what do you get when you drag race seven pre-built gaming PCs from Dell HP main
gear star for genz C by power and cyber power you get secret shopper part 4 so
far we've talked shopping shipping
support and now it's time for
performance who gave us the best bang for the bucket $1,500 in this
installment we'll be looking at pre-installed bloatware BIOS
configurations is anyone leaving performance on the table with a bad
config Cooling and of course straight up
raw gaming horsepower we'll also be looking at who sponsored this whole
series ug green and their nexo Pro 100 W
charger with 100 watts of supercharging it'll take your 14-in MacBook Pro from 0
to 86% in just 60 minutes and with three
USB ports you can charge up to three devices at once but enough about
charging devices for now I want to talk to you about our old friend Dell when we
unboxed the XPS 8950 night Sky we
noticed that there was both a 1-year on-site service warranty and onee of
accidental damage protection we chalked this up at the time to them both being
included but the thing is Shay said no
to the extra warranty that was suggested for an additional $69 Canadian dollars
and after investigating further it turns out that it wasn't included there was a
charge on our invoice for it it was only
$546 so we got a discount account but we
never agreed to it so any points that we
gave Dell earlier in the series for not forcing their warranty down our throat
were unwarranted that's right Dell screwed us
again and you'll soon see that it was in more ways than one the Windows 11 home
and BIOS versions were from mid-march the chipset driver was from late 2021
and our graphics driver was from mid November
2022 I am now 100% sure that we were we
getting some cleared out old stock which isn't inherently a problem just
something to watch for if you're buying a Dell to ensure that all of our
Hardware in the series is putting its best foot forward we updated all the
software and drivers enabled XMP memory tuning and enabled resizable bar on all
of our systems or at least most of them
I'm sad to say that not only did Dell not have either of these two performance
enhancers turned on but XMP isn't even
an option on this motherboard and adding insult to injury the included jde 4800
megat transfer per second cl40 kit was running at just 4400 megat transfers per
second with no way to change it so
that's what we were stuck with we did find some highlights as we went through
the system in more detail the dam cached Samsung drive that Dell uses is A Cut
Above the competition but looking into their power supply we were very
disappointed by our upgrade options it's a ply 460 W 80 plus bronze unit so
certainly enough for our 12700 and 360 TI today but no more and because it uses
a custom power connector swapping it out for something else is going to be
challenging we were also very disappointed by the included cooler it
sucks and it's really hard to upgrade thanks to the M3 threaded back plate
that is built into the case moving on to cyber power we're lucky this thing still
boots after what sheay put it through they 100% lost the tech support
challenge but hey at least they didn't charge us extra for their three years
labor one-year Parts warranty and we got a free month of Xbox game pass along
with our mouse and keyboard software updates weren't awful either with our
graphics driver being very current and our BIOS just a couple of months old
Windows and our Intel chipset could have been better at mid to late 2022 but we
consider that to be acceptable a nice touch is that both XMP and resizable bar
were enabled out of the box but what's not so nice is this single Channel ddr5
config I kind of rail on this before but I'm going to do it again really cyber
power I mean at least it's kind of fast
ddr5 it's just painful seeing them save
like five bucks on single Channel memory only to waste $50 on a Z series
motherboard for a non overclockable CPU
at least the system is easy to upgrade though with a standard motherboard from
ASUS that gives us four dim slots lots of m.2 and PCIe expansion including Gen
5 expansion for potential future gpus it's also got a much better power supply
at 600 watts 80 plus gold so if you do want to upgrade that RTX 460 in the
future you should be able to our only big issue here aside from that stupid
single Channel memory module is a serious lack of airf flow which is such
a shame because it has all these fans just impotently spinning behind a sealed
off front panel the good news is that the RTX 4068 gig doesn't get all that
hot but if we were to step up to even a 70 class card I can't guarantee the same
results in the future and forget about the future the CPU is a problem today
yeah it's liquid cooled but these Intel chips need all the help that they can
get when the motherboard lets them run full bore and this system in cinebench
20124 had our CPU up to a toasty 100° C
97 average meaning it needs more airf
flow or maybe a bigger radiator if you're going to hit it with heavy
multicore loads but it should be noted that it was totally fine in games and we
did buy a gaming PC so we got what we asked for but it's something potential
buyers should be aware of next up is the PC I'm betting on the HP Omen 40l gt21
and it's not off to a good start Windows
chipset drivers BIOS and GPU drivers go
as far back as late 2021 so if you buy anything from HP make
sure that you're ready to install a slew of updates before you actually get to
gaming you're also going to want to enable XMP since that wasn't on by
default but rebar was even though we
couldn't find the setting for it in their custom BIOS in the Box we got a
keyboard and mouse like almost everyone else if you want to play a fun game you
can guess who didn't send peripherals leave a comment right now you might end
up surprised we got a warranty card for our one year of coverage that didn't
