sites like Craigslist and Facebook are full of people who offer custom PC
Building Services but should you trust them with your gaming budget I'm going
to contact completely random people on Facebook
Marketplace give them my money and then just pray I don't get scammed the rules
are simple each Builder gets a budget of 1,250 Canadian rubles and then a
different member of our team is going to go undercover meet these guys in person
and bring back something I hope
then I will judge the quality of their craftsmanship drag race the PCS and at
the end maybe even meet our builders in person talk to them that is unless they
scam me oh hey that's one of them now uh
yeah yeah radon 7600 that sounds good uh
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description our opening line was the same for every Builder here's my budget
I need a gaming PC there were other requirements that we kind of had in mind
but there's a catch if they wanted that information they had to specific Al ask
us for it that's going to affect their communication score then we're going to
rate each system for Quality performance value and Beauty at the end Whoever has
the highest rank will get the PC returned to them for free so they can
resell it as for who comes last they go
on the Wall of Shame let's start with Jason's system we decided to purchase
from him because he seemed experienced with an Instagram and website
specifically for showing off PC builds and look at this he even gave us an
invoice unfortunately what he also gave us is one of the weirdest systems that I
think I've seen in a very long time I've
never even heard of manmo brand game Max
only showed up on my radar when one of their power supplies blew up during Labs
testing recently and he's using a mobile engineering sample CPU also soyo
motherboard I've never even heard of this brand oh I have but not since the
early 2000s I mean I guess they have a stored
history since 1985 yeah it's not the kind of story
that I would tell my kids at bedtime might keep them up late if you know what
I mean why did we end up with two power
supply boxes um I don't know the he gave
us two power supply boxes like was there something in it no he also gave us a
different CPU Cooler box oh than the one that he yeah this is a completely
different cooler yeah and also there's nothing in any of these boxes I'm very
interested to see how this per forms especially with that slow memory but I
can't wait do you leave the plastic peel on that
fan I was going to go easy on him for build
quality but I'm sorry this is a this is a three out of 10 oh it gets so much
worse you don't even know we'll get to that later how is this communication
though we got this nice invoice total made differ by plus or minus 1 cent due
to rounding error yeah I mean the invoice shows he was professional he
answered our messages quickly he offered things like do we want used parts or new
parts so to save a couple of bucks that's good to know he was upfront about
some of the weirdness like getting the engineering sample though maybe not as
upfront as he should have been he kind of just said that hey it's going to be an engineering sample and it won't show
up in Windows right but that doesn't address the complete lack of warranty
the potential reliability issues and potential performance issues yeah he
also said that it would perform the same as a 12900 K uh no and when we went to
go pick it up well uh reys what did you say he was professional it looks like he
had done this before you know he he's obviously a Salesman kind of good at
selling the product that he's selling right but you already bought it but I already bought it so I don't know he was
a nice guy he was a very nice guy why did we end up with random boxes Reese he
like had the computer set up and I went up and tried it everything worked fine
and he just like oh grab the boxes like okay and I just grabbed what was there
so he didn't tell me yes or no he just I just grabbed all the boxes that were
available did he have like other systems being built or at the same time or uh I
think he I think he said he had other ones on the go for communication what
would you rank him I'll say eight I'll say online Maybe maybe a a six cuz he
wasn't super forthright let's call it a seven sure but the next guy ree said was
the nicest person he'd ever met really I don't know if I said that but he is very
nice for one thing he didn't charge us a building fee every dollar is accounted
for here 6 core ryzen 5000 processor ASRock motherboard Kingston NVMe SSD and
an RX 7700x tgpu oh look at that a brand
named power supply in terms of quality
is this three times the quality of the we just looked at I think so yeah but
how is his communication he was great he was understanding when we had to
reschedule he was very prompt and clear he even offered us multiple ways to pay
him he could do a 50% deposit and he would order all the parts himself that's
a little risky yeah uh or we could just
bring the parts to him and he would build it for us wait for free yeah what
is he even what's his business model uh he says he just has free time and he
likes building computers so 10 for
communication yeah absolutely we're going to need another field for business
savvy cuz Katon is setting very unrealistic expectations I mean was the
pickup perfect too BR he's doing it for the Love of the Game I love the guy I
think he's I think he's perfect I I'm going to give tens across the board just
heads up reach out we want to be friends with you we want to be friends with you
all right how about mirus you nicknamed this one teenage engineering but I
couldn't help noticing that's an NZXT case yeah well mirla is like 17 years
old and the reason he's selling computers is because he's trying to save
up for college wow okay yeah so he's
certainly more profit motivated than
Katon though I got to give him credit this is a pretty nice build yeah there's
a couple of tweaks that I think I would make like he got a SATA SSD instead of
an nbme SSD oh you're not even really saving money on that yeah but you know
still meets our criteria of a 1 tby SSD yeah and his build fee $ 100 Canadian
dollar that's pretty reasonable that's only about 70 us he was also happy to
throw in extra fans at a discount oh that's nice of him yeah did we ask if he
was willing to throw in extra cable management and extra peeling the plastic
off of our motherboard heat sink nope it's got the world's most
