stop wait everyone knows you shouldn't buy a pre-built gaming PC from a big box
store don't be a sucker except that twice now we've sent secret shoppers to
Best Buy and after a bit of run around both times they came back with a
pre-built gaming rig that ended up being a better value than we expected but
everyone strikes out eventually and it looks like it's Best Buy's day without
spoiling too much the 4 minute extended warranty sales pitch was far from the
worst thing that special agent Maria had to endure imagine being told to buy an
overpriced machine today in hopes that the price will come down in time for you
to come back to the store and apply for price protection what now imagine that
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link down below Maria's mission was simple buy whatever gaming PC the sales
rep ends up recommend ending within a few guidelines one it has to be under a
thousand US dollars two it must include
a graphics card we have almost been burned by that one before and three it
has to be available to just grab off the shelf and buy like a regular person
would expect the greeter at the door directed Maria to the computer department but it then took 10 minutes
and multiple requests for assistance before the fourth employee finally
offered to help that's better than getting swarmed by commissioned salespeople like the bad old days but
maybe there's a happy medium to be found he started by asking what sorts of games
she plays that's good but then he went off the rails completely suggesting that
she could spend significantly more than her Budget on a machine today because it
had been recently on sale and then she could come back to the store within the
exchange window and hope that it would go on promo again to get a partial
refund truthfully he may know something that we don't that might have been a
good strategy but rightfully Maria was pretty sketched out by it his next
record Foundation then was to back order a machine Maria then reminded him that
she needed the PC right away and things took a turn for the kind of even weirder
rather than sell her one of the RTX 3060 Acer machines that was right there on
the Shelf the rep suggested going to a couple of competing stores one of which
doesn't even seem to sell desktop computers anymore and then when she
insisted on buying something from him agreed to go look in the back for
something she could take today he returned with this the ASUS G10
ce-bb1560 TI Maria paid the man 825 US
Dollars and took relief nothing about this thing screams gamer there's no
window but there is an RGB zigzag slash down the front that ASUS warns can
impact the performance of its Core i5 11 400f CPU so we're off to a good start
here the front panel connectors are on the top with two USB 3 5 gigabit ports
and a single combo audio jack and on the back of the motherboard along with the
usual mid-level i o we've got dual display ports and an HDMI port even
though the CPU in our configuration doesn't have integrated Graphics finally
we've got the two display ports and two HDMI ports that we can actually use on
the back of our GTX 1660 TI GPU opening
up the case the cable management is I'd say pretty okay the only thing that
isn't well secured is this bundle of extra SATA power cables in front of the
600 watt 80 plus Gold light on power supply they just kind of flop around
there there's not much in the way in cooling either basic CPU Cooler well
that's probably fine Far Cry 5 and then there's a 90 millimeter fan in the back
and if you wanted to upgrade the graphics down the line you could mount a
120 millimeter intake in the front but you'd have to contribute your own speed
holes if you wanted it to get any fresh air we've actually got a video that
covers how to do that though if you like to laugh the motherboard reports that
it's oh let's go ahead and fire it up now oh the motherboard reports that it's
a g10ce and the bio seems to be fairly Republic of gamery and overclocking
friendly until you start to dig further into the options it appears that what
ASUS means by G10 CE is pro
b560m-ct CSM with a coat of black paint
and an Rog theme on what is otherwise a
pretty bog standard BIOS CSM stands for corporate stable model and basically
means that it's unlikely to have much in the way a thousand whistles but
Replacements should be readily available for some time which I guess is neat it's
reasonably featureful overall though four ddr4 dim slots two m.2 of slots
three PCI slots total onboard Bluetooth and Wi-Fi through an add-on card and
SATA ports for up to six additional storage devices you'll have to get a
little creative finding places to stick your drives with double-sided tape
because it doesn't actually contain that many Drive mounts overall it's a
significant improvement over the non-standard motherboard that we got in
the Dell machine back in 2020 but the configuration still has some odd choices
