Are Walmart Gaming PCs actually THAT bad?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,993 words · ~14 min read
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Now Walmart doesn't sell their gaming PCs in Canada,
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but there's no way that that was gonna prevent us
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from getting our hands on the next generation
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of overpowered gaming PC.
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Now, I have heard through the grapevine
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that the Walmart gaming desktop PC, as they call it,
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might not be all that it was cracked up to be,
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but I have intentionally sequestered myself.
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I have not watched Gamers Nexus or Bitwits content on this
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so that I can experience it for the first time
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in all of its glory for myself.
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Now, Ivan, you have already peaked under the hood,
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have you not?
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Don't spoil it.
0:51
And this video is brought to you by,
0:53
huh, no, I'm just kidding, the be quiet! Silent Base 801.
0:56
It offers great usability and utilizes noise dampening vents
0:59
to keep your PC quiet.
1:01
Check it out on Newegg at the link in the video description.
1:12
Now, my first impressions of Walmart's overpowered lineup
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of gaming PCs was, what?
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Followed shortly by, dang,
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those are some pretty good specs for the price.
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Like, that's very competitive, much better than I expected.
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Also, the configurations made a ton of sense to me.
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It was almost like they had gone out of their way
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to find someone who knows what the crap they're doing
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to configure their systems for them.
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I mean, i7-8700 processor, okay.
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I mean, i7-8700 processor, okay.
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I mean, i7-8700 processor, okay.
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It's not a K, it's not overclockable or whatever,
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but like, that's fine.
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It's a prebuilt.
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GTX 1070, 16 gigs RAM, 256 gig SSD.
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Like, it looks like the kind of thing
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that I would put together for, you know, $1,500 or so.
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Opening up the package, we get a,
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actually not terrible looking quick start guide.
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Certainly seen worse.
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Connect your power, connect a HDMI
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or a DisplayPort on the graphics card.
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They specify which one to use,
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but they don't actually have a great,
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they don't have a great diagram of that.
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Oh boy, that's not right.
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Connect your PC through an Ethernet cable
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to hardwire your device.
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Not particularly descriptive.
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Spelling mistakes.
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Oh, I didn't even notice that.
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In terms of accessories,
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we've got a adequate quality looking power connector,
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a piece of Velcro, like double-sided Velcro stuff,
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presumably for stashing this somewhere,
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and then you can grab it off with Velcro, I guess.
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That's your RGB thing.
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Okay.
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OP posters to hang in my room,
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because I'm OP like that.
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Like, what is this?
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Is this, this is water.
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Oh, okay.
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So you're going to be like overwhelmed
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by the OP-ness of it,
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and you're just going to be like, oh.
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Did you just say overwhelmed by the penis of it?
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OP-ness, OP-ness, OP-ness.
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OP-ness.
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This is a pretty cookie cutter sort of vinyl decal here,
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but it's better than absolutely nothing,
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which is what a lot of system integrators do.
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These are more expensive than you'd think.
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So to make our performance test as fair as possible,
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Ivan has actually sourced an identically configured
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pre-built system from those HP guys,
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so that we can get some idea of whether it performs
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as expected out of the box.
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Let's start with that.
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Although one thing that does give me pause
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before I even get that far is the non-powder coating
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on the back.
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I mean, I don't know,
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I don't know if you can see it,
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but it's a non-powder coated power supply.
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It's just got like a simple gray back.
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I remember asking a power supply manufacturer
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how much it costs to powder coat a power supply.
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And I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood
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of like tens of cents.
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So it's not usually a good sign
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when they save that tens of cents on an aesthetic coating,
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even though in fairness,
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it doesn't contribute to performance.
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We're going to have to look at it a little more closely
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once we open it up.
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Actually, this is bizarre too.
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A USB-C on a little like daughter board thing here.
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And why the hell would they put it way up there?
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Now, just to double check,
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this is configured the same as this?
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Are there any key differences?
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No, which is why specifically I picked this system
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to go head to head.
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And price difference is about a hundred bucks.
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This is 1400, this is 15.
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Okay, here we go.
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It's got RGB.
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Color changing works as expected.
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Oh, on the back, the back fan is RGB too.
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Okay.
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Mmm.
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What can happen sometimes in shipping is...
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Okay, well, I've never seen it like that before, like-
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have hides i contract.
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Yeah,
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this just looks like they outright forgot to plug it in.
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Like, I'm trying to think of what the workflow,
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wow, that is the cheapest looking motherboard.
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Maybe not that I've ever seen,
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but wow.
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Is it ever close?
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You know how they say,
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first impressions?
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Last a lifetime.
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This is not a good first impression.
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Holy , I just noticed
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that the only onboard video output is VGA.
