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stop wait everyone knows you shouldn't buy a pre-built gaming PC from a big box

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store don't be a sucker except that twice now we've sent secret shoppers to

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Best Buy and after a bit of run around both times they came back with a

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pre-built gaming rig that ended up being a better value than we expected but

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everyone strikes out eventually and it looks like it's Best Buy's day without

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spoiling too much the 4 minute extended warranty sales pitch was far from the

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worst thing that special agent Maria had to endure imagine being told to buy an

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overpriced machine today in hopes that the price will come down in time for you

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to come back to the store and apply for price protection what now imagine that

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I'm gonna tell you all those things after this message from our sponsor

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origin PC they have all the amazing things to offer this holiday season

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including NVIDIA's 40 series gpus and Intel's 13th gen CPUs learn more at the

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link down below Maria's mission was simple buy whatever gaming PC the sales

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rep ends up recommend ending within a few guidelines one it has to be under a

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thousand US dollars two it must include

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a graphics card we have almost been burned by that one before and three it

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has to be available to just grab off the shelf and buy like a regular person

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would expect the greeter at the door directed Maria to the computer department but it then took 10 minutes

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and multiple requests for assistance before the fourth employee finally

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offered to help that's better than getting swarmed by commissioned salespeople like the bad old days but

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maybe there's a happy medium to be found he started by asking what sorts of games

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she plays that's good but then he went off the rails completely suggesting that

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she could spend significantly more than her Budget on a machine today because it

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had been recently on sale and then she could come back to the store within the

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exchange window and hope that it would go on promo again to get a partial

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refund truthfully he may know something that we don't that might have been a

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good strategy but rightfully Maria was pretty sketched out by it his next

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record Foundation then was to back order a machine Maria then reminded him that

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she needed the PC right away and things took a turn for the kind of even weirder

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rather than sell her one of the RTX 3060 Acer machines that was right there on

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the Shelf the rep suggested going to a couple of competing stores one of which

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doesn't even seem to sell desktop computers anymore and then when she

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insisted on buying something from him agreed to go look in the back for

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something she could take today he returned with this the ASUS G10

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ce-bb1560 TI Maria paid the man 825 US

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Dollars and took relief nothing about this thing screams gamer there's no

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window but there is an RGB zigzag slash down the front that ASUS warns can

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impact the performance of its Core i5 11 400f CPU so we're off to a good start

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here the front panel connectors are on the top with two USB 3 5 gigabit ports

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and a single combo audio jack and on the back of the motherboard along with the

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usual mid-level i o we've got dual display ports and an HDMI port even

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though the CPU in our configuration doesn't have integrated Graphics finally

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we've got the two display ports and two HDMI ports that we can actually use on

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the back of our GTX 1660 TI GPU opening

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up the case the cable management is I'd say pretty okay the only thing that

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isn't well secured is this bundle of extra SATA power cables in front of the

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600 watt 80 plus Gold light on power supply they just kind of flop around

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there there's not much in the way in cooling either basic CPU Cooler well

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that's probably fine Far Cry 5 and then there's a 90 millimeter fan in the back

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and if you wanted to upgrade the graphics down the line you could mount a

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120 millimeter intake in the front but you'd have to contribute your own speed

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holes if you wanted it to get any fresh air we've actually got a video that

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covers how to do that though if you like to laugh the motherboard reports that

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it's oh let's go ahead and fire it up now oh the motherboard reports that it's

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a g10ce and the bio seems to be fairly Republic of gamery and overclocking

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friendly until you start to dig further into the options it appears that what

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ASUS means by G10 CE is pro

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b560m-ct CSM with a coat of black paint

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and an Rog theme on what is otherwise a

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pretty bog standard BIOS CSM stands for corporate stable model and basically

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means that it's unlikely to have much in the way a thousand whistles but

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Replacements should be readily available for some time which I guess is neat it's

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reasonably featureful overall though four ddr4 dim slots two m.2 of slots

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three PCI slots total onboard Bluetooth and Wi-Fi through an add-on card and

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SATA ports for up to six additional storage devices you'll have to get a

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little creative finding places to stick your drives with double-sided tape

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because it doesn't actually contain that many Drive mounts overall it's a

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significant improvement over the non-standard motherboard that we got in

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the Dell machine back in 2020 but the configuration still has some odd choices

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like the mere 12 gigs of SK hynx ddr4

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3200 memory that's one eight gig stick and one 4 gig stick now Savvy viewers

