist and Facebook are full of people who offer custom PC building services.

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But should you trust them with your gaming budget? I'm going to contact completely random people on Facebook Marketplace,

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give them my money, and then just pray I don't get scammed.

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The rules are simple. Each builder gets a budget of 1,250 Canadian rubles,

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and then a different member of our team is going to go undercover.

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Meet these guys in person and bring back something, I hope.

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Then I will judge the quality of their craftsmanship, drag-race the PCs, and at the end, maybe even meet our builders in person.

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Talk to them. That is, unless they scam me.

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Oh, hey, that's one of them now!

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Yeah, yeah, Radeon 7600? That sounds good, but do you also have Segway to our sponsor?

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Our opening line was the same for every builder.

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Here's my budget. I need a gaming PC. There were other requirements that we kind of had in mind,

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but there's a catch. If they wanted that information, they had to specifically ask us for it.

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That's going to affect their communication score. Then we're going to rate each system for quality, performance, value, and beauty.

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At the end, whoever has the highest rank will get the PC returned to them for free

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so they can resell it. As for who comes last, they go on the wall of shame.

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Let's start with Jason's system. We decided to purchase from him because he seemed experienced with an Instagram

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and website specifically for showing off PC builds. And look at this, he even gave us an invoice.

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Unfortunately, what he also gave us is one of the weirdest systems

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that I think I've seen in a very long time.

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I've never even heard of Manmoo brand. GameMax only showed up on my radar when one of their power supplies blew up during Labs

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testing recently. And he's using a mobile engineering sample CPU?

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Also, soil motherboard? I've never even heard of this brand.

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Oh, I have, but not since the early 2000s.

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I mean, I guess they have a storied history since 1985.

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Yeah, that's not the kind of story that I would tell my kids at bedtime.

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Might keep them up late if you know what I mean.

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Why did we end up with two power supply boxes? Um, I don't know.

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He gave us two power supply boxes. Like, was there something in it?

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No, he also gave us a different CPU cooler box.

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Oh, then the one that... Yeah, this is a completely different cooler.

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Yeah, and also there's nothing in any of these boxes. I'm very interested to see how this performs, especially with that slow memory,

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but I can't... Wait, do you have the plastic peel on that fan?

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I was going to go easy on him for build quality,

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but I'm sorry, this is a three out of 10.

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Oh, it gets so much worse. You don't even know. We'll get to that later.

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How does this communication, though? We got this nice invoice, totally differed by plus or minus one cent due to rounding error.

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Yeah, I mean, the invoice shows he was professional. He answered our messages quickly.

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He offered things like, do we want used parts or new parts?

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To save a couple of bucks. That's good to know. He was upfront about some of the weirdness,

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like getting the engineering sample, though maybe not as upfront as he should have been.

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He kind of just said that, hey, it's going to be an engineering sample, and it won't show up in Windows.

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Right, but that doesn't address the complete lack of warranty, the potential reliability issues, and potential performance issues.

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Yeah, he also said that it would perform the same as a 1200K.

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No. And when we went to go pick it up, well, Rhys, what did you say?

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He was professional. It looks like he had done this before. He's obviously a salesman, kind of good at selling the product that he's selling.

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Right, but you already bought it. But I already bought it. So, I don't know. He was a nice guy.

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He was a very nice guy. Why did we end up with random boxes, Rhys? He had the computer set up, and I went up and tried it.

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Everything worked fine. And then he was like, oh, grab the boxes. Like, okay. And I just grabbed what was there.

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So he didn't tell me yes or no. He just, I just grabbed all the boxes that were available.

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Did he have other systems being built at the same time, or? I think he said he had other ones on the go.

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For communication, what would you rank him? I'll say eight. I'll say online.

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Maybe a six, because he wasn't super forthright. Let's call it a seven.

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Sure. But the next guy Rhys said was the nicest person he'd ever met.

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Really? I don't know if I said that, but he is very nice. For one thing, he didn't charge us a building fee.

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Every dollar is accounted for here. Six core Ryzen 5000 processor, Asrock motherboard, Kingston NVMe SSD, and an RX 7700 X TGPU.

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Oh, look at that. A brand name power supply. In terms of quality,

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is this three times the quality of the one we just looked at? I think so.

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Yeah. But how was his communication? He was great. He was understanding when we had to reschedule.

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He was very prompt and clear. He even offered us multiple ways to pay him.

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He could do a 50% deposit and he would order all the parts himself.

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That's a little risky. Yeah. Or we could just bring the parts to him and he would build it for us.