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I mean, not that it matters.
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We wouldn't be using the onboard video,
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but like, what year is it?
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Oh, the year's right here.
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Manufacture date, October, 2018.
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No, I didn't go back in time.
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I just thought I did,
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because that was a VGA connection on there.
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All right, what game are we starting with?
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Or should we just start with like a CPU stress test?
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Cinebench?
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Yeah, as the synthetics.
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Okay, Cinebench.
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Okay, we're in the home stretch here,
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and this is about as neck and neck
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as I think I could imagine it being.
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Okay, yeah, 199 for the Walmart overpowered PC,
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199 for our Omen.
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Okay, now let's try multi-core.
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Interestingly, our overpowered PC
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actually came out ahead in this one, 1312.
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Whoa, you want to punish it.
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All right, fine.
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I mean, it's fair.
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IBT is a fair test.
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So I'm gonna open Task Manager as well,
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just so we can verify that our CPU is 100% loaded.
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Okay, so right now I'm at 4.28 gigahertz.
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What are you at?
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4.29.
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4.29, okay.
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Keep in mind, this has a per-core monitoring as well.
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Okay.
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My system took longer to start the test.
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No, it's being hit now.
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It's all loaded into RAM.
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I'm at 4.1 gigahertz, so I'm running faster than you.
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So have they configured this system
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to use an all-core turbo on those VRMs?
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Now, the thing to note is that our Omen desktop
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is actually adhering to Intel's spec,
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while this one is technically kind of overclocked
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in a way that some aftermarket motherboards
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will be configured out of the box to operate.
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Something to note though,
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is that while ours seems to be working fine,
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all cores loaded stress test, your mileage may vary.
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We might get a really good CPU
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that handles all-core turbo just fine.
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Your system might be unstable.
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I mean, we can only judge what's in front of us though.
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And so far, this thing is managing 4.1 gigahertz,
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all cores loaded on its 8700.
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And with temps that are in the 50 degree or so range.
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So to put that in context,
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that's probably about 35 degrees above average.
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So that's a little bit of an ambience.
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It is pretty chilly in here today.
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No!
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The front ports are all USB 2.
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That's why they have that weird USB 3.0 thing on the back.
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What, why would they?
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How can you ship a system in 2018 with USB 2.0 front ports?
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That's why they had the internal header free
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for that weird thing at the back.
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They don't have front USB 3.0.
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What is this?
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Why did they create four partitions?
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Why did they create four partitions for the hard drives?
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What possible purpose could that serve?
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They do know that partitioning a hard drive
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doesn't do anything, right?
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Like with respect to reliability, ease of organizing files.
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Why would you do that?
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Maybe make it easier for people
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to compartmentalize their files.
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Like I'm having-
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It's called a folder!
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Now we're not judging game loading times here just because,
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Shadow of the Tomb Raider is installed
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on a hard drive here and an SSD here.
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So let's ignore that,
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but that doesn't affect gaming performance.
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Oh, we were wrong about that.
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So I don't know, maybe it's to do with the fact
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that we're loading new scenes of the game so frequently.
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Anyway, the point is we've got all our games
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on the SSDs for both systems now.
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Let's click run and let's see them side by side, baby.
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Everything's looking pretty normal so far.
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This one actually seems to be maybe running a touch faster,
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but I don't think so.
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Holy crap.
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So I went to change the color
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and it turns out there's like a bazillion different patterns.
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If you keep pressing this LED thing,
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like I swear I've been through 50 different patterns
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at least already.
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What the crap?
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This is about as RGBed out as I think it gets.
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Like, what is this?
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I will give them credit.
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The system actually looks pretty sharp and pretty clean.
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I mean, for now.
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The only issue is that these intakes
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are completely unfiltered,
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so it's gonna look like ass pretty quickly.
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But anyway, anyway, we got it.
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It comes down to the results.
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Let's have a look.
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Average FPS, 86.
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Mins look reasonable.
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And things do not get any better in Assassin's Creed Origins.
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This is at ultra 1080.
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So everything looks fine.
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63 FPS compared to 71.
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Okay, yeah, that's an improvement.
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But if you look a little closer,
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the CPU frame times are 15 milliseconds.
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Whereas our CPU over here is nine.
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So you can clearly see the GPU is the difference.
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So that's where our frames per second
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actually isn't that much higher over here.
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But our CPU is performing way better for some reason.
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Okay.
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So bringing us to our last one, Deus Ex.
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Same thing here.
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If all we look at,
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this is exactly why you can't just trust average frame rates.
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87.8 versus 88.2 over here.
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But the minimums are over 10 frames per second lower.
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That is like 15, 18%.
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Probably about 15%.
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That is nuts.