cost cost extra a quick start guide and uh how to install Windows 11 card I
guess these guys are still shipping Windows 10 systems though based on how
updated it was I can't say I'm not surprised like with Dell we're looking
at an oem motherboard this time for our only AMD CPU the ryzen 7 5800 X non 3D
but hey it uses a sensible chipset b550
and it's pretty bog standard both in terms of its layout and its connectors
allowing for all the usual upgrades including swapping the board out
entirely in the future and continuing to use the case and power supply see it's
not that hard Dell it doesn't have a ton of PCIe expansion the 11 16x slot is
already populated though it's by the GPU that I think is going to win this thing
the crown a last gen RTX 370 TI and to
its credit it's got the first power supply that made me say put away that
sexy new no to Edition Screwdriver from LTT Store.com I don't think you're going
to be needing it anytime soon it's an 800 W 80 plus gold unit from
Cooler Master sort of it's made by light on Technologies but then CM SLA their
sticker on the side and then HP put in their system cable management wasn't
awful the was among the worst of the bunch though I have to give them some
credit for having an RGB and addressable RGB Hub wired up in the back and three
total 120 mm fans for decent air flow and pooling performance even if the
bottom fan basically dumps air straight into the base B where the power supply
is already taking fresh air in from the bottom anyway so it kind of doesn't
really do anything now it's time to check in on the king iby power walked
over the competition in our support Challenge and has won the performance
Crown the last two times running it's
going to be a tougher Road this year the RTX 460 TI in here isn't the better 16
gig variant and our ddr5 is on the slower side running at 5200 megatrans
per second CL 40 that's over 15 nond of
first word latency at least XMP was enabled out of the box as was rebar but
this was also the only system that didn't arrive with a Windows recovery
environment this could be because of the technician's instructions during our
support call but I'm still going to have to dock a couple marks cuz they should
have had us fix it and I'm going to have to dock some marks for another big issue
with this system this might be more on MSI than it is on IB power but you
cannot for whatever reason reason easily upgrade to a regular MSI BIOS on boards
that are used by System integrators John Evans bc3 MK brought this up in the
comments on an earlier part of this series after they discovered that they
couldn't use direct memory access on a system from main gear and there was no
way to run the update from MSI's site that should enable it now we didn't run
into that but our test technician John did notice that MSI Center wasn't
installed properly so he figured okay easy fix let's just run Clean Center
master from MSI's website didn't work
then he tried uninstalling and reinstalling with three different
versions from MSI the Microsoft store and tpot and no dice we're not sure why
MSI Center seems to be such hot garbage on pre-builts but there are plenty of
other posts complaining about this in one way or another often on laptops this
is an off-the-shelf board that you could purchase yourself so we don't understand
why this issue is occurring or where it's happening in the chain but buyer
beware until they get this sorted out which should be now MSI now is a good
time we also have a couple of other Hardware complaints mostly to do with
the case and the cooler I mean front air intake who needs it hopefully not you
and what are they doing with this wimpy 92mm Tower cooler I mean it's better
than nothing I guess but why when
actually good air coolers are so cheap these days it also doesn't help that our
MSI Motherboard here was set to water cooler mode which gives our 13700 F
access to a whopping 2051 watts of juice
at power limit 1 which is way too much for this piece of junk cooler as
evidenced by our near instant 100° C in
cinebench other than that though they did pretty well tidy cable management
and SSD with a dam cache even if it was on the slower side and BIOS and GPU
drivers that were only a couple of months old it's also got a 7 50 W 880
plus gold rated power supply which is 50 Watts more than the 700 watt that we
were supposed to get 3 years labor 1e
Parts warranty and an RGB keyboard and mouse and an OverWatch 2 Invasion
ultimate bundle hooray they also went with a b760 chipset motherboard which is
more in line with our nonk series processor now I'm going to jump ahead a
little bit here since we were very curious to see how I byw slow memory and
other issues would affect it in productivity and so surprisingly it
turns out not much they won the fastest
Barber Shop blender render and da Vinci resolve Puget bench extended test
honestly the 46 DTI 8 gig ended up being a Little Engine That Could throughout
all of our testing and the dual fan variant in this system even managed to
stay nice and cool in spite of the abysmal front air intake on this case
now before we get to main gear we've got a word from our sponsor ugen with their
nexo Pro 65 watt mini you can charge a 13-in MacBook Air from 0 to 70% in just
60 minutes and with their combination of Gan Infinity chips and air purch they're
able to make this device tiny fitting in the palm of your hand while maintaining
the same output as their previous nexe 65w charger it's also compatible with
all modern smartphones tablets and laptops with support for 45 W Samsung
super fast charging 2.0 these Gan Infinity chips are also efficient
putting the Green in U green now for another 460 TI build the mg1 gold from
main gear they went with a better air cooler but a lower tier CPU and while
it's a ddr4 system hey at least the memory is Snappy ddr4 at 3600 megatrans
per second cl18 everything except for Windows 11