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Wait, for free? Yeah. What is even, what's his business model?

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He says he just has free time and he likes building computers.

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So 10 for communication? Yeah.

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Absolutely. We're going to see another field for business savvy, because Keaton is setting very unrealistic expectations.

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I mean, was the pickup perfect too? He's doing it for the love of the game.

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I love the guy. I think he's, I think he's perfect. I'm going to give 10s across the board just so he heads up.

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Reach out. We want to be friends with you. We want to be friends with you.

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All right. How about MiraSla? You nicknamed this one Teenage Engineering,

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but I couldn't help noticing that's an NZXT case. Yeah.

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Well, MiraSla is like 17 years old and the reason he's selling computers

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is because he's trying to save up for college. Wow. Okay.

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Yeah. So he's certainly more profit motivated than Keaton,

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though I got to give him credit. This is a pretty nice build.

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Yeah. There's a couple of tweaks that I think I would make. Like he got a SATA SSD instead of an NVMe SSD.

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Oh, you're not even really saving money on that. Yeah.

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But, you know, still meets our criteria of a one terabyte SSD.

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Yeah. And his build fee, $100 Canadian dollars. That's pretty reasonable.

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That's only about 70 US. He was also happy to throw in extra fans at a discount.

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Oh, that's nice of him. Yeah. Did we ask if he was willing to throw in extra cable management

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and extra peeling the plastic off of our motherboard?

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He'd sink it. Nope. It's got the world's most overcompensating Wi-Fi antennas though, so that's good.

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I'm going to have to dock a couple build quality points for sloppiness,

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but I'm going to give one of them back for going with quality cooling

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and a quality power supply. Those are the kinds of things that are very easy for people to cheap out on

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and take advantage of a not very knowledgeable customer.

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And Miraslaw chose not to do that.

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He was really helpful in other ways. Like instead of just looking at prices on PC Partpicker,

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he actually went and found like bundles on like Canada computers.

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However, the bundle we ended up getting basically was the literal price of buying each of the individual components alone.

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So neither here nor there. All right.

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I mean, they're good parts. Yeah. It was an A for effort. I probably would have done what Keaton did and spent a little more on GPU and a little less on CPU.

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But depending on what we were trying to accomplish, this is a perfectly reasonable parts list as well.

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How was the pickup? Good. A little bit awkward. He's a young guy.

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I think I was pretty awkward at that age as well. You know what I mean? Yeah.

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Just at that age. Just yeah. Thank you. His communication over Facebook was actually really good.

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He sent some photos of the case like I got slightly damaged in transit.

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I can't see it from here. Oh yeah, I see it. Yeah.

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Very slight damages. But he was very upfront with that, which was nice. That's great.

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Nine. Eight. Seven. I think seven.

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Eight. Eight. So far the professionals not looking so hot.

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But the professional might have the performance where it counts.

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Let's pretend we don't know that. Okay. This is true.

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Maybe. Leave them some suspense for crying out loud.

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Now to begin the drag race. Three, two, one.

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And I can already tell that it's not going to be close Adam.

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We are dipping down to 50, 55 FPS on both the professional and teenage engineering.

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Did I see that go over 100? Teenage engineering is screaming right now.

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It's wow. What is up with that? I think it's because of the GPU. It has a predator bifrost, which is like a half blower style card.

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I think he just didn't really tune the fan curves.

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Interesting. He actually did install fan control on this for us.

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And he put a nice big CPU heatsink in here.

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So maybe he just doesn't get bothered by noise and he thought,

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well, let's get everything to run as cool as possible. His temps should be really good.

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We have ray tracing off right now, but it is crazy how neck and neck the 4060 and the 7600 are.

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They're basically the exact same. Though if we turned ray tracing on, this would easily take the lead.

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Yeah. Are you turning ray tracing on on a mid-tier card though?

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I mean, I guess you can. You can. You got DLSS and stuff.

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But we're getting 60 FPS now. Yeah, I know. And it looks pretty good.

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Mind you, we are running at 1440p and the vast majority of people are still gaming at 1080p.

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So you could probably run at 1080 with ray tracing and get similar performance.

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Where did we land in terms of thermals though? The hobbyist was sitting at a peak of about 70 degrees on the CPU and 55 on the GPU.

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Meanwhile, as expected, Teenage Engine hearing didn't manage to get above 54 on the CPU and was at about 58 on the GPU.

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So clearly there's some headroom for us to turn those fans down if we really wanted to.

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As for that mobile CPU, 58 degrees max.