overcompensate Wi-Fi antennas though so that's good I'm going to have to dock a
couple build quality points for sloppiness but I'm going to give one of
them back for going with quality Cooling and a quality power supply those are the
kinds of things that are very easy for people to cheap out on and take
advantage of a not very knowledgeable customer and Mira chose not to do that
he was really helpful in other ways like instead of just looking at prices on PC
part picker he actually went and found like bundles on like Canada Computers
however the bundle we ended up getting basically was the literal price of
buying each of the individual components alone so neither here nor there all
right I mean they're good parts yeah it was an a for affort I probably would
have done what Katon did and spent a little more on GPU and a little less on
CPU but depending on what we were trying to accomplish this is a perfectly
reasonable parts list as well how was the pickup good a little bit awkward
he's he's a young guy um I think I was pretty awkward at that age as well you
know what I mean yeah just at that age just yeah thank you his communication over Facebook was actually really good
he sent some photos of the case I got
got got slightly damaged in transit I can't see it from here um yeah very
slight damages but he was very up front with that which was nice that's great um
n eight seven I think I I think seven
eight eight so far the professional is not looking so
hot but the professional might have the performance where it
counts let's pretend we don't know that okay this is
true maybe leave them some suspense for
crying out loud now to begin the Drag Race 3 2
1 and I can already tell that it's not going to be close Adam we are dipping
down to 5050 55 FPS on both the
professional and teenage engineering did I see that go over a 100
teenage engineering is screaming right now it's loud yeah what is up with that
I think it's because of the GPU it has a predator by Frost which is like a half
blower style card I think he just didn't really tune the fan curves interesting
he actually did install fan control on this for us and he put a nice big CPU
heat sink in here so maybe he just
doesn't get bothered by noise and he thought well let's get everything to run
as cool as possible his temp should be really good we have Ray tracing off
right now but it is crazy how neck and neck the 4060 and the 7600 are they're
basically the exact same though if we turned R tracing on this would easily
take the lead yeah are you turning ra tracing on on a mid- tier card though I
mean I guess you can you can you got dlss and stuff but we're getting 60 FPS
now yeah I know and it looks pretty good mind you we are running at 1440p and the
vast majority of people are still gaming at 1080p so you could probably run at
1080 with r tracing and get similar performance where did we land in terms
of thermals though the hobbyist was sitting at a peak of about 70° on the
CPU and 55 on the GPU meanwhile as
expected teenage engineering didn't manage to get above 54 on the CPU and
was at about 58 on the GPU so clearly
there's some Headroom for us to turn those hands down if we really wanted to
as for that mobile CPU
58° Max and on our GPU we ended up
hitting about 70 the professional is uh
not the best system so far no but that could change in cine bench let's see if
all those extra cores are going to help out that what is it 12900 hkx HX all
right ready W brother
it may be an engineering sample but it's uh professional engineering apparently
it does have just core numbers on its side right that's 24 threads versus a 12
thread and a 16 thread this is as not close as that last one was in favor of
the hobbyist if you are doing something that benefits from multi-threading like
say you do a lot of video encoding on CPU the professional looking pretty good
for the money wow that's a laptop chip I
know right and the 5600 is a well it's a
great choice for gaming yeah cheapest CPU of the lot and that is what we asked
for we asked for 1440p gaming and the hobbyist gave us a better GPU and a
lower tier CPU and you can really see that in the results here just 11,000
points compared to 14,000 and
19,500 but the professional promised that that had the same performance as a
12900 K what what's the score of a 12900
K 25,000 27,000 so it's not as good not even
close this is pretty typical for engineering sample chips you see because
they're often not finished and that even ignores that this poor motherboard is
going to have no idea what to do with this thing in terms of power limits we
maxed out at 125 watts which is kind of
within spec but it clearly never
stretched beyond that oh boy I can already tell in the menu again that
teenage engineering is not going to be able to keep up with the hobbyist it's
so loud now we're looking at balers Gate 3 at 1440p Ultra details with no
resolution scaling and once again the competition is and not close the 1% lows
on the hobbyist thanks to that 7700 XT
GPU are higher than the average frame
rates on both of our other systems to be clear either of these is going to
deliver a really smooth gaming experience in balers Gate 3 it just
won't be nearly as smooth as the hobbyist between the other two though
the GeForce 4060 manages to outclass the Radeon 7600 showing you guys that as bad
as NVIDIA's current generation is their competition manages to make them look
okay and that engineering sample CPU doesn't seem to be holding it back here
in spite of it not being the same as a 12900 k should we give them a score or
should we just like rank them first to third either way is going to be complicated because depending on the
application they're going to vary a little bit Yeah the hobbyist ran away
with it in gaming performance but it even if your focus is gaming it's never
a bad idea to have a well-rounded system and you've got to give the professional
and teenage engineering some credit here so I'm going to say maybe you know eight
for the hobbyist because we did give up a lot in terms of multi-threaded
performance but given how much the other ones gave up everywhere else I'd say at
best they can have a five five is perfectly adequate it really middle it's
a pass yeah now we turn to value and you might
think oh well line is that simple it's just performance versus how much you
paid but I see a value in for example
having a warranty on my CPU that's where
the professional system falls apart I see a value in having a power supply