was pretty up to date and overall it looks super clean with lots of RGB if
you're into that but we have some pretty
serious complaints once we get under the surface really main gear 512 gigs of
storage in 2023 who do you think you are Apple this is almost as bad as the
single stick of memory that we saw earlier I mean we darn near filled this
thing up with just our Benchmark Suite XMP was also off so if you want to
actually take advantage of this decent memory kit make sure you fix that
yourself and it's got an 80 plus bronze rated power supply compared to the gold
rating of most of the others there was no included battery in the RGB remote
and AMD RIS master was pre-installed despite this being an Intel system
that's probably just part of the standard software set that they load on
to each system for testing before it leaves the warehouse but using the exact
same image across AMD and Intel does come across a little sloppy this one
also did not come with a keyboard and mouse so you're going to have to
purchase those separately as for what they got right they killed the support
Challenge and I'm happy to say that their zero bloatware advertisement is
accurate other than the ryzen master issue that we had cable management is
great we got a Windows recovery USB drive in case we ever need a reset and
there's reasonable air flow with our CPU and GPU staying cool and quiet while
gaming and testing with this setup you could easily upgrade this I5 to an i7
down the line except the issue is you're probably
going to want to the 13400 f is okay not
great and it shows when we get into our cinebench and D resolve testing
surprisingly though probably thanks to the faster memory kit main gear crushed
it during cinebench GPU testing and they
had the second fastest blender render out of the bunch overall not a bad
showing but we're not ready to talk gaming benchmarks yet and uh well no
spoilers at least not until we've talked about NZXT who fell victim to one of the
classic blunders this time a kseries
overclocking CPU you on a B series board
that doesn't support overclocking however that's actually not
nearly as wasteful as the other way around these days now that CPUs are
pretty much overclocked out of the box and these K chips are measurably faster
even on B series boards regardless of any Performance Tuning this system used
all four dim slots which could be a bummer for future upgrades but has 32
gigs of ddr4 running at 3200 megat transfer cl6 SE right out of the box so
it's less likely to need an upgrade and our GPU driver and BIOS were up to date
with Windows 11 and our chipset being less than a year old we're not sure if
NZXT partners with them or if it's just a happy coincidence but we've got a lot
of Gigabyte Hardware in here and considering how Rock Solid they've been
for us recently that was a pleasant surprise and team purple also managed to
add a bunch of extras in the Box including the motherboard pamphlet
original manuals for the power supply air cooler and SSD some extra SATA
cables a bunch of case and cooler Hardware including an M2 screw and the
socket cover for the board even the H5 flow case manual okay these aren't
extras but this was probably the most
complete experience out of the entire bunch and the closest to what you'd end
up with if you bought all of the parts individually and built it yourself the
only things missing were a mouse and keyboard but as with the rest of them
these are things that you can choose to add at the time of purchase or just bring your own they've also gone with a
wdbl SN 582 tbte Drive admittedly that's
a dless drive but one that performed well enough in our testing and offered
four times the storage of that main Gear
Drive yes I'm still salty about it our system wasn't bogged down by a ton of
bloatware just the standard Gigabyte software and NZXT Cam and this was some
of the nicest Cable Management out of the bunch with everything tied up and
tucked away for a Sleek look unfortunately it's not all sunshine and
rainbows here XMP wasn't enabled and
rebar wasn't on meaning you're going to be missing out on some performance if
you never enable those options yourself to its credit the system stays cool and
quiet enough but if you wanted to slap a stronger GPU or CPU in here in the
future you're probably going to want to add an extra fan or two at the same time
thankfully it's the flow variant of the H5 case now with perforations so
there'll be some air for those fans to move but what about star Forge at a time
where the 4060 TI seems to be everywhere The Horizon 2 Prime stood out for having
the only AMD GPU in our Roundup with a
12 gig 6750 XT that's a lot of vram
especially when everyone's complaining that 8 gigs just playe isn't enough
anymore and the software wasn't too old
with drivers just a few months out of date and a Windows 11 build from late
September 2022 as for the warranty star
Forge does include great coverage at two years for the hardware rather than the
typical one year that we see for other system integrators star Forge was also
the only system to include sexy cable extensions for all three major visible
connectors in their deep cool CG 560 case which subjectively made this our
nicest looking build though there are some polarizing elements like it or not
the Deep cool ak400 cooler has the star Forge rocket logo on it which makes the
system look a little fleshier I mean uh flashier and more custom than some of
the other systems the only issue I have with any of this is that these extras
can end up eating up valuable budget that could have been spent on
performance which as I promise we're going to get to very soon I'm happy to
announce that XMP and rebar were enabled out of the box and there was basically
zero bloatware one minor slip up is it
looks like they didn't prep the system properly as we found a star Forge
systems folder including a Windows key.
