We have looked at some very disappointing computers from Walmart.
But then again, what do you expect from a company that's been controversial for decades?
Of course, at an $800 billion valuation, someone must like shopping there.
So maybe, maybe the problem is us. Maybe it's time to try again, but with a more positive attitude.
While their pre-built's never recovered from that disastrous launch,
you can still buy all kinds of PC components from the local Walmart.
The only question is, should you? Right, sorry, sorry, I've got an open mind and an open wallet.
We spent $1,000 for a custom gaming PC and let me tell you,
I did not expect this kind of experience from Walmart.
Just like you weren't expecting. Boom! The segue to our sponsor.
Right out of the gate, our first challenge was battling a Walmart.com website
that was clearly not designed with PC configuration in mind.
Filters don't work, parts are sorted incorrectly,
and the same marketplace and s**tification that has taken over the rest of online retail
is on full display here. Okay, let's manually search AMD, limit to sold by Walmart, and then sort by price.
Okay, that's a little less terrible. We've got a Ryzen 5 7600 for under $200, but wait, what's this?
Sold by Newegg. Okay, how about the 7600X?
Who is platinum micro? That's a little weird.
CPUs are kind of core components, and like,
none of these are being sold by Big Blue themselves.
So if we want a, like, actually from Walmart CPU,
we're basically stuck with this. The AMD Ryzen 8600G for $190.
Not a terrible CPU. It's currently one of the cheapest entry points into the AM5 platform,
with six Zen 4 cores that turbo to up to five gigahertz,
but it's also not the one that we would recommend for a number of reasons.
Well, on the plus side, at least the pricing is about in line with Newegg at the time of filming.
Can't say the same for the RAM though. I mean, this Kingston Fury Beast kit should provide solid performance for many years to come.
It just sucks that I had to buy 32 gigs of it.
I know we are getting to the point where we might need more than that someday,
but 16 gigs is still enough for most games right now,
and having zero 16 gig DDR5 kits available when you're on a limited budget?
That sucks, Walmart. What sucks less is our motherboard.
The MSI Pro B650S Wi-Fi, for better or for worse, is a bog standard B650 board.
It's got decent expansion and connectivity, most importantly, support for our AM5 CPU.
Fun fact, by the way, while Walmart's stock's DDR4 memory and AM4 CPUs,
they don't have any older AM4 motherboards. And then for current gen, this is the cheapest one that they sell.
I guess they rolled back their product selection.
With that said, this is coming together not too bad so far,
but it won't fire up without a power supply. We settled on the MSI MEG A650GL 80 plus Gold for 86 bucks,
which honestly doesn't seem that bad for the price,
especially considering that MSI has made some pretty decent power supplies in the past,
and this one is fully modular. It's even a little smaller than a regular ATX power supply,
which gives us extra room to plug in our cables once we've installed it in our case,
the Thermaltake S200 plus TG, which, speaking of, oh look,
another part that looks like we've prompted an AI with generic gaming computer.
There's really nothing to complain about on first glance. It's a mid-sized tower with support for our ATX board and a tempered glass side panel,
but I usually find a thing or two not to like when I build my PCs,
so let's see if this thing holds up to closer scrutiny.
Starting with cable management, it's bare bones, but it does exist.
All the corners for your cables are rounded, and there's a nice little channel here where you can put all the cables
for your front panel connectors, and you're included four RGB fans.
It's a nice bonus at this price point. I am not, speaking of fans, a fan of these little foam dots
that hold up the power supply. They immediately got knocked off, but not a lot of extra room for the motherboard up here,
but we got all we need. Definitely a little bit of inexpensive case tolerance syndrome,
but once it's on there, I don't think that's going anywhere. Wow, not a lot of room for these bottom connectors here.
It's got a hard drive mount and two 2.5-inch SSD mounts.
It doesn't look amazing from this side, but hey, from this side, not bad.
How much should we pay for this guy? We paid $83.
Um, okay, that's not that cheap.
Nor is our one terabyte SSD. Oh, cool.
We got a Western Digital SN770 for $85, which, man,
it's not like this or any of the selections we've looked at are horrible,
but we've been burning $5, $10, $20 every time we throw something into the cart.
Yeah, it's death by a thousand cuts. All in all, we've wasted about $80 total so far
versus building the exact same computer with the cheapest prices I could find on the web.
And making matters worse, that ignores the optimizations we can make
if we have better parts to choose from. But I have a surprise for you.
Oh, I love surprises. I have one part I couldn't find for cheaper anywhere else.
Oh, awesome. Wait, this is an A750.
That's right, the Predator Bifrost Intel Arc A750 for $245.
Even if we wanted an Intel card, that's nearly the MSRP of an Arc B580.