like the mere 12 gigs of SK hynx ddr4
3200 memory that's one eight gig stick and one 4 gig stick now Savvy viewers
may remember that thanks to asynchronous dual channel that size mismatch isn't
the end of the world for performance but almost anyone these days could benefit
from another 4 gigs of RAM and our budget should have easily allowed for
that the same goes for our storage and this is where the sales rep's biggest
error becomes very apparent in the last two years SSD prices have fallen
precipitously but all we got was a 512
gig wdsn 530. I mean it's NVMe at least
but the there's no dram cache and 512
gigs the one terabyte version of this drive is only 30 dollars more Ah that's
because this model is from 2021 according to the box that would also
explain the 11th gen CPU and the ancient
GPU I mean the G4 1660 TI isn't a bad
card or rather it wasn't but whether
it's a training issue or the sales rep's personal biases affecting him it is a
much worse Choice than the 3060 based Acer machines that were sitting right
there and were within our budget and I suspect it's going to be a lot worse
than what we can cook up ourselves to evaluate the value of this system we
configured two comparables first one
with parts available from Amazon and Newegg with the intention of building
something that was as identical as possible like last time we assumed the
purchaser didn't have one of our beautiful LTT screwdrivers available on
ltdstore.com and we tacked on a 100 US dollar billed fee which was the typical
few quoted by the PC builders that we investigated this gave us a total of
1047 US Dollars wow that's more than two
hundred dollars higher than what we paid for the ASUS at Best Buy ASUS is clearly
taking advantage then of the fact that they manufacture many of the core system
components themselves looking like a pretty good value so far
so far but what if we took our thousand US dollar budget and put together our
own PC in this case we can make assumptions like that we already have a
decent keyboard and mouse kicking around because of course we do and we built the
machine ourselves saving us the build fee we also didn't go out of our way to
include Wi-Fi because you really should be using a wire for gaming we ended up
with this for a grand total of one thousand dollars 26 Cents don't worry
we'll take the extra quarter out of Dennis's paycheck he won't notice starting our tasks with Tiny Tina's
wonderlands on the high preset at 1080p our ASUS pre-built actually handled the
game nicely with a respectable 70 FPS average its only problem is that our
custom build doubled that at if you remember only about two hundred dollars
more in f122 we took some rainy laps of the Vancouver track on the high preset
at 1080P and again our off-the-shelf PC
managed to handle the game fine just fine though it did get outperformed by
our custom build by about 28 CS go is
where the story changes somewhat rsu's pre-built managed an average of 349 FPS
while our custom built managed only
267. why you might ask well as it turns
out we forgot to follow AMD's advice and enable Smart access memory in our BIOS
an easy enough mistake to make once we did that we re-round the benchmarks and
got an average of 495 FPS a 42 percent
increase over this guy this might seem like a minor note oh well you guys made
a configuration error and you fixed it but that's exactly the sort of error
that a first-time Builder could make and they might not have any way of knowing
that anything is wrong so it really highlights why buying a pre-built can be
an appealing option for people who don't want to figure out all the ins and outs
of PC Building as for non-gaming performance we tried 7-zips Benchmark
where our custom build blew our pre-built out of the water and in Benchmark it was pretty much the same
story though at least the margins were a little bit closer so where does that
leave us once again Best Buy has shown that the Shut Up And Take My Money
approach to buying a PC can actually work out okay for the customer it took a
little time for a sales rep to help Maria and it seems like he was hesitant
to take advantage of her full budget for the machine maybe he hoped to leave some
spare budget for the warranty upsell either way armed with just a couple of
basic rules she ended up with a perfectly adequate gaming rig with
decent name brand components and for a lower price than she would have paid if
she bought the same components and paid someone to put them together of course
by selecting smarter components we were still able to build a significantly
better machine at our stated budget so I guess you'd have to say that the Best
Buy wasn't at the Best Buy I'll stop
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guys enjoyed this video you might enjoy last round where it was actually Riley
who tried to get the best deal at Best Buy