XML L file and some test software like occt and test driver this is pretty
minor uh whoever prepped the system seems to have just forgotten the last
step there and it's good to see that they're testing these systems before
they put them out the door it's just the kind of thing we would like to see cleaned up there were really only two
major issues the first being that Puget bench Da Vinci did not like this system
or not sure why could be the AMD GPU it
could be something else it worked fine with every other computer tested but
it's getting a big fat did not finish for that test no matter what we tried
and the other is just how much the 12400
CPU in the system drags down performance
I mean we know that blender favors NVIDIA so we're not surprised to see
this one lose the render race but what was surprising is just how much of a
difference there was in cinebench with star Forge coming dead last there as
well but what about the games I mean after all that's why we bought these
computers not to see big numbers in cinch and synthetic workloads well in
cyberpunk 2077 everyone stayed above
that critical 1% low of 60 FPS at 1080p
with HP clearing the second place finisher I by power by a substantial 8%
looks like I called this one guys what's surprising though is just how close
everyone but Dell and cyber power are
star Forge NZXT main gear they are all
within a few FPS of each other not the
kind of thing that you would notice in day-to-day gameplay and if you bump up
the resolution we get pretty similar rankings f123 sees a similar Podium with
some minor shuffling in the mid-range at either resolution but both returnal and
Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1440p see a bit
of an upset with star forge's RX 6750 XT
system taking second place it's not by
much and when we scale down to 1080p the they technically lose by 1 FPS and the
1% lows compared to main gear and IB power who have better CPUs but overall
I'm happy to report that when it comes to gaming your GPU is still the most
important choice you're going to make and it's not a terrible decision to pair
it even with something like Intel's lowly core
i52400 especially if you're going with a mid to Performance TI your graphics card
at least as long as you are planning to play heavier AAA games Dota 2 meanwhile
it's more of a lightweight Esports title and can end up heavily CPU bottlenecked
and this is the one spot where cyber power and their core i7 13700 F got
their day in the sun they jumped up from second last to second place when judging
by 1% lows barely losing to iby power at
1080p if we move up to 1440 that 1% lows
Gap does widen substantially but they're still way ahead of everyone else on
average especially star Forge where that CPU bottleneck is killing them
unfortunately for cyber power they came in dead last every other time 1080p
1440p it doesn't matter this was our only RTX 4060 non-ti system and as great
as the core i7 13700 f is it is not
enough to carry the rest of that build I was surprised to find that single
Channel ddr5 isn't nearly as bad as I expected that virtual second channel on
each dim helps it hold up much better than single channel ddr4 would but it
also didn't help enough here so bottom line if you're strictly an Esports gamer
over spending on a fast CPU is a valid way to go but then considering how our
support call with them went maybe you could look to someone other than cyber
power if you don't want to build your own PC so in a major upset to some but
no surprise to me HP is our winner this
year decent packaging standard if
somewhat OEM flavored Parts the beefiest
power supply at 800 WTS solid case
design good Cooling and a great CPU GPU
combo that delivered well-rounded performance across our entire Suite they
also had solid customer service both when purchasing the system and on our
tech support call even if they did give up and ask us to send it back for repair
my only complaint is that if you buy from them make sure you're ready to run
a bunch of updates and enable XMP or amp
as HP lists it in their custom BIOS oh and maybe move that bottom fan intake up
or flip the power supply so the air is actually doing something to everyone who
made it through all four parts of this year's secret shopper hey thanks for
watching these are a lot of fun for us to do and without your support we can't
and speaking of support thanks to our sponsor ug green if that 100 wat NEX sod
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pick up yours today at the link in the video description if you guys enjoyed
this video maybe check out the previous episodes of this series or check out our
previous secret shoppers they are as entertaining as they are informative at
least we think so