WEBVTT

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We have looked at some very disappointing computers from Walmart.

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But then again, what do you expect from a company that's been controversial for decades?

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Of course, at an $800 billion valuation, someone must like shopping there.

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So maybe, maybe the problem is us. Maybe it's time to try again, but with a more positive attitude.

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While their pre-built's never recovered from that disastrous launch,

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you can still buy all kinds of PC components from the local Walmart.

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The only question is, should you? Right, sorry, sorry, I've got an open mind and an open wallet.

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We spent $1,000 for a custom gaming PC and let me tell you,

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I did not expect this kind of experience from Walmart.

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Just like you weren't expecting. Boom! The segue to our sponsor.

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Right out of the gate, our first challenge was battling a Walmart.com website

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that was clearly not designed with PC configuration in mind.

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Filters don't work, parts are sorted incorrectly,

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and the same marketplace and s**tification that has taken over the rest of online retail

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is on full display here. Okay, let's manually search AMD, limit to sold by Walmart, and then sort by price.

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Okay, that's a little less terrible. We've got a Ryzen 5 7600 for under $200, but wait, what's this?

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Sold by Newegg. Okay, how about the 7600X?

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Who is platinum micro? That's a little weird.

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CPUs are kind of core components, and like,

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none of these are being sold by Big Blue themselves.

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So if we want a, like, actually from Walmart CPU,

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we're basically stuck with this. The AMD Ryzen 8600G for $190.

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Not a terrible CPU. It's currently one of the cheapest entry points into the AM5 platform,

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with six Zen 4 cores that turbo to up to five gigahertz,

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but it's also not the one that we would recommend for a number of reasons.

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Well, on the plus side, at least the pricing is about in line with Newegg at the time of filming.

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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.

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It just sucks that I had to buy 32 gigs of it.

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I know we are getting to the point where we might need more than that someday,

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but 16 gigs is still enough for most games right now,

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and having zero 16 gig DDR5 kits available when you're on a limited budget?

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That sucks, Walmart. What sucks less is our motherboard.

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The MSI Pro B650S Wi-Fi, for better or for worse, is a bog standard B650 board.

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It's got decent expansion and connectivity, most importantly, support for our AM5 CPU.

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Fun fact, by the way, while Walmart's stock's DDR4 memory and AM4 CPUs,

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they don't have any older AM4 motherboards. And then for current gen, this is the cheapest one that they sell.

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I guess they rolled back their product selection.

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With that said, this is coming together not too bad so far,

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but it won't fire up without a power supply. We settled on the MSI MEG A650GL 80 plus Gold for 86 bucks,

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which honestly doesn't seem that bad for the price,

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especially considering that MSI has made some pretty decent power supplies in the past,

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and this one is fully modular. It's even a little smaller than a regular ATX power supply,

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which gives us extra room to plug in our cables once we've installed it in our case,

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the Thermaltake S200 plus TG, which, speaking of, oh look,

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another part that looks like we've prompted an AI with generic gaming computer.

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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,

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but I usually find a thing or two not to like when I build my PCs,

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so let's see if this thing holds up to closer scrutiny.

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Starting with cable management, it's bare bones, but it does exist.

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All the corners for your cables are rounded, and there's a nice little channel here where you can put all the cables

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for your front panel connectors, and you're included four RGB fans.

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It's a nice bonus at this price point. I am not, speaking of fans, a fan of these little foam dots

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that hold up the power supply. They immediately got knocked off, but not a lot of extra room for the motherboard up here,

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but we got all we need. Definitely a little bit of inexpensive case tolerance syndrome,

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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.

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It's got a hard drive mount and two 2.5-inch SSD mounts.

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It doesn't look amazing from this side, but hey, from this side, not bad.

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How much should we pay for this guy? We paid $83.

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Um, okay, that's not that cheap.

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Nor is our one terabyte SSD. Oh, cool.

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We got a Western Digital SN770 for $85, which, man,

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it's not like this or any of the selections we've looked at are horrible,

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but we've been burning $5, $10, $20 every time we throw something into the cart.

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Yeah, it's death by a thousand cuts. All in all, we've wasted about $80 total so far

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versus building the exact same computer with the cheapest prices I could find on the web.

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And making matters worse, that ignores the optimizations we can make

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if we have better parts to choose from. But I have a surprise for you.

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Oh, I love surprises. I have one part I couldn't find for cheaper anywhere else.

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Oh, awesome. Wait, this is an A750.

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That's right, the Predator Bifrost Intel Arc A750 for $245.

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Even if we wanted an Intel card, that's nearly the MSRP of an Arc B580.

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A way better card! Sure is. Once again, we were killed by selection.

