Amazon Scam PC: Everything is Wrong in the iBUYPOWER Element Mini

this is such an impressive abomination that it actually warrants the word scam in the most legitimate sense that's one stick of ram so we're also gonna check for if there's 16 gigabytes of ram apparently this one is eight gigabytes i can reintroduce you to nvidia's fermi series of gpus [Music] today we're reviewing the most impressively bad pre-built gaming pc we've probably looked at yet this one takes it to a whole new level it redefines the word scam or ripoff in many new ways that are creative and a little bit terrifying frankly and so we're going to be looking at the ibuypower element mini this one is the 167a model it has a gt730 asterisk not really we'll talk about that that that was shocking and an r5 3600 which really needed to be rescued and maybe we can do some good with this system by pulling it out of here before that this video is brought to you by crucial and it's crucial x6 portable ssd we use these external ssds all over the office for rapidly transferring games and files between systems the x6 comes in 500 gigabytes 1 terabyte 2 terabyte and four terabyte capacities with usb a or usb type c for the cable for a high speed and high capacity external drive from crucial click the link in the description below so this is part of our pre-built review series all the same rules apply as all the other ones which means we're trying to buy something that is pre-assembled without too much input from us in this case there was no input from us we bought something that was already built by iowa power all we had to do was pay the money and then it magically showed up here this one was 690 dollars the spec sheet says that it well we'll go over it in more detail in the tear down but it gets quite a few things wrong before this is why we ordered it uh we were amused at the idea of a four core r5 3600 didn't know those existed so we ordered one also the gt730 is quite unique and everything else is pretty bad too now to be clear about one thing some of these things aren't entirely ipower's fault eyebrow power did build the system and it did put these components together which is probably the worst defense out of all of this but some of the listing mistakes like the incorrect core account and the one gigabyte hard drive are mistakes that probably were made by the third-party marketplace seller the price also mostly comes from the seller but the worst part of the build still comes from iowa power and that's the gpu so we're gonna be looking at this now iron power the last time we bought one we bought it directly from iowa power and our biggest complaint was that they shipped it without any packing foam and the video card ripped out of the motherboard pcie slot and more or less for most consumers would have destroyed the computer they would have had to send it back we obviously were able to fix it but most people would have it the journey would have ended there for that pc i buy power from what we understand has instituted a whole list of qc checks since that video they were talking with us about it it does sound genuinely promising the improvements either power is trying to make to its qc process to make sure that their shipping systems that won't fall apart from from lacking just foam any kind of packaging really at all would have been good for the previous system you can blame a little bit on shipping but you know if you don't pack it properly uh at that point it's not really shipping's fault it's the shipper's fault so anyway they're trying to address that this is what we're looking at uh there's a lot to talk about today it's it's really bad it's impressive so let's get started so we're doing something different here we actually pulled this part of the teardown forward because this is such an impressive abomination that it actually warrants the word scam in the most legitimate sense uh we will be taking apart the rest of the computer however this was just it's such an important part of the story that it really did need to come forward and not only because of small details like the fact that half of the pcie pins down there are missing so it's actually running by eight instead of by 16 but for much larger more important and uh profound details because this is in fact a very special gt730 this is a gt 730 in name only and that's because it's well let's just open it up and i'll show you this is going to be a very fast teardown i think there's only four screws around here so here we go fortunately the warranty void if removed sticker probably doesn't matter too much seeing as the gpu i'm about to show you is 11 years old maybe it's only 10. it might only be 10 i don't want to misrepresent it but it's pretty old so probably the warranty is not too important at this point of course to be clear it was sold as a new card as part of a brand new computer that's about seven hundred dollars for the whole computer here's what you get is everybody ready everybody who's been in this game for a little while ready to reminisce you winter is coming up at least in this hemisphere so if you've needed something to heat your room perhaps i can reintroduce you to nvidia's fermi series of gpus that's how long this has been around this is a very special gpu let's get the alcohol out i mean that kind too but all right there's what that's what matters down there that number it's a gf-108 if that doesn't sound familiar uh i'll give you a hint it's 40 nanometers the process technology that is and it's fermi and if that name doesn't sound familiar that's because it is a it's the crypt keeper of gpus at this point it's a 700 megahertz gt630 that's what this is and when i say it's a gt 630 what i actually mean is it's a gt440 because the gt730 in this variation is a rebranded gt630 which is already a rebranded gt440 which is from