Final Verdict - $1500 Gaming PC Secret Shopper Part 4
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
4,186 words · ~20 min read
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we bought them we unboxed them and we endured tech support hell and now
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finally after three weeks of waiting
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we're ready to share the performance of our fifteen hundred dollar gaming
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systems in both gaming and game capture workloads
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but not before we share with you some
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interesting discoveries that cropped up while we were taking a closer look
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at these machines because uh
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oh boy there's far more here than meets the eye
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thermaltake's a500 has a modern minimalistic design with brushed
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aluminum panels and dual hinge swinging tempered glass doors check it out today
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at the link below
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okay uh i know
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i am just as psyched to find out which of our rigs produces the most FPS as you
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guys but we've actually got some other really
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really important stuff to go through here first
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let's start with alienware
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so this thing shipped with a reasonably recent version of Windows 10 built 1803
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and needed very few updates in order to get up and running the theme wallpaper
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and boot logo were all set so you'd know that dude you're getting a doubt
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excuse me i mean alienware and bloatware
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didn't look too bad um so let's see here
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we've got updater mobile connector customer
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connect alien effects whatever for lighting and overclocking control but
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let's come back to bloatware later first something got weird
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this system uses over four
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gigabytes of RAM at idle that is double
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our other machines and after we manually killed any and all
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alienware slash dell processes it barely
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budged then we subjected the machine to a CPU
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stress test and this is even weirder normally
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this kind of stress test loads up all of the cores to the hilt but on this
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machine the load fluctuated
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not only that but the CPU would boost to
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4.5 ish gigahertz hit temperatures in the high 90 degrees celsius then do this
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weird thing where the cooling would rev up super hard then the temps and the
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clock speeds would go down rinse and repeat
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what because like if the processor can't handle the
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standard load why on earth do they have
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overclocking support well to see how bad that would be
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we fired it up and wait are you sure you got this right
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this is bizarre this shows that the CPU
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while overclocked neither overheated nor
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dropped below 4.3 gigahertz that is the
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max 6 core load per Intel spec that
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means that enabling oc stage 1 was
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faster and cooler than the out of the box
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settings and not to mention essentially required to get the processor running
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the way that it was supposed to to begin with
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stage two was not as rosy with our processor shooting up to 4.8 gigahertz
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occasionally but then quickly toning itself back down to 3.7
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okay what made this even more puzzling was
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that after we disabled the software oc
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that weird turboing up and overheating behavior completely disappeared
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and that's not even the end of our software and firmware and whatever
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issues with this box but we really need to move on to hardware now
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so our graphics card is a standard issue gtx 1060 that behaved entirely
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predictably minus the driver set from six months ago
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so that's all right but there are some
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issues here that we missed during the initial inspection first we found that
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the machine had a sloppily wired wi-fi module
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then we noticed that while the box said
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NVMe our configuration is actually equipped
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with an m.2 drive that uses SATA rather
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than pci express meaning that there is no performance benefit over a
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traditional two and a half inch drive now our invoice was marked correctly
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it's not false advertising or anything like that it's just
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kind of a drag anyway much more interesting is the
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topmost pci express slot that runs at only 8x electrically rather than 16x no
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matter what we did and that our
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multi-GPU approved power supply only has
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385 watts combined on its 12-volt rails
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with no 80 plus certification whatsoever now given that this machine already
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pulls around 300 watts from the wall under a combined CPU and GPU load
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calling that sli capable is misleading at best
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one positive note is that the power supply fan does stop under low load and
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our machine idles at just 26 watts furthermore after the rev up throttle
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down behavior magically disappeared the system would only hum up under load with
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no sharp fan rev ups those naked vrm modules that we were
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concerned about before by the way those did not end up heating up pretty much at
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all and finally when it comes to the UEFI bio settings they were about as
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sparse as you'd expect with a pre-built machine like this with no option to save
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a profile and SATA mode set to raid which then disables BIOS recovery from a
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hard drive which is enabled by default so i guess all we can really
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say is uh
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let's move on to the hp omen unlike the alienware our hp omen ships with Windows
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10 version 1709 from over a year ago
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so between that and replacing the graphics driver from
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five months ago it took over an hour to
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get this thing updated out of the box
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note is that the issue with games running slower off of the hard drive