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At the time of ordering, there were only a dozen or so cards available,

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and of those dozen, all but two of them that fit in our budget were over three generations old.

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With that said, I mean, the A750 is pretty okay for 1080p,

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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.

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How much was it? About $960. Oh, there she goes.

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Nice! And she gains.

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We're at 1080p, high settings. I mean, yeah, sure, it's only CS2, but it's CS2.

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It's not CS Source. And this is running kind of, actually great.

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I mean, averages of around 160, 180 FPS, and we're not seeing 1% lows dip below 100.

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And I've even got the settings actually pretty high. Check this out.

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Like, she's running. And we could even squeeze our water-resistant LTT Hat Pro into the budget.

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Well, before you get too excited, we actually built a system using the same $960-ish budget,

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but using parts that we could get off new at. Oh, boy.

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And so considering this has a 9600X and a 6750XT,

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I'm a little bit worried for our little Walmart buddy over there, but let's see how it does.

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We'll have all the parts linked down below, by the way. What's that line ploof always gives?

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Comparison is the thief of joy. Prepare to have no joy.

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Uh-oh. This is already not going well. Wait.

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Oh, not good. Okay, I'm heading over there.

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I'm heading over there. Let's go to the double doors. My 1% lows are wacky.

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Uh, dude. Double? Yeah, we're looking at pretty much double all the time.

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Same settings. I'm just over 200 FPS.

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He's just shy of 350. Oh, he's over 350.

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Yeah, I took one look at that system. I'm like, it even looks better. Yeah.

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You have a bigger case, bigger cooling.

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Is it quiet or two? Probably.

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I mean, mine's reasonable. It's reasonable.

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Good job, Walmart. This one's better.

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Yeah, and I didn't even min-max all the parts. Like I could have gone a cheaper cooler, cheaper SSD, cheaper case,

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but I got ones that I thought I would actually want for this price bracket.

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Yeah, and we can't let David min-max things anymore because you guys get upset because nobody deal hunts like this man.

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Well, who knows? Maybe it's just the game.

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Move on to something else. Oh, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

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Let's do it. Dude, I have no shot. Okay, maybe I was a little overambitious about what this computer could do.

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We're definitely overambitious about what this computer can do.

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As bad as yours is, mine's worse.

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Standing here doing nothing. I'm getting 1% low dips down to 13.

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Dude, that is noticeably, immediately visibly way better.

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Like way better. Mine doesn't seem on paper like it should be that bad, but it feels chunky.

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This feels totally fine on my side.

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Yeah, looks totally fine on your side. It does not feel fine on my side,

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even though my FPS counter is reading the same as yours right now.

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For this amount of money, the game should run like that.

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For this amount of money, I have it running like this.

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Which you can clearly see is trashed here.

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Walmart, Walmart, Walmart. And we really did do the best we could do with the selection that we had at Walmart.

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This isn't like we've done in the past sometimes with like

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AliExpress or Temu, where we've intentionally ordered meme stuff.

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It's a pretty functional computer, other than just the part selection, the pricing being garbage.

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Warning me, my graphics drivers out of date. I was like, did you guys not prep these? Oh, right, it's Intel.

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That's just the kind of errors you get when you run Intel. Even the loading screen.

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You're running at double the FPS that I am. You loaded faster though.

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Oh no. Oh no, cyberpunk.

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Yeah, we don't really have to deep dive. Just looking at the parts that we knew this was going to happen.

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Yeah. Look at your frame rates. It's still, oh, look at that. Do you see that?

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Do you see that though? That was sub 10.

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I think it's pretty safe to say about double the performance.

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Pretty damn close. Bottom line then, should you buy a gaming PC at Walmart?

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Well, as wild as this is going to sound after everything you guys just saw.

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Yeah, but only if you're going to buy a pre-built PC.

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And if you carefully analyze the specs, some of their discounted gaming systems are legitimately a great value

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and come from trusted brands. But when it comes to buying parts and assembling your own system,

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it's clear that when we limit our choices to stuff that's sold by Walmart,

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it is a terrible experience. I mean, Walmart in many cases doesn't have the best prices on walmart.com.

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And then even once we open up the third party marketplace floodgates,

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it's still pretty underwhelming and noticeably worse than buying from Walmart's competitors.

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Not only is the website itself a mess to navigate and find parts on,

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but from the time that we got the items approved to when we ordered,

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which was just a few hours, four of them were out of stock.

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And then when our order arrived, we had to send back our GPU due to water damage to the box.

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So let us know, what's your favorite place to buy PC parts?

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Is it Walmart? You know what's not Walmart?

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Our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video and you're like making fun of big businesses

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failing to offer a good PC buying experience, you should check out our PC where we built using parts from Sheehan.

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It was worse and wilder than this one.