that's known more for powering computers than for powerful failures like we've
seen from this brand in our Labs testing so for me the
professional I don't know three two what
is this generic RAM the generic RAM is 32 GB of Samsung ddr4 running at 2666
MHz cl19 that's twice as much RAM as the
other systems yeah it's at half the speed it's slow as heck Four In fairness
to the pro those cut Corners did allow him to undercut everyone else on pricing
but for me peace of mind is a big part of value and I feel that both the
hobbyist and teenage engineering blew him away there for beauty I think
everyone captured the gamer aesthetic pretty well definite points for the
hobbyist's use of RGB everywhere but
personally I like to see a big heat sink
more than I like to see flashy light right so I think I'm going to give both
of these a nine or at least I would if I
didn't look at the cable management at the back maybe it's not worth a $100 to
me but ironically the one with the worst cable management at the front has far
better cable management at the back than our hobbyist it's more of a party in the
back yeah but that's why it's behind closed doors right sorry Katon I think
I'm going to have to dock you a point here as for the pro Jason selected such
a Bare Bones case that I think the best I could give it is probably an eight and
Adam promised that I would find some interesting surprises once I turned it
around to the back this back plate is bowed out that's not a good thing I
don't know if that's to spec or not nope it's not you know what it is this is a
mobile chip it doesn't have an IHS so it has to go down
tighter in order to make contact it is making contact The Thermals were fine
but that's why it's deeper than it would otherwise be now I'm really curious cuz
I saw listings for this online and they showed an image with an IHS oh no no
you're right there is an IHS on it okay I have no idea then I guess he just
really gave her with the screws you think he gave her with those screws just
wait till you see the m.2 screw while I was trying to figure out what kind of
components were in the system so I could try and figure out a relative price to
see if he ripped us off with this 1150 thing look at the screw for the SSD he
just chucked a random screw in here there's no standoff yeah um and not just
any any random screw a wood
screw oh so it is can you retroactively
cut six when you find stuff like this it really makes you question everything
else about the system with the scores tallied up surprisingly everybody gets a
pass yeah the professional was just barely but to his credit it is a
functioning system and he didn't ghost us or scam us outright but it's clear
that to actually win the challenge we're only really looking at teenage
engineering and the hobbyist and at the end of the day with the points we had to
dock from teenage engineering for choosing a SATA SSD and going with a
more powerful CPU for a 1440p gaming
system even ignoring the $100 build cost
which by the way is perfectly reasonable we've got to give it to the hobbyist who
we're about to meet hey how's it going hey Ken how's it going it is Katon
right dang I forgot to get the screen
recording started oh my God hey hey sorry technical diffic um okay
thanks for taking my call um just to be up front with you uh there's nothing
wrong with computer if you ever heard of lonus tech tips yes okay well um he'd
like to say something to you he's got some good news for you hey Ken nice system oh hey how you doing thank you oh
my God this is ridiculous hey I just wanted to say you built a heck of a
system for the money but I got a question what's going on here you didn't
even charge us a build fee or anything like that do you really just do this for
the fun of it I've been building computers since I was like 10 with my
dad uh like I work from home as a project manager so I I have a lot of
free time I want to Tinker with computers more often but I don't want to
go and buy used parts and get people good deals things I don't have that that much time but I figured I'd like just do
free builds and make sure like you know the tweaking is done right I don't know
I just like I like helping people a lot and I feel like computer stores are kind
of like not where they used to be and they're not really offering that kind of
like premium service anymore so yeah the challenge was that we actually gave the
same budget to three different people on Facebook Marketplace chosen randomly and
whoever won whoever gave us the best value system for our dollars gets the
system back so they can resell it to someone else so it's not that I don't
love it you did a great job but you won
man so this is yours it's free real estate oh wow dude that's crazy that's
awesome thank you so much I really appreciate that so about how many of these systems do you do on a monthly
basis how many people reach out to you us probably
do one to two a month it's not like
something that's super common I guess people like partly thing is a a trust
bar it's like you don't want to leave Parts with someone who you don't know
who does this for fun abolutely what a weird thing to tell people you know I
get how it sounds um but honestly I just I like building computers I like playing
with computers yeah I just it's a passion of mine and I enjoy it and I can
do this and help people out the same same time I think it's a really awesome
thing to do cool all right see you later man yeah awesome thanks so much we
weren't able to get teenage engineering on a video call but we reached out
asking hey is this a viable side hustle like about how many systems you do and
he said he's got about four of them on the go right now so while it is
difficult to break into it looks like some people are making a go of it so in
conclusion your mileage is absolutely going to vary and being a Savvy Shopper
as always is going to go a long way towards making sure that getting the
most for your money but it's clear that there's a alive and well or maybe even
vibrant ecosystem of buyers and sellers on these marketplaces so uh if you want
to try your luck hey it might not be the stupidest thing in the world and you
might get Super Lucky and find someone like Katon who just loves helping people
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systems from the major system integrators rather than from randoms on
Facebook Marketplace honestly this seemed like kind of a better value
overall but uh hey I'll let you guys be the judge see you later