Sites like Craigslist and Facebook are full of people who offer custom PC building services.
But should you trust them with your gaming budget? I'm going to contact completely random people on Facebook Marketplace,
give them my money, and then just pray I don't get scammed.
The rules are simple. Each builder gets a budget of 1,250 Canadian rubles,
and then a different member of our team is going to go undercover.
Meet these guys in person and bring back something, I hope.
Then I will judge the quality of their craftsmanship, drag-race the PCs, and at the end, maybe even meet our builders in person.
Talk to them. That is, unless they scam me.
Oh, hey, that's one of them now!
Yeah, yeah, Radeon 7600? That sounds good, but do you also have Segway to our sponsor?
Our opening line was the same for every builder.
Here's my budget. I need a gaming PC. There were other requirements that we kind of had in mind,
but there's a catch. If they wanted that information, they had to specifically ask us for it.
That's going to affect their communication score. Then we're going to rate each system for quality, performance, value, and beauty.
At the end, whoever has the highest rank will get the PC returned to them for free
so they can resell it. As for who comes last, they go on the wall of shame.
Let's start with Jason's system. We decided to purchase from him because he seemed experienced with an Instagram
and website specifically for showing off PC builds. And look at this, he even gave us an invoice.
Unfortunately, what he also gave us is one of the weirdest systems
that I think I've seen in a very long time.
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
testing recently. And he's using a mobile engineering sample CPU?
Also, soil motherboard? I've never even heard of this brand.
Oh, I have, but not since the early 2000s.
I mean, I guess they have a storied history since 1985.
Yeah, that's not the kind of story that I would tell my kids at bedtime.
Might keep them up late if you know what I mean.
Why did we end up with two power supply boxes? Um, I don't know.
He gave us two power supply boxes. Like, was there something in it?
No, he also gave us a different CPU cooler box.
Oh, then the one that... Yeah, this is a completely different cooler.
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,
but I can't... Wait, do you have the plastic peel on that fan?
I was going to go easy on him for build quality,
but I'm sorry, this is a three out of 10.
Oh, it gets so much worse. You don't even know. We'll get to that later.
How does this communication, though? We got this nice invoice, totally differed by plus or minus one cent due to rounding error.
Yeah, I mean, the invoice shows he was professional. He answered our messages quickly.
He offered things like, do we want used parts or new parts?
To save a couple of bucks. That's good to know. He was upfront about some of the weirdness,
like getting the engineering sample, though maybe not as upfront as he should have been.
He kind of just said that, hey, it's going to be an engineering sample, and it won't show up in Windows.
Right, but that doesn't address the complete lack of warranty, the potential reliability issues, and potential performance issues.
Yeah, he also said that it would perform the same as a 1200K.
No. And when we went to go pick it up, well, Rhys, what did you say?
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.
Right, but you already bought it. But I already bought it. So, I don't know. He was a nice guy.
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.
Everything worked fine. And then he was like, oh, grab the boxes. Like, okay. And I just grabbed what was there.
So he didn't tell me yes or no. He just, I just grabbed all the boxes that were available.
Did he have other systems being built at the same time, or? I think he said he had other ones on the go.
For communication, what would you rank him? I'll say eight. I'll say online.
Maybe a six, because he wasn't super forthright. Let's call it a seven.
Sure. But the next guy Rhys said was the nicest person he'd ever met.
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.
Every dollar is accounted for here. Six core Ryzen 5000 processor, Asrock motherboard, Kingston NVMe SSD, and an RX 7700 X TGPU.
Oh, look at that. A brand name power supply. In terms of quality,
is this three times the quality of the one we just looked at? I think so.
Yeah. But how was his communication? He was great. He was understanding when we had to reschedule.
He was very prompt and clear. He even offered us multiple ways to pay him.
He could do a 50% deposit and he would order all the parts himself.
That's a little risky. Yeah. Or we could just bring the parts to him and he would build it for us.
Wait, for free? Yeah. What is even, what's his business model?
He says he just has free time and he likes building computers.