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And on our GPU, we ended up hitting about 70.

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The professional is not the best system so far.

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No. But that could change in Cinebench. Let's see if all those extra cores are going to help out that...

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What is it? 12900HKX. HX. HX.

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All right, ready? Yes. It also takes us. Brother.

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Wow. It may be an engineering sample, but it's professional engineering apparently.

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It does have just core numbers on its side, right? That's 24 threads versus a 12 thread and a 16 thread?

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This is as not close as that last one was in favor of the hobbyist.

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If you are doing something that benefits from multi-threading,

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like say you do a lot of video encoding on CPU,

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the professional looking pretty good for the money. Wow.

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That's a laptop chip. I know, right? And the 5600 is a...

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Well, it's a great choice for gaming. Yeah, cheapest CPU of the lot.

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And that is what we asked for. We asked for 1440P gaming and the hobbyist gave us a better GPU and a lower tier CPU.

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And you can really see that in the results here. Just 11,000 points compared to 14,000 and 19,500.

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But the professional promised that that had the same performance as a 12900K.

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What's the score of a 12900K? 25,000, 27,000.

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So it's not as good. Not even close.

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This is pretty typical for engineering sample chips, you see,

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because they're often not finished. And that even ignores that this poor motherboard is going to have no idea what to do with this thing

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in terms of power limits. We maxed out at 125W, which is kind of within spec.

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But it clearly never stretched beyond that.

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Oh boy, I can already tell in the menu again that teenage engineering is not going to be able to keep up with the hobbyist.

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It's so loud. Now we're looking at Baldur's Gate 3 at 1440p,

151
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ultra details with no resolution scaling. And once again, the competition is not close.

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The 1% lows on the hobbyist, thanks to that 7700XT GPU,

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are higher than the average frame rates on both of our other systems.

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To be clear, either of these is going to deliver a really smooth gaming experience in Baldur's Gate 3.

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It just won't be nearly as smooth as the hobbyist.

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Between the other two though, the GeForce 4060 manages to outclass the Radeon 7600,

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showing you guys that as bad as NVIDIA's current generation is,

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their competition manages to make them look okay.

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And that engineering sample CPU doesn't seem to be holding it back here,

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in spite of it not being the same as a 1200K.

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Should we give them a score or should we just rank them first to third?

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Either way is going to be complicated, because depending on the application, they're going to vary a little bit.

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Yeah, the hobbyist ran away with it in gaming performance,

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but even if your focus is gaming, it's never a bad idea to have a well-rounded system.

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And you've got to give the professional and teenage engineering some credit here.

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So I'm going to say maybe, you know, 8 for the hobbyist,

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because we did give up a lot in terms of multi-threaded performance,

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but given how much the other ones gave up everywhere else,

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I'd say at best they can have a 5. 5 is perfectly adequate.

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It really is. It's a pass.

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Now we turn to value, and you might think, oh, well, why is that simple?

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It's just performance versus how much you paid.

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But I see a value in, for example, having a warranty on my CPU.

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That's where the professional system falls apart. I see a value in having a power supply that's known more for powering computers

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than for powerful failures, like we've seen from this brand in our Labs testing.

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So for me, the professional, I don't know, 3?

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2? What is this generic RAM? The generic RAM is 32 gigabytes of Samsung DDR4 running at 2666 megahertz CL-19.

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That's twice as much RAM as the other systems. Yeah, it's at half the speed.

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It's slow as heck. 4. In fairness to the pro, those cut corners did allow him to undercut everyone else on pricing.

180
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But for me, peace of mind is a big part of value.

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And I feel that both the hobbyist and teenage engineering blew him away there.

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For beauty, I think everyone captured the gamer aesthetic pretty well.

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Definite points for the hobbyists use of RGB everywhere.

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But personally, I like to see a big heat sink more than I like to see flashy lights.

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So I think I'm going to give both of these a 9.

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Or at least I would if I didn't look at the cable management at the back.

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Maybe it's not worth $100 to me, but ironically,

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the one with the worst cable management at the front has far better cable management at the back than our hobbyist.

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He's more of a party in the back. Yeah, but that's why it's behind closed doors, right?

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Sorry, Keaton. I think I'm going to have to dock you a point here.

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As for the pro, Jason selected such a bare bones case

192
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that I think the best I could give it is probably an eight.

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And Adam promised that I would find some interesting surprises

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once I turned it around to the back. This back plate is bowed out.

195
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That's not a good thing. I don't know if that's to spec or not.

196
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Nope, it's not. You know what it is? This is a mobile chip.