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Okay, let's get the HP out of here
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and let's tear this thing down.
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So we'll take this.
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No, no, it's fine, we can leave it here.
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Now, this will be the first time
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that we're taking off the other side panel.
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So there's a few things I really don't like here.
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Number one, that is a single 16 gig stick of RAM.
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I understand the argument to be made for upgradability,
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but single channel memory.
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Oh, I wonder if that's what's killing our CPU performance.
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Anyway, single channel memory
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cuts your bandwidth effectively in half.
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Also, these wires,
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I don't know what better way to describe them than as pinner.
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These are really thin wires.
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These are providing all the power for your motherboard.
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We do get an eight pin connector for our CPU.
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So I guess that's probably a relatively good sign.
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Look again.
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Wait, what?
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Oh no, nevermind.
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It's an eight pin connector on a four pin on the board.
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Can they get something right here?
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Okay, that's far from the worst cable management I've seen.
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Like this is the weird thing about this whole thing.
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About this whole experience
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is that there's these sprinklings of competence,
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but then somehow they've ended up with an end result
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that is underperforming for the hardware that's in it
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by this very significant margin.
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And that just has these confoundingly stupid errors.
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The hot glued on the USB three connector.
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Why would they do that?
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That's not even a connector
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that is generally known to come out.
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If anything, these things can be so hard to remove
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that you can end up ripping the housing off the board
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when you try to unplug them.
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What a strange thing to do.
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And then they didn't even hot glue this one.
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It's what like, there's just these weird
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sort of moon logic things going on here.
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Where like, if we see this as a concern
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that needs to be rectified by hot glue,
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why is it a concern here, but not here?
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Why is it a concern here, but not here?
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Why is it a concern here, but not here?
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Why is it a concern here, but not here?
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Why is it a concern here, but not here?
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It's the same connector.
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All right, it's not super light,
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but it's also a great wall unit
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who aren't really known for making amazing OEM power supplies.
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So it's a 500 watt unit of which 21 of the 45 amps
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on the 12 volt rail are dedicated to the CPU apparently.
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And then you've got 24 amps leftover for IO,
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whatever that means.
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So it's a two rail power supply,
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which means that you can't have any more than about,
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300-ish watts.
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Now there is one more thing
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that we can have a look at here.
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Let's see how good of a job they did
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of their thermal compound application.
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Frankly, I don't know what to expect
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because some stuff has been done
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to a reasonable degree of competence.
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Like the cable management, honestly,
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considering that the parts for this system
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only come to about $60 less than this completed system.
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So they're only charging us 60 bucks for assembly.
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Like that is definitely a 60,
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$60 assembly job for sure.
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I consider it quite adequate.
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But then there's other things
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like not having the graphics card plugged in
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that are just unbelievable.
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Yeah, no concerns there.
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This was probably the pre-applied thermal compound
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on this heat sink though.
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So it's a little bit of a heavy application,
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but it's quite thin where these direct contact heat pipes
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actually touch the integrated heat spreader.
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So I really, I mean, I have no concerns there
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and I didn't see anything about the thermal performance
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of the system that raised red flags.
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And that's the thing, is I think,
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the bottom line here is that I just,
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even though they're not really making
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a huge amount of margin on this thing
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and they're not charging an unreasonable amount
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for what you get,
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there's just these gross errors in the configuration of it
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that make it impossible to recommend.
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USB two ports on the front panel.
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What is that?
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And the motherboard, it needs a significant upgrade
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so that you don't have to give up performance
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in order to get upgrade ability.
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You should be using a proper board with four memory slots
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and while you're at it, a little bit more expandability.
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Like what it really feels like to me
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is that they blew the motherboard
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and power supply budget on RGB lighting.
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And I get that RGB is for gamers,
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but first and foremost,
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gamers need performance and stability.
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And right now this system just has too many red flags
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for me to possibly recommend it.
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And this whole thing is unfortunate
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because I had really wanted to be
16:19
the contrarian, you know,
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I thought maybe Steve was being too nitpicky or something.
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Not that Steve would ever nitpick on it, you know,
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a minor technical detail, not Steve.
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But I thought maybe he was being nitpicky
16:30
or something like that,
16:31
but I'm just in a position where I'm just not comfortable
16:35
telling anyone to buy this thing either.
16:37
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16:55
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17:16
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I don't know if there's anything in this video
17:25
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17:27
at this point in time.
17:28
But maybe we'll put like something fun down there.
17:31
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See, I was gonna be like smart
17:40
and give you a hint about like city new performance.
17:43
What were you before you met Yvonne?
17:45
What, what, sorry?
17:46
What were you before you met Yvonne?
17:49
Single?
17:51
Channel?