So 10 for communication? Yeah.
Absolutely. We're going to see another field for business savvy, because Keaton is setting very unrealistic expectations.
I mean, was the pickup perfect too? He's doing it for the love of the game.
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.
Reach out. We want to be friends with you. We want to be friends with you.
All right. How about MiraSla? You nicknamed this one Teenage Engineering,
but I couldn't help noticing that's an NZXT case. Yeah.
Well, MiraSla is like 17 years old and the reason he's selling computers
is because he's trying to save up for college. Wow. Okay.
Yeah. So he's certainly more profit motivated than Keaton,
though I got to give him credit. This is a pretty nice build.
Yeah. There's a couple of tweaks that I think I would make. Like he got a SATA SSD instead of an NVMe SSD.
Oh, you're not even really saving money on that. Yeah.
But, you know, still meets our criteria of a one terabyte SSD.
Yeah. And his build fee, $100 Canadian dollars. That's pretty reasonable.
That's only about 70 US. He was also happy to throw in extra fans at a discount.
Oh, that's nice of him. Yeah. Did we ask if he was willing to throw in extra cable management
and extra peeling the plastic off of our motherboard?
He'd sink it. Nope. It's got the world's most overcompensating Wi-Fi antennas though, so that's good.
I'm going to have to dock a couple build quality points for sloppiness,
but I'm going to give one of them back for going with quality cooling
and a quality power supply. Those are the kinds of things that are very easy for people to cheap out on
and take advantage of a not very knowledgeable customer.
And Miraslaw chose not to do that.
He was really helpful in other ways. Like instead of just looking at prices on PC Partpicker,
he actually went and found like bundles on like Canada computers.
However, the bundle we ended up getting basically was the literal price of buying each of the individual components alone.
So neither here nor there. All right.
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.
But depending on what we were trying to accomplish, this is a perfectly reasonable parts list as well.
How was the pickup? Good. A little bit awkward. He's a young guy.
I think I was pretty awkward at that age as well. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Just at that age. Just yeah. Thank you. His communication over Facebook was actually really good.
He sent some photos of the case like I got slightly damaged in transit.
I can't see it from here. Oh yeah, I see it. Yeah.
Very slight damages. But he was very upfront with that, which was nice. That's great.
Nine. Eight. Seven. I think seven.
Eight. Eight. So far the professionals not looking so hot.
But the professional might have the performance where it counts.
Let's pretend we don't know that. Okay. This is true.
Maybe. Leave them some suspense for crying out loud.
Now to begin the drag race. Three, two, one.
And I can already tell that it's not going to be close Adam.
We are dipping down to 50, 55 FPS on both the professional and teenage engineering.
Did I see that go over 100? Teenage engineering is screaming right now.
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.
I think he just didn't really tune the fan curves.
Interesting. He actually did install fan control on this for us.
And he put a nice big CPU heatsink in here.
So maybe he just doesn't get bothered by noise and he thought,
well, let's get everything to run as cool as possible. His temps should be really good.
We have ray tracing off right now, but it is crazy how neck and neck the 4060 and the 7600 are.
They're basically the exact same. Though if we turned ray tracing on, this would easily take the lead.
Yeah. Are you turning ray tracing on on a mid-tier card though?
I mean, I guess you can. You can. You got DLSS and stuff.
But we're getting 60 FPS now. Yeah, I know. And it looks pretty good.
Mind you, we are running at 1440p and the vast majority of people are still gaming at 1080p.
So you could probably run at 1080 with ray tracing and get similar performance.
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.
Meanwhile, as expected, Teenage Engine hearing didn't manage to get above 54 on the CPU and was at about 58 on the GPU.
So clearly there's some headroom for us to turn those fans down if we really wanted to.
As for that mobile CPU, 58 degrees max.
And on our GPU, we ended up hitting about 70.
The professional is not the best system so far.
No. But that could change in Cinebench. Let's see if all those extra cores are going to help out that...
What is it? 12900HKX. HX. HX.
All right, ready? Yes. It also takes us. Brother.
