It's been seven years and I'm back in Huasheng Bay in Shenzhen, China, the world's largest
tech mall with one simple goal, to buy a sick gaming PC, build it, and give it to a lucky
LTT viewer. You know, like we do, but I've got a small problem.
See, obviously I want to get the best possible deal for my new friend, but I've heard that
foreigners don't always get the best deal.
That is where Daniel comes in. Hello.
He's been our loyal guide and interpreter throughout this trip and he's going to help
me figure out just how much I'm losing or gaining by being an English-speaking Laowai.
Laowai, I think you got it. Nice.
Now for an English-speaking Segway for our sponsor. Oh man, I forgot how overwhelming this place is.
Good gravy. They have everything here, from ICs, to security cameras, to drones, to musical instruments,
and we're only on the second floor.
The fourth floor alone probably has more PC hardware packed into it than all of the computer
retailer that I used to work at, and that served all of Western Canada.
They've got shops that look more like a showroom or part of a chain. They've got ones that just have all the inventory piled up on the floor, but what they all have
in common is they are packed to the gills with tech.
Not all of it new, mind you. But the sheer volume of it is just so impressive.
Where else could I buy AMD Epics in bulk?
Already built AI servers. That's not what I'm after today though, so let's head downstairs and find a more gaming-oriented
shop. To keep things simple, I'm going to go in there, lay out my budget, and buy whatever
they recommend. If they ask me questions about my use case, I will answer them as best I can, but if they
ask me technical questions, I'm just going to say, yeah, I don't really know too much.
My friend's going to put it together for me. Hi.
Hello. Oh, English? No.
Oh, under budget.
My friend has WeChat. Yeah, I'm on the 5th floor, 5252.
Oh, hey. Hold on.
You exceeded the daily limit. Yeah. Uh-oh.
Sorry, your bank declined the card. Oh, come on. Let me try the other one.
Yeah, try the verifying succeeded.
Okay then. Yay.
Okay. Oh, this way. Okay.
Okay. Okay. Bye.
Woo, we got it.
Let's go check out our hall. Just need to find a place to build.
Is this recommended by internet celebrities or for them?
The bench I built on last time is occupado at the moment, so how about these stairs to
nowhere? I don't think anybody needs to use them.
While the process was pretty straightforward, he asked me if my system was for gaming, clarified
my budget, asked me what color of chassis I wanted, showed me that all the parts were
brand new and sealed, assuring me that they all have a three-year warranty, and told me
that I'm getting all top-tier brands, which I was mostly vibing with until he pulled out
this Prime power supply. While I am familiar with the C-Sonic Prime lineup, I'm less familiar with the Goghunter's
Prime lineup. It says here it's manufactured by Great Wall though, so yeah, they'd be a tier one.
Let's see what else we got. I was a little surprised to see him go Intel, and then I realized it's a 14th gen.
You know, the last time Intel made a CPU that people wanted to use for gaming.
It's an OEM chip, so I'm not sure where he gets the idea that I'm getting a three-year
warranty on it, but hey, I'm not going to be here in three years, and six performance
cores and eight efficiency cores should be a pretty good choice for what I'm trying to
do. Whoops. I only got single-channel memory.
If it was DDR5, that might not be the end of the world, but DDR4, single-channel...
Are there two of these? Nope.
No, no, I don't, I think this is just fans.
Only fans. I mean, it's 32 gigs, so it's not like he even cheaped out, but like, bad.
Then for our SSD, we've got a Kingston NV3-1 terabyte.
He did confirm with me that this was enough capacity to have a cache.
That's a negatory captain. It is a Gen 4 drive though, so it should give us okay performance.
Now I just got to figure out how to install it without a tool. Damn.
I never travel anywhere without it.
All right, let's crack open our case and have a look.
Not familiar with Golden Field, but it looks pretty decent on the show floor and they've
got nice high-quality packing materials, so that's two things about them.
We're going to get ourselves a little somewhat stable platform.
You can't make this shit up, man.
No! Well, it'll be good for cooling.
Damn. I was about to say the next thing we want to do is get the panels off and put them inside
the box for safekeeping. Okay, well, my handling error is aside.
The case looks pretty decent. It supports back-to-front motherboards, lots of room for fans, and both the front and side
panel come off for nice easy access while you're building.
This cooler brand I've heard of before, but only because it's Golden Field, which I just
heard of. Did they sell me too many fans?
I've got three RGB fans pre-installed on here, plus another set.
Where the hell am I supposed to put them all?
They use nice broad-head screws for this AIO. It's maybe not quite as secure as using a washer, but it's certainly a lot more convenient.
After what feels like 84 years of installing fans, I finally got them all in.
I don't think we're going to have the most ideal layout for Airflow, but hey, I have
the pretty side of all the fans facing in, so there you go.
Now I just got to deal with this side. Let's take a look at our power supply now.
No modular interface, so that means more cable management.
It's not heavy. Not the only indicator of power supply quality.
I'm sure if Lucas from the lab was here, he could tell us exactly how good it is.
But it also isn't typically a great sign.
What does 80 plus 230 volt EU mean?
Does that mean it's only 80 plus in the EU?
Oh wow. This is not a universal input power supply.
From what I can find, 80 plus 230 volt is a thing, but it is worth noting that pretty
much any power supply worth at Salt these days has active PFC and would be able to accept
any voltage input, so I don't know if I'm feeling too great about this one.
Oh yeah, these cables feel really cheap too. Let's take a look at our GPU.
Oh good. Unlike many 50 series cards, this 8 gig dual 5060 Ti from ASUS does use an older PCIe
power connector, so we'll be able to plug it in.