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may remember that thanks to asynchronous dual channel that size mismatch isn't

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the end of the world for performance but almost anyone these days could benefit

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from another 4 gigs of RAM and our budget should have easily allowed for

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that the same goes for our storage and this is where the sales rep's biggest

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error becomes very apparent in the last two years SSD prices have fallen

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precipitously but all we got was a 512

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gig wdsn 530. I mean it's NVMe at least

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but the there's no dram cache and 512

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gigs the one terabyte version of this drive is only 30 dollars more Ah that's

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because this model is from 2021 according to the box that would also

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explain the 11th gen CPU and the ancient

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GPU I mean the G4 1660 TI isn't a bad

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card or rather it wasn't but whether

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it's a training issue or the sales rep's personal biases affecting him it is a

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much worse Choice than the 3060 based Acer machines that were sitting right

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there and were within our budget and I suspect it's going to be a lot worse

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than what we can cook up ourselves to evaluate the value of this system we

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configured two comparables first one

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with parts available from Amazon and Newegg with the intention of building

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something that was as identical as possible like last time we assumed the

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purchaser didn't have one of our beautiful LTT screwdrivers available on

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ltdstore.com and we tacked on a 100 US dollar billed fee which was the typical

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few quoted by the PC builders that we investigated this gave us a total of

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1047 US Dollars wow that's more than two

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hundred dollars higher than what we paid for the ASUS at Best Buy ASUS is clearly

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taking advantage then of the fact that they manufacture many of the core system

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components themselves looking like a pretty good value so far

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so far but what if we took our thousand US dollar budget and put together our

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own PC in this case we can make assumptions like that we already have a

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decent keyboard and mouse kicking around because of course we do and we built the

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machine ourselves saving us the build fee we also didn't go out of our way to

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include Wi-Fi because you really should be using a wire for gaming we ended up

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with this for a grand total of one thousand dollars 26 Cents don't worry

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we'll take the extra quarter out of Dennis's paycheck he won't notice starting our tasks with Tiny Tina's

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wonderlands on the high preset at 1080p our ASUS pre-built actually handled the

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game nicely with a respectable 70 FPS average its only problem is that our

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custom build doubled that at if you remember only about two hundred dollars

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more in f122 we took some rainy laps of the Vancouver track on the high preset

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at 1080P and again our off-the-shelf PC

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managed to handle the game fine just fine though it did get outperformed by

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our custom build by about 28 CS go is

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where the story changes somewhat rsu's pre-built managed an average of 349 FPS

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while our custom built managed only

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267. why you might ask well as it turns

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out we forgot to follow AMD's advice and enable Smart access memory in our BIOS

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an easy enough mistake to make once we did that we re-round the benchmarks and

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got an average of 495 FPS a 42 percent

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increase over this guy this might seem like a minor note oh well you guys made

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a configuration error and you fixed it but that's exactly the sort of error

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that a first-time Builder could make and they might not have any way of knowing

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that anything is wrong so it really highlights why buying a pre-built can be

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an appealing option for people who don't want to figure out all the ins and outs

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of PC Building as for non-gaming performance we tried 7-zips Benchmark

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where our custom build blew our pre-built out of the water and in Benchmark it was pretty much the same

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story though at least the margins were a little bit closer so where does that

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leave us once again Best Buy has shown that the Shut Up And Take My Money

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approach to buying a PC can actually work out okay for the customer it took a

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little time for a sales rep to help Maria and it seems like he was hesitant

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to take advantage of her full budget for the machine maybe he hoped to leave some

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spare budget for the warranty upsell either way armed with just a couple of

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basic rules she ended up with a perfectly adequate gaming rig with

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decent name brand components and for a lower price than she would have paid if

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she bought the same components and paid someone to put them together of course

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by selecting smarter components we were still able to build a significantly

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better machine at our stated budget so I guess you'd have to say that the Best

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Buy wasn't at the Best Buy I'll stop

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groaning because you can get the Best Buy with our sponsor MSI if you somehow

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left Christmas shopping until the last second again well worry not because MSI

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gpus and accessories they've got great deals for all your needs and a highlight

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of the sale is the limited edition NSI fragment Z16 Creator laptop which was

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made in collaboration with Hiroshi fujiwara which you can grab right now

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for up to twelve hundred dollars off so what are you waiting for check out MSI's

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deals and special holiday offers at the link down below to start saving if you

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guys enjoyed this video you might enjoy last round where it was actually Riley

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who tried to get the best deal at Best Buy