Wow. It may be an engineering sample, but it's professional engineering apparently.
It does have just core numbers on its side, right? That's 24 threads versus a 12 thread and a 16 thread?
This is as not close as that last one was in favor of the hobbyist.
If you are doing something that benefits from multi-threading,
like say you do a lot of video encoding on CPU,
the professional looking pretty good for the money. Wow.
That's a laptop chip. I know, right? And the 5600 is a...
Well, it's a great choice for gaming. Yeah, cheapest CPU of the lot.
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.
And you can really see that in the results here. Just 11,000 points compared to 14,000 and 19,500.
But the professional promised that that had the same performance as a 12900K.
What's the score of a 12900K? 25,000, 27,000.
So it's not as good. Not even close.
This is pretty typical for engineering sample chips, you see,
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
in terms of power limits. We maxed out at 125W, which is kind of within spec.
But it clearly never stretched beyond that.
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.
It's so loud. Now we're looking at Baldur's Gate 3 at 1440p,
ultra details with no resolution scaling. And once again, the competition is not close.
The 1% lows on the hobbyist, thanks to that 7700XT GPU,
are higher than the average frame rates on both of our other systems.
To be clear, either of these is going to deliver a really smooth gaming experience in Baldur's Gate 3.
It just won't be nearly as smooth as the hobbyist.
Between the other two though, the GeForce 4060 manages to outclass the Radeon 7600,
showing you guys that as bad as NVIDIA's current generation is,
their competition manages to make them look okay.
And that engineering sample CPU doesn't seem to be holding it back here,
in spite of it not being the same as a 1200K.
Should we give them a score or should we just rank them first to third?
Either way is going to be complicated, because depending on the application, they're going to vary a little bit.
Yeah, the hobbyist ran away with it in gaming performance,
but even if your focus is gaming, it's never a bad idea to have a well-rounded system.
And you've got to give the professional and teenage engineering some credit here.
So I'm going to say maybe, you know, 8 for the hobbyist,
because we did give up a lot in terms of multi-threaded performance,
but given how much the other ones gave up everywhere else,
I'd say at best they can have a 5. 5 is perfectly adequate.
It really is. It's a pass.
Now we turn to value, and you might think, oh, well, why is that simple?
It's just performance versus how much you paid.
But I see a value in, for example, having a warranty on my CPU.
That's where the professional system falls apart. I see a value in having a power supply that's known more for powering computers
than for powerful failures, like we've seen from this brand in our Labs testing.
So for me, the professional, I don't know, 3?
2? What is this generic RAM? The generic RAM is 32 gigabytes of Samsung DDR4 running at 2666 megahertz CL-19.
That's twice as much RAM as the other systems. Yeah, it's at half the speed.
It's slow as heck. 4. In fairness to the pro, those cut corners did allow him to undercut everyone else on pricing.
But for me, peace of mind is a big part of value.
And I feel that both the hobbyist and teenage engineering blew him away there.
For beauty, I think everyone captured the gamer aesthetic pretty well.
Definite points for the hobbyists use of RGB everywhere.
But personally, I like to see a big heat sink more than I like to see flashy lights.
So I think I'm going to give both of these a 9.
Or at least I would if I didn't look at the cable management at the back.
Maybe it's not worth $100 to me, but ironically,
the one with the worst cable management at the front has far better cable management at the back than our hobbyist.
He's more of a party in the back. Yeah, but that's why it's behind closed doors, right?
Sorry, Keaton. I think I'm going to have to dock you a point here.
As for the pro, Jason selected such a bare bones case
that I think the best I could give it is probably an eight.
And Adam promised that I would find some interesting surprises
once I turned it around to the back. This back plate is bowed out.
That's not a good thing. I don't know if that's to spec or not.
Nope, it's not. You know what it is? This is a mobile chip.
It doesn't have an IHS. So it has to go down tighter in order to make contact.
It is making contact. The thermals were fine, but that's why it's deeper
than it would otherwise be. Now I'm really curious because I saw listings for this online
and they showed an image with an IHS. Oh, no, no, you're right.