I'm not super psyched to be getting an 8 gig card at this price, but I haven't done a direct
comparison to Western pricing yet, so I don't know whether to blame NVIDIA or the shop.
Now for a couple finishing touches, get these peels off.
I'm a really weird busker. It doesn't stop people from watching me though.
Not a bad little build. Or is it?
Time to take a closer look at this. Well the fans were a good price anyway, 140 Chinese yen for 7 of them.
That comes out to about $2.80 each for RGB Infinity Mirror fans.
As for the rest of it, 7,900 Chinese yen comes to around $1,109 US dollars, so how
does that compare to our new egg bill? So that's $1,243 US dollars.
Really? So we beat it by 130 bucks, plus you're probably paying tax and shipping on top of that.
This is all in. Well at the very least then, I didn't get a bad deal compared to back home, but the question
is can Daniel get a better deal?
Before we send Agent Daniel in there, I've got a few questions for you.
Where are you from? Shanghai. Shanghai, okay.
So how long have you lived in Canada? For about 6 years. Do you think you can still pass for a native speaker?
Yeah, I'm pretty confident I can do that. Okay, cool. So the basics is this.
You've got $1,100 US dollars to spend.
You're a gamer. You're not interested in streaming or video editing or anything like that.
If they ask what games you want to play, I don't know.
League? Blackmith. Blackmith, that's good stuff.
Yep, you have a 1080p monitor. We want to end up with a very similar build.
You want a terabyte of storage and you don't need Windows. What do you think is going to happen?
I'm going to let you finish. I'll tell you what's going to happen.
We saw it getting breakfast for our hotel rooms. How much did you pay for three days?
I paid $99. We paid over $200.
Yes, $210, exactly. Why?
They made me subscribe to their WeChat account and that gave me a discount.
I paid with WeChat too. You have WeChat too? What the heck?
There you go. Boom. There's your answer.
Wow. Guess we'll see. All right, let's go.
Just kidding, you're on your own. See ya. Wait, what?
Okay. Well, I can't be seen with you. They left so early?
Yes. They left so early?
Yes. Okay. Okay.
We have some bad news.
That shop is closed, so let's think of a plan B.
We got it.
Let's go to Linus. Any luck?
Unfortunately, no. That original shop was closed, but we did get a quote from a different shop.
Oh, okay. You're getting a 50-70.
70, yep. What the fuck? But they cheaped out on the CPU, I guess.
Top gen. That's not your... Where's my quote?
Well, okay, yeah. I spent another 100 CNY on my CPU, but wait, what's this?
Plus 160. This is a double-tower air cooler, so I don't get AIO water cooling.
Okay. So for being realistic, you got a pretty similar markup to me.
You just got someone who understood the assignment a little bit better for a gaming PC.
We focused a lot on Wukong. That's the most demanding game. Right.
We said better GPU, better game. And in fairness, I never told the first shop that I wanted to play Blacksmith Wukong.
Of course, I didn't say I didn't want to play it. So either way, it's pretty clear to me that markup-wise, neither of us really got much
of a better deal or worse deal. Yeah. It seems like the difference is mainly just the opinion of the builder, like what they
thought was best for our systems. Yeah. The closest comparable we have is that we both got 32 gigs of RAM.
Yeah, he's giving me a single stick as well. Yeah. And you paid 10 CNY less.
Pretty darn close. Okay. So you also got a crappy power supply.
Yeah. I asked him about getting a better one. He said a Corsair would cost a thousand, where this is a 360 bucks.
A Corsair would be a lot better of a power supply. But actually, this is another comparable then, because I also got a great wall power supply
and you paid 10 CNY more. So if we look at the two direct comparables we have, it's just like random variable between
different shops. Yeah. So bottom line, whether you're buying back home or you're buying here, you're probably
paying pretty similar for similar quality of components, because yeah, it was more from
New Egg, but we also got higher quality parts.
Like by the time we spent that much more on a brand name power supply, we're probably right in the same ballpark.
Let's give away a PC. Probably no one's going to say anything because they don't want it because it's broken.
Where do we go? Did we just start walking? Sure.
Why not? It's such a random place that you hate.
It's very random. Okay, hold on.
Take another picture. This picture is of you getting a new PC.
Congratulations. Are you serious? Yeah.
What? Wait, no. Don't drop it.
I'm not going to drop it. I already dropped it once. Are you sure?
Yeah. Oh, I'm sure I dropped it once. Yeah, it shattered a little bit.
Oh my God. It's good for airflow. You just take that panel off.
I think I have the luggage for this, but I'm going to try. You know what?
I believe in you. Oh, here. I'm going to put one of these Hollyland mics on you.
There you go. Thank you. Thank you.
This is the most random day of my life.
Thank you so much. Are you a gamer?
No, my brother is, but I'm not. Guess what? Now you are.
Oh, thank you. I'll get into it. Thank you.
So what brings you to Shenzhen? Obligatory family holiday.
Oh, heck yeah. Okay. What brings you here?
Obligatory making videos holiday. Very nice.
Yeah, no, I'm here for a couple of factory tours, and then I was like, well, I'm back
at the place that I got all stressed out building a PC with Scotty from Strange Parts
seven years ago. So I'll return and face my final boss again.
All right. Thank you, man. This is really, really random.
But thank you. Really, really convenient here. So I'm going to do one of these.
All good, man. Thank you. All right.
I've got to figure out a way to get this back to my hotel. But thank you. Yeah.
All right. Let's go get some drinks. Back down under.
Thanks, guys. All right. That was pretty random.
Now we just need a random, hopefully in English this time segway to our sponsor.
If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out the last time I was here building a PC
with Scotty from Strange Parts. It was stressful, but only because I gave myself a very difficult challenge, trying to build
a PC with only parts that I have never heard of before.