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versus the SSD that we encountered while using this machine in our walmart pc
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video has gone away so that's good and we were also pleased to
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see less than two gigs of our RAM being used at idle that is half of the
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alienware onto software the so-called omen command
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center commands almost nothing except for enabling dual
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force mode to send low priority networking traffic over the integrated
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wi-fi and then higher priority packets over Ethernet but i mean given that they
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both terminate at the same modem i'm i'm having a hard time understanding
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what the point of that is also of note our omen included mcafee
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antivirus so if you want to uninstall it
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john says hi
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now here's something weird our 8700
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non-k processor boosted to about 3.5
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gigahertz with all core turbo now this is well below the 4.3 gigahertz
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all core boost that gamers nexus measured for this CPU and only 10
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above base clock now why hp might have handicapped the CPU
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frequency in this way is not clear but what we do know is that this can only
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hurt it when it comes to performance moving on our graphics card is a bone
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stock gtx 1070 with as expected behavior
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and then finishing it up in here we found a wi-fi module that we actually
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didn't notice during our unboxing also it turns out that our power supply
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is rated to 470 watts max on the 12 volt rails with 80 plus certification
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so far more sli ready actually than the one
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in the dell moving on to the BIOS well
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actually you just don't get to pressing f2 at boot takes you to a diagnostic
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screen for just about every subsystem in the omen from CPU and RAM to usb and
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keyboard then going to advanced reboot yields a mostly useless gray on blue
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setup screen straight out of the 90s all right
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let's move on to the eye by power rig now then which is apparently
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so advanced that janice is not even worthy of opening it and you're not able
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to help me through that not my ability to
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mimic your ability to look inside a computer if you're not familiar with the
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part it's going to be very difficult to do anything inside of the pc
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while this one shipped with a recent version of Windows 10 the machine still
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did require quite a few updates and the
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graphics driver here is the oldest one
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yet i mean i guess that's uh what they had
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rolled into their os image and they just haven't bothered to update it i mean
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frankly back at ncix we did a lot of stuff wrong
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we did but we did regularly update the bloody
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graphics drivers for our gaming systems like
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i with that said this behavior doesn't seem that
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surprising given the clap it together and ship it overall build quality that
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we observed there were zero changes made to the UEFI BIOS so that means no
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optimized profile was saved even though the option is present on this
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motherboard and in practical terms this means that while our invoice boasted a
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free upgrade to 3 000 megahertz RAM you can see it in there it's all shiny
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ours was only running at the default 26
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66 megahertz don't get me wrong everything worked and
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it was stable with our CPU boosting to 4.3 gigahertz max across all cores as
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expected and our graphics card was factory overclocked with idle RAM usage
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that was normal it's just that we didn't really get a
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you know we care a lot vibe from the
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overall build quality like
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again this kind of sort of sloppiness
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doesn't affect performance which we will see is definitely a strong point for
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this system but not even one of the CPU cooling fans
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is plugged into the CPU fan header they put the pump there when there's an empty
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pump header right here
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i mean why and like we found a grand total of
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exactly one zip tie and
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one twist tie in the entire system
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let's move on to the next oh
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so this is what you get for
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1500 us dollars from origin pc
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a core i5 processor and a gtx 1050 ti
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i mean at this point it almost doesn't really matter what else they do right
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does it but for the sake of completeness let's
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take a look the os the machine shipped
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with was recent and so was the graphics
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driver that shouldn't be worth bonus points but apparently it is
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idle RAM usage was sub 2 gigabytes another good thing but we did notice
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that when we looked at the UEFI settings that while our xmp 3000 megahertz
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profile was enabled for our RAM the speed field was left on auto which
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for some reason caused it to clock in slightly lower at 29.33 to origin's
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credit even though only that one setting was tweaked on the machine it was saved
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into a profile which we could load onto it for our performance testing
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but profiles are only as useful as how
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enabled they are we've really hoped that our tech would prompt us when we called
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them for tech support to load the profile after that whole only half the
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RAM is being detected incident but he didn't looking under the hood we found
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cable management that on the surface looked pretty good until we noticed that
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our pump was powered via molex
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which means no speed control and no
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warning if your pump dies and then making matters worse we notice
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that there is an available header on the motherboard that they used that they
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plugged the front intake fan into instead
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then this is the worst thing yet we came to the pass-through power cable that