There is an IHS on it. Okay, I have no idea then.
I guess he just really gave her with the screws. You think he gave her with those screws?
Just wait till you see the M.2 screw. While I was trying to figure out what kind of components
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,
look at the screw for the SSD. He just chucked a random screw in here.
There's no standoff. Yeah, and not just any random screw.
A wood screw. Oh, so it is.
Can you retroactively cut it? Six. When you find stuff like this,
it really makes you question everything else about the system.
With the scores tallied up, surprisingly, everybody gets a pass.
Yeah, the professional was just barely, but to his credit,
it is a functioning system and he didn't ghost us
or scam us outright, but it's clear that to actually win the challenge,
we're only really looking at teenage engineering and the hobbyist.
And at the end of the day, with the points we had to dock from teenage engineering
for choosing a SATA SSD and going with a more powerful CPU for a 1440p gaming system,
even ignoring the $100 build cost, which by the way is perfectly reasonable,
we've got to give it to the hobbyist who we're about to meet.
Hey, how's it going? Hey, Kaden, how's it going? It is Kaden, right? That's good.
I forgot to get the screen recording started. Oh my God, you guys. That's okay.
Hey, sorry, technical difficulties. Thanks for taking my call.
Just to be upfront with you, there's nothing wrong with the computer. Have you ever heard of Linus Tech Tips?
Yes. Okay, well, he'd like to say something to you.
He's got some good news for you. Hey, Kaden, nice system. Oh, hey.
How you doing? Thank you. Oh my God, this is ridiculous.
Hey, I just wanted to say, you built a heck of a system for the money,
but I got a question. What's going on here? You didn't even charge us a build fee or anything like that.
Do you really just do this for the fun of it? I've been building computers since I was like 10 with my dad.
Like I work from home as a project manager, so I have a lot of free time.
I want to take it with computers more often, but I don't want to go and buy used parts
and get people good deals and things. I don't have that much time, but I figured I'd like just do free builds
and make sure like, you know, the tweaking's done right. I don't know. I just like helping people a lot,
and I feel like computer stores are kind of like
not where they used to be, and they're not really offering that kind of like premium service anymore.
So the challenge was that we actually gave the same budget
to three different people on Facebook Marketplace, chosen randomly, and whoever won,
whoever gave us the best value system for our dollars,
gets the system back so they can resell it to someone else.
So it's not that I don't love it. You did a great job, but you won, man.
So this is yours. It's free real estate. Oh, wow.
Dude, that's crazy. That's awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.
So about how many of these systems do you do on a monthly basis?
How many people reach out to you? Personally, I probably do one to two a month.
It's not like something that's super common. I guess people like partly think it's a trust barrier.
It's like, you don't want to leave parts with someone who you don't know.
Who does this for fun? Yeah, absolutely. What a weird thing to tell people, you know?
I get how it sounds. But honestly, I like building computers.
I like playing with computers. Yeah, it's a passion of mine, and I enjoy it.
And I can do this and help people at the same time.
I think it's a really awesome thing to do. Cool. All right. See you later, man.
Yeah, so awesome. Thanks so much. We weren't able to get Teenage Engineering on a video call,
but we reached out asking, hey, is this a viable side hustle
about how many systems do you do? And he said he's got about four of them on the go right now.
So while it is difficult to break into,
it looks like some people are making a go of it.
So in conclusion, your mileage is absolutely going to vary. And being a savvy shopper, as always,
is going to go a long way towards making sure that you're getting the most for your money.
But it's clear that there's a alive and well or maybe even vibrant ecosystem of buyers and sellers
on these marketplaces. So if you want to try your luck,
hey, it might not be the stupidest thing in the world. And you might get super lucky
and find someone like Keaton who just loves helping people.
Or you might even find this segue to our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video,
you might enjoy the time we bought systems from the major system integrators
rather than from randoms on Facebook marketplace. Honestly, this seemed like kind of a better rally overall,
but hey, I'll let you guys be the judge. See you later.