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It doesn't have an IHS. So it has to go down tighter in order to make contact.

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It is making contact. The thermals were fine, but that's why it's deeper

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than it would otherwise be. Now I'm really curious because I saw listings for this online

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and they showed an image with an IHS. Oh, no, no, you're right.

201
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There is an IHS on it. Okay, I have no idea then.

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I guess he just really gave her with the screws. You think he gave her with those screws?

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Just wait till you see the M.2 screw. While I was trying to figure out what kind of components

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were in the system so I could try and figure out a relative price to see if he ripped us off with this 1150 thing,

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look at the screw for the SSD. He just chucked a random screw in here.

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There's no standoff. Yeah, and not just any random screw.

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A wood screw. Oh, so it is.

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Can you retroactively cut it? Six. When you find stuff like this,

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it really makes you question everything else about the system.

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With the scores tallied up, surprisingly, everybody gets a pass.

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Yeah, the professional was just barely, but to his credit,

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it is a functioning system and he didn't ghost us

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or scam us outright, but it's clear that to actually win the challenge,

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we're only really looking at teenage engineering and the hobbyist.

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And at the end of the day, with the points we had to dock from teenage engineering

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for choosing a SATA SSD and going with a more powerful CPU for a 1440p gaming system,

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even ignoring the $100 build cost, which by the way is perfectly reasonable,

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we've got to give it to the hobbyist who we're about to meet.

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Hey, how's it going? Hey, Kaden, how's it going? It is Kaden, right? That's good.

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I forgot to get the screen recording started. Oh my God, you guys. That's okay.

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Hey, sorry, technical difficulties. Thanks for taking my call.

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Just to be upfront with you, there's nothing wrong with the computer. Have you ever heard of Linus Tech Tips?

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Yes. Okay, well, he'd like to say something to you.

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He's got some good news for you. Hey, Kaden, nice system. Oh, hey.

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How you doing? Thank you. Oh my God, this is ridiculous.

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Hey, I just wanted to say, you built a heck of a system for the money,

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but I got a question. What's going on here? You didn't even charge us a build fee or anything like that.

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Do you really just do this for the fun of it? I've been building computers since I was like 10 with my dad.

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Like I work from home as a project manager, so I have a lot of free time.

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I want to take it with computers more often, but I don't want to go and buy used parts

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and get people good deals and things. I don't have that much time, but I figured I'd like just do free builds

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and make sure like, you know, the tweaking's done right. I don't know. I just like helping people a lot,

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and I feel like computer stores are kind of like

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not where they used to be, and they're not really offering that kind of like premium service anymore.

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So the challenge was that we actually gave the same budget

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to three different people on Facebook Marketplace, chosen randomly, and whoever won,

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whoever gave us the best value system for our dollars,

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gets the system back so they can resell it to someone else.

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So it's not that I don't love it. You did a great job, but you won, man.

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So this is yours. It's free real estate. Oh, wow.

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Dude, that's crazy. That's awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

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So about how many of these systems do you do on a monthly basis?

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How many people reach out to you? Personally, I probably do one to two a month.

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It's not like something that's super common. I guess people like partly think it's a trust barrier.

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It's like, you don't want to leave parts with someone who you don't know.

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Who does this for fun? Yeah, absolutely. What a weird thing to tell people, you know?

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I get how it sounds. But honestly, I like building computers.

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I like playing with computers. Yeah, it's a passion of mine, and I enjoy it.

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And I can do this and help people at the same time.

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I think it's a really awesome thing to do. Cool. All right. See you later, man.

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Yeah, so awesome. Thanks so much. We weren't able to get Teenage Engineering on a video call,

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but we reached out asking, hey, is this a viable side hustle

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about how many systems do you do? And he said he's got about four of them on the go right now.

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So while it is difficult to break into,

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it looks like some people are making a go of it.

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So in conclusion, your mileage is absolutely going to vary. And being a savvy shopper, as always,

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is going to go a long way towards making sure that you're getting the most for your money.

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But it's clear that there's a alive and well or maybe even vibrant ecosystem of buyers and sellers

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on these marketplaces. So if you want to try your luck,

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hey, it might not be the stupidest thing in the world. And you might get super lucky

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and find someone like Keaton who just loves helping people.

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Or you might even find this segue to our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video,

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you might enjoy the time we bought systems from the major system integrators

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rather than from randoms on Facebook marketplace. Honestly, this seemed like kind of a better rally overall,

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but hey, I'll let you guys be the judge. See you later.