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connects the rear plug on the back of the actual system to the power supply
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inside because it's got a really unusual internal layout
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this here uses non-soldered
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hobby grade connectors and on our machine the metal contacts were slightly
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exposed with no power off switch available at the back of the system that
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means that while it would be unlikely these can slip off and someone could
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accidentally bridge those live wires full ac power with their fingers
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this could and should be done better
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let's move on to main gear first we need to make a correction here
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during the purchasing part of this system the rep mentioned the two-year extended
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warranty and we laughed oh here comes the
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warranty pitch well he saved it for the last you know
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oh man he mentioned it because it was free and
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that's a good thing but we were mostly laughing because we'd
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sat through so many warranty pitches in the last two hours
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we should have corrected ourselves because free is free baby so thanks to
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our commenters for noticing that as for the machine itself well the
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software side was virgin other than a custom boot logo wallpaper and a red
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theme both the os and the graphics driver were recent and our gtx 1060 was
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a factory overclocked version the processor clocked itself at about 3.9
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gigahertz on all six cores this is exactly what we would expect for a ryzen
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2600x and we noticed that the machine had its high performance power plan
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enabled by default this would help explain why it had the highest idle
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power draw out of our competitors at around 50 watts but that is considered
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best practice with ryzen processors the UEFI did have a factory settings profile
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set but there was really nothing in there that would affect performance just
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a couple of networking related settings and boot mode forced into UEFI only mode
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a closer look at the insides revealed that
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well in terms of issues we had a really hard
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time finding fault in this build they
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even cable managed the back side of the motherboard tray
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digging deeper the power button was
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slightly off center i guess but that's more of like a case qc issue and
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actually no this was one the hard drive SATA cable clicked when we pushed on it
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meaning that it wasn't actually in a hundred percent but the drive was
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detected and did work out of the box and
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given main gear support if that did come out in shipping i'm sure they would have
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been able to help us with it pretty quickly
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so then you want to line them all up here i guess let's finally do it for you let's
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summarize the specs of all the machines
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we ended up with alienware shipped
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with a liquid-cooled 8700k processor
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16 gigs of 2666 RAM a stock gtx 1060
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with a 128 gig SATA os drive coupled with the two terabytes of storage and it
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was powered by a multi-GPU approved 460 watt power supply
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hp shipped our omen with a 9k 8700
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processor with 16 gigs of 2400 megahertz RAM a vanilla gtx 1070
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a 256 gig NVMe drive they were the only
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one to ship an NVMe boot drive weren't they and two terabytes of mechanical
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storage they also threw in a decent 80 plus 500 watt power supply and they had
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a 200 canadian 150 us promotion at the
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checkout it should be noted we bought all of these systems though during
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Intel's gamer days promotion so every si
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had the same opportunity to take advantage of that i buy power jumped the
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gun smartly selling us a pre-order of the core i5 9600k
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before it was formally shipping they cooled it with an aio water cooler threw
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it in an MSI z390a motherboard loaded up
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16 gigs of 66 megahertz RAM and through
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a 240 gig SATA os drive with one
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terabytes of storage in it we got a factory overclocked gtx 1070 the most
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powerful graphics card out of the bunch and that was powered by a quality 750
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watt power supply that we got upgraded to for free
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on paper this one should be the fastest system
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for gaming origin oh origin we got a liquid cooled
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core i5 8400 with a gtx 1050 ti and 120
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gigs of SATA SSD storage with no extra
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mechanical storage for our game library the power supply is a high quality 450
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watt unit but the fancy z390 overclocking capable
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motherboard even though it's its quality
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doesn't make sense for this config our CPU doesn't support overclocking
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honestly this config is a total dog's
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breakfast finally maingear sold us the only AMD
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system in the lineup with a 240 millimeter aio cooled ryzen 5 2600x
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this could end up very interesting because we did specifically mention to
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everyone on the phone that we wanted to not only game but also record our
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gameplay for youtube they went with an MSI b350m pro vd
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motherboard with 16 gigs of 2666 megahertz RAM a 256 gig SATA os SSD a
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one terabyte storage drive and a factory overclocked gtx 1060. all this was
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powered by an evga 500 watt power supply and of note is that the 200 us dollar
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discount that was applied to our checkout due to Intel's gamers day's
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promotion was something we were able to take advantage of however that works for uh
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an AMD based configuration okay
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so which one of these is the fastest for gaming well in a
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massive surprise to no one i buy power
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and hp omen dominated our suite of gaming benchmarks
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with ibuypower edging out its closest competitor pretty handily thanks to its
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factory overclocked graphics card and the fact that its CPU was turboing