A way better card! Sure is. Once again, we were killed by selection.
At the time of ordering, there were only a dozen or so cards available,
and of those dozen, all but two of them that fit in our budget were over three generations old.
With that said, I mean, the A750 is pretty okay for 1080p,
especially now that it's had a few years of driver updates. Now that we've got it all installed, it's time to look at the total damage for our system.
How much was it? About $960. Oh, there she goes.
Nice! And she gains.
We're at 1080p, high settings. I mean, yeah, sure, it's only CS2, but it's CS2.
It's not CS Source. And this is running kind of, actually great.
I mean, averages of around 160, 180 FPS, and we're not seeing 1% lows dip below 100.
And I've even got the settings actually pretty high. Check this out.
Like, she's running. And we could even squeeze our water-resistant LTT Hat Pro into the budget.
Well, before you get too excited, we actually built a system using the same $960-ish budget,
but using parts that we could get off new at. Oh, boy.
And so considering this has a 9600X and a 6750XT,
I'm a little bit worried for our little Walmart buddy over there, but let's see how it does.
We'll have all the parts linked down below, by the way. What's that line ploof always gives?
Comparison is the thief of joy. Prepare to have no joy.
Uh-oh. This is already not going well. Wait.
Oh, not good. Okay, I'm heading over there.
I'm heading over there. Let's go to the double doors. My 1% lows are wacky.
Uh, dude. Double? Yeah, we're looking at pretty much double all the time.
Same settings. I'm just over 200 FPS.
He's just shy of 350. Oh, he's over 350.
Yeah, I took one look at that system. I'm like, it even looks better. Yeah.
You have a bigger case, bigger cooling.
Is it quiet or two? Probably.
I mean, mine's reasonable. It's reasonable.
Good job, Walmart. This one's better.
Yeah, and I didn't even min-max all the parts. Like I could have gone a cheaper cooler, cheaper SSD, cheaper case,
but I got ones that I thought I would actually want for this price bracket.
Yeah, and we can't let David min-max things anymore because you guys get upset because nobody deal hunts like this man.
Well, who knows? Maybe it's just the game.
Move on to something else. Oh, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
Let's do it. Dude, I have no shot. Okay, maybe I was a little overambitious about what this computer could do.
We're definitely overambitious about what this computer can do.
As bad as yours is, mine's worse.
Standing here doing nothing. I'm getting 1% low dips down to 13.
Dude, that is noticeably, immediately visibly way better.
Like way better. Mine doesn't seem on paper like it should be that bad, but it feels chunky.
This feels totally fine on my side.
Yeah, looks totally fine on your side. It does not feel fine on my side,
even though my FPS counter is reading the same as yours right now.
For this amount of money, the game should run like that.
For this amount of money, I have it running like this.
Which you can clearly see is trashed here.
Walmart, Walmart, Walmart. And we really did do the best we could do with the selection that we had at Walmart.
This isn't like we've done in the past sometimes with like
AliExpress or Temu, where we've intentionally ordered meme stuff.
It's a pretty functional computer, other than just the part selection, the pricing being garbage.
Warning me, my graphics drivers out of date. I was like, did you guys not prep these? Oh, right, it's Intel.
That's just the kind of errors you get when you run Intel. Even the loading screen.
You're running at double the FPS that I am. You loaded faster though.
Oh no. Oh no, cyberpunk.
Yeah, we don't really have to deep dive. Just looking at the parts that we knew this was going to happen.
Yeah. Look at your frame rates. It's still, oh, look at that. Do you see that?
Do you see that though? That was sub 10.
I think it's pretty safe to say about double the performance.
Pretty damn close. Bottom line then, should you buy a gaming PC at Walmart?
Well, as wild as this is going to sound after everything you guys just saw.
Yeah, but only if you're going to buy a pre-built PC.
And if you carefully analyze the specs, some of their discounted gaming systems are legitimately a great value
and come from trusted brands. But when it comes to buying parts and assembling your own system,
it's clear that when we limit our choices to stuff that's sold by Walmart,
it is a terrible experience. I mean, Walmart in many cases doesn't have the best prices on walmart.com.
And then even once we open up the third party marketplace floodgates,
it's still pretty underwhelming and noticeably worse than buying from Walmart's competitors.
Not only is the website itself a mess to navigate and find parts on,
but from the time that we got the items approved to when we ordered,
which was just a few hours, four of them were out of stock.
And then when our order arrived, we had to send back our GPU due to water damage to the box.
So let us know, what's your favorite place to buy PC parts?
Is it Walmart? You know what's not Walmart?
Our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video and you're like making fun of big businesses
failing to offer a good PC buying experience, you should check out our PC where we built using parts from Sheehan.
It was worse and wilder than this one.