february 2011. or it actually might be a gt430 we'll look it up and put it on the screen so that's actually insane the problem here is this it's pretty simple it's the same as with the gt 1030 where there's multiple variations of the 730 some significantly better than others some significantly newer than ours there are kepler 730s and these are code names that if you don't recognize them that's okay it's they've been around for a while but there are kepler 730s with gddr5 this is fermi from 2011 with ddr3 memory we have shown in the past with a gt 1030 even with a gpu as low end as that as impressively low end as a 1030 we've shown how a reduction from g5 to ddr4 will massively impact the performance sometimes approaching something like 50 so this is actually far worse than any modern apu and it's worse than even intel's integrated graphics and not even just the recent stuff like older stuff from a generation or two ago that's that's how bad this is and unfortunately because it has the same name and because in amazon listings it is frequently only called gt 730 without any specificity as to which specific variant of gt730 it is uh you end up where consumers if they decide to research it a little bit will look up maybe benchmarks and find entirely different results than reality if they pull up benchmarks for 730 which is much more modern than this 730. so as always having multiple products with the same name is a bad idea unless you want to sell a lot of them and have no morals in which case excellent idea keep doing it nvidia great job as always and of course amazon sellers or i buy power or whoever it was in the chain for this particular system who decided to stuff the this 730 into a box and just call it 730. if you're wondering how bad it gets for your 690 dollar pre-built gaming pc uh if you're thinking well i just need a display out and i'm willing to get ripped off um i i hate money and i would like to spend it on something that's a decade old and was worthless even then if you're that person uh it still has problems because even the display outs are totally fixed on this card so for the display we'll just get a close-up of those you have your standard hdmi there's dvi on there but even the hdmi is problematic this lacks displayport obviously but the single hdmi port only supports up to 1080p 60 while the dvi connector is able to support 2560 by 1600 at 60 hertz dual link and no using dvi to hdmi doesn't circumvent the 1080p hdmi limit that you'll have right there so you can run a custom resolution or dig up a 1440p monitor with a dvi port we however decided to just say that this is and poor treatment of customers spending 700 on a pre-build and something that probably most customers of that pre-built are unprepared to deal with anyway so then for basically almost all intents and purposes this system is incapable of outputting anything higher than 1080p at this point and for all intents and purposes in totality the system is more or less a scam it's been misrepresented in many ways some of them we haven't shown yet we're getting to that in the next part of the tear down the the part that we did technically before this but we've had to pull this forward because it was so offensively bad so at this point you could basically stop watching the review we've told you the conclusion it's not something we're going to recommend but if you would like to continue watching the train as it uh piles up off of the tracks you can continue doing that in the tear down let's get to that time to tear it down so we're gonna look for our one gigabyte hard drive we were promised we're also going to look for the gt730 the r5 3600 and make sure that's one stick of ram so we're also going to check for if there's 16 gigabytes of ram apparently that's been added to the punch list now patrick's already done all the testing on this as usual so it's all done it's done through thermals through gaming everything we just need to look at the build quality in the assembly one of the things so i try to isolate myself from the process the review process up until this point so that i don't form too many opinions until i'm on camera to so so we can experience it together uh it's like a form of therapy for me because if i had to go through this alone then it would be bad and the first thing i noticed when i started looking at this was the impressive quality of the power button where uh okay the impressive quality of the power button where it's got this nice decisive uh click where it sounds like it's gonna get stuck soon like probably this will survive 100 button cycles and then it's going to be stuck permanently and then you'll have to leave the side panel on and turn your computer on with the fork so this is the inside of it it's an ioi power system as as you would expect by which i mean there's no internal packing foam that ships without the foam they said they were going to start adding it this card might be too low end for them maybe to add the packing phone but if you remember our last highway power instance uh it needed packing foam and it was also a pretty small video card but this one did survive it didn't get ripped out of the socket and destroy the pcie slot this time oh nice i was just gonna immediately discard this but i discovered an issue so i was looking at this and i was thinking you know these panels are normally they normally involve adhesive and a cheap computer is not going to do that well and that was accurate you can see it's starting to peel already check that out that's pretty good huh we just got this like a week ago and uh the glass is already peeling off of the metal tabs that hold it onto the side of the computer so that's what that is right there the it's just a double-sided adhesive that's not not particularly functional so just a reminder what we're going to be looking for