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correctly i mean you want your CPU turboing
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correctly that seems like a good idea right who knew
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main gears machine and our alienware aurora then traded blows thanks to their
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similar grade of graphics firepower in the next tier down
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and as for our origin chronos well
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it didn't manage to break 60 FPS in any
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of our gaming tests aside from cs go
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also for the sake of completeness we actually
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tested the origin machine with both the core i3 that fit within our budget and
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the i5 that they up sold us to make theirs not only the worst performer in
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the bunch but also the most expensive system that we purchased
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now on to recording videos to post to youtube now this is presumably what led
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main gear to recommend a six core 12
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thread AMD system now we never mentioned streaming so we
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were actually kind of hoping for someone to recommend using
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shadowplay because it mostly just works and comes with very little performance
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penalty if you want to just you know cut together your frag vids
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but no i think everyone kind of assumed we were streaming
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anyway on to testing we set obs to the
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same 1080p 60fps 3500 megabit per second
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cbr settings on all machines and then we
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just kept cranking the x264 in code quality until we started dropping frames
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which actually brings us back to alienware did what
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so check this out regardless of encoder quality our aurora
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dropped a savage number of frames and
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spit out rendering errors so the benchmark that we chose would run
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at 60fps like so our game was fine our
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CPU usage remained reasonable and yet
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the end recording was unwatchable
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every single time
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and this behavior persisted even when we
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switched to the nbank NVIDIA encoder which has nothing to do with the CPU so
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ivan's like racking his brain for a week on this stupid thing trying different
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settings recording to a different drive resetting and reinstalling the software
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using a different graphics card out of our inventory and even going as far as
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asking one of the key obs devs what the heck is going on here
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finally we relented and popped one of our bench boot ssds into the aurora only
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for it to immediately stop having the issues
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but then the mystery goes deeper still because we tried our alienware os drive
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in another similar spec test bench machine and continued experiencing the
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same issue so while we do not know what
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precisely is going on we've done our diligence and we've
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managed to deduce that something we're
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pretty sure is just broken in software on our
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alienware machine maybe it has to do with the high idle
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RAM usage on to the rest then our main gear machine hung in there until the
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medium quality setting that's our best result with our hp omen coming in second
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i buy power came in third as expected starting to lose frames at the faster
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preset when it came to CPU encoding and then as for the chronos
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well she did it right
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what were we really expecting on a system that couldn't hit 60fps in the
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first place so what's the takeaway from all this
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when it comes to raw gaming power for the price
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i buy power took the prize that is if you're comfortable with their
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quality tech support but that also doesn't necessarily mean that
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hp lost thanks in part to their promo price they
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put up a surprisingly good fight when it came to gaming performance
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and there were aspects of this system that don't directly impact gaming but
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are certainly benefits like the NVMe boot SSD versus a cheapo SATA one in the
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i buy power rig not to mention the carrying handle the excellent i o and
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the handy easy hard drive upgrade slots
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now their tech support was far from perfect but they weren't dismissive or rude to
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us and they did eventually solve the problem
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after those two we would have a tie for second
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if alienware could get their pre-loaded os figured out
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and also if their pre-sales and after sales support weren't both abominable
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across the board now i'm sure alienware would say that we
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got unlucky but here's my response to that between all the call transfers that
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we went through i'm pretty sure we talked to probably half a dozen people
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who worked there and every single one of
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them was worse than both of the people that we talked to at main gear
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so there's just no contest here main gear comes in third
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speaking of no contest origin pc
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they did do some things well their staff were polite competent and helpful
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but at the end of the day this was a pretty simple transaction
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wii u fifteen hundred dollars give you
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us gaming pc send and while they did a
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good job of taking our fifteen hundred dollars i would argue that they didn't really
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hold up their end of the bargain
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is this a gaming pc well it's a gaming pc but certainly not
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for fifteen hundred dollars so
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i guess that i guess that's it right are we done
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for this season for this season oh lordy are we doing this again
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boy this was time consuming but uh we really hope that you guys have
26:14
enjoyed it i know ivan's been tearing his hair out but i mean was it fun at
26:18
least yes it was
26:22
you know you know you know it was actually it was a lot of fun to go through this um maybe we'll do something
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like this that's similar in the future leave us a comment in the video description uh with with what you guys
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would like to see us secret shop you know
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