Brands reach out asking for reviews every day but if they send the product
to us directly how do we know that they haven't sent us a
uh special handpicked
unit well believe it or not with most
product categories this isn't a major
concern you see it costs millions of dollars to develop and validate a CPU
for example which makes it pretty impractical to send out special or
different on from the mass production units however we've always been a little
wary of pre-built PCS you see so much of
what sets one apart from the next is the care and attention that goes into the
build so when Cooler Master offered us
their half five Pro gaming PC it raised
a lot of questions like since when is Cooler Master a system integrator and
would they handpick a unit to send us to find out we did accept their offer but
unbeknownst to them we also purchased a
second unit for ourselves off of Amazon
let's see then how these systems stack up both the one they meant to send us
and the one they didn't mean to send us and let's see how this segue Stacks up
to our sponsor motion gray they sit to stand desk and ergonomic chairs provide
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spine check them out at the link down below and use code Linus for 10% off
your purchase before our machine arrived we poured over the Amazon listing
comparing it to cooler Masters Communication in an attempt to figure
out exactly what to expect and between
the description and some CSI style zooming in enhancing we were able to put
together a list of expected Parts we're going to have them all linked down below
to our surprise and Delight actually when we totaled up the prices on PC part
picker it was almost bang on cooler Master's 1 99 list price which at the
time of recording has actually dropped to $8.99 making this a pretty good deal
at the moment as long as they didn't bung anything up both systems ultimately
arrived in one piece and we started with a quick non-invasive once over we're
going to keep the unit from Cooler Master on your left side throughout the
video and the one from Amazon is going to hang out on the right now we didn't
want to pull off any of the coolers or move any cables around since that could
affect our Labs team's results but we were able to confirm at this stage that
most of the components were as expected and that both systems were identical
save for the angle of the adjustable fan right here or so we thought we weren't
at all prepared for what we found when we opened up the back
panels no no not the different colored zip ties this the unit sent To Us by
Cooler Master had a loose screw rolling around a screw that that should have
been holding the motherboard in place that is exactly the kind of thing you
might expect on a retail unit but that you would not expect on a cherry-picked
review sample so good job Cooler Master
not trying to oversell your quality control I guess anyway that screw wasn't
actually going to impact the testing that we had planned so we put it back
where it belonged boxed the units back up and drag them over to the lab I
should make it clear that up until this point we didn't make any adjustments to
components or even plug the systems in we wanted to be sure that our Labs team
got them in a fresh outof the-box state or not so fresh the unit from Amazon
actually wouldn't even post right out of the box after some troubleshooting the
Labs team discovered that the problem was one of the two RAM sticks neither of
our systems would boot with that stick installed curiously that stick did work
in an entirely motherboard so it could be that it's borderline functional I
mean maybe it worked when Cooler Master tried it but overall not a great
experience though I have to give credit to Amazon for their handling of the
situation they offered to send a technician out to fix it free of charge
for us and time permitting we could have gone through that process and gotten a
new stick that way but we had spare RAM on hand anyway so we said hey thanks uh
but no thanks and moved on to testing our system side by side we can deal with
the warranty service later with both units booted we could finally
confirm the I5 12400 F CPU and have a
little poke around in the BIOS both of them came with the very first version of
the BIOS for this motherboard from way back in October of 2022 that's bad but
XMP was enabled out of the box and we didn't have any stability issues that's
good resizable bar was not enabled which
will hurt gaming performance so that's bad and Labs reported that both systems
were a little temperamental about using DisplayPort until they enabled CSM
which is also bad particularly troubling
in all of this is that there is a BIOS update for this board from March of 2023
that specifically fixes problems with the RTX 360 gpus that are pre-installed
in these systems so it's disappointing that they weren't updated but given how
manufacturing lead times and shipping work it's likely that both of these
systems were boxed up before the March revision we can't confirm this we didn't
find any packing dates on the boxes but we did later find that the installed
NVIDIA drivers were dated February of 2023 which is as close to confirmation
as we're going to get the Labs updated both motherboards in hopes that CSM
could be turned back off but found that things still worked better with CSM
enabled even on the latest BIOS for this
board we were all set to start installing and testing games then when
we hit our next snag again again on the Amazon system instead of the outof
thebox new computer experience that we expected we saw the Windows system
preparation tool that's supposed to be run by the technician when they're about
to pack up the new system for delivery seems like whoever was setting this
machine up forgot to finish the job luckily our lab techs aren't easily
deterred and both systems were quickly up and running and not only that but
they were refreshingly bloat free they didn't even preload any game launchers
on these things that sucks unusual these days wow sorry I was just I was logging
into steam here and I couldn't help noticing this is a
spectacularly awful keyboard it was this included with the system yeah Devastator
3 I'm the one who got devastated how's the mouse oh good it's
a Devastator 3 Mouse um I mean it feels less
awful is that both of
them you know what I'm sorry I'm going to take off our label just to just to
check no it's not our label that hurts
the value argument a little bit just because it's the right price according
to PC part picker doesn't mean that it's worth whatever we paid for it or that we
would have chosen it okay well let's
play cyber Punk anyway once we finally got to benchmarking we found pretty much
exactly what we expected for the hardware in these systems we tested
cyberpunk 2077 Hitman 3 and total War
Warhammer 3 at 1440p with everything cranked up and our systems cranked out
virtually identical performance I mean I'm talking one frame per second
difference at most which is within the margin of error of our runs we also took
a quick look at csgo and this is to compare against cooler Master's claimed
performance of 293 FPS and I don't really know what to
say other than we have no idea how they
got that number the good news is we ended up blowing it out of the water
with an average FPS of 432 meaning that if you pick up one of
these systems all you need to do next is pull on a hoodie from the new pcmr
collection on LTT Store.com and you are ready to start annoying all of your
console playing friends now the Labs
team doesn't quite have their thermal testing suite formalized for desktop
systems but I can say that we didn't run into any thermal throttling at room
temperature actually a little above room temperature it's some and our AC is not
in yet don't worry about it the point is we're not really surprised given the
amount of air being moved by the ample case fans in here and Cooler Master it
seems has lived up to their name now the
script calls for lightning round Linus inspection so I guess this is the part
where I get to see if I can find any differences between our two
systems h no big complaints about Cable
Management though personally I would bring the 24 pin in from up here and
then I would bring my USB in from right next to it minor thing okay there's a
random zip tie and the one directly from Cooler Master hold on I can get this
how's the front panel come off this case oh you have to release the clips
ha what is going on with this twist
tie nerd jewelry oh she said
no I guess I'm pulling panels off I might as well do the same to the back
this is also a perfect opportunity to plug the upcoming noct to Edition LTT
screw driver sign up for a notification of stock on LTT
store.com not bad I do have to wonder um are they
really saving that much on the natural plastic color zip ties on the back such
that anywhere that the zip tie is not visible they use those instead of the
black ones this is hilarious look at
this all black zip ties on this side
everywhere all ugly yellowish zip ties
on the back this seems to be the same on
both systems but the reset switch goes into the RGB
controller which oh interesting that is
not that intuitive and kind of random when they could have just plugged this
into the motherboard for RGB control wait no no they couldn't have what the
devil's going on here is this it yeah
this is it what the why' they do that Cooler Master that's not intuitive I
would think the reset switch would reset the computer not adjust my RGB
lighting and also the lead for this is
right here all you had to do was plug it in there now it's controlled by the
motherboard with that said we praised them for their bloat Weare free
installation and in installing RGB software is arguably bloat depending who
you ask it is nice that they're all the same though now it matches the RAM you
know like it should what happens if I press the reset switch
now um oh it disables that oh that's a good
way for that controller to function cool yeah all I could think is just like it's
dead simple that way yeah but like you lose the reset functionality which is
not good I'd be pretty frustrated if I needed to hard reset my computer and it
didn't hard reset just kept changing yeah just kept changing the
RGB are you mocking me sir to cooler
Master's credit though the experience however flawed is consistent on the one
that we ordered from Amazon seems like they oh not quite consistent they've
routed the USB cables slightly differently overall though if I had a
system integrator and my production team turned out systems that were this
similar I would praise the consistency even if I wouldn't be happy about the
fact that you know they don't turn on for the customer it's consistent yeah
you can have the screen any color you want as long as it's black Henry Ford
approved the truth is cooler Master's been playing the game long enough that
we didn't really expect to find any significant differences between the
systems it's extra work to cherry-pick review units and if you take the chance
and try to handb build something special for a reviewer that's outside of your
normal manufacturing process you've got a greater chance of embarrassing
yourself s if a customer posts something significantly different on Reddit so
it's good that Cooler Master isn't engaging in this practice however the
bad RAM and the flawed outof boox experience in the retail unit not to
mention that loose screw in the direct shipped Tower are indications that
Cooler Master has some work to do on quality control if they want to be a
serious player in the pre-built game given that their most memorable previous
attempt at this had a chicken warming chamber I guess these hiccups aren't
entirely unexpected but I'd like to see them do better as far as specs are
concerned it would have been nice to see a 13th gen CPU but with the planning and
Lead times that are typically involved in PC system building not to mention the
attractive pricing of 12 gen chips right now this is a decent deal at the list
price I mean you'd pay the same to build it with the exact same Parts yourself
and at the time of recording it's available at a $200 discount if that
becomes a regular occurrence I'd say it gets a recommendation even if I can only
recommend it for folks who have a bit of experience troubleshooting PC
the if you like this video check out the recent one where we unleashed our secret
shopper to test some of our sponsors I
mean somebody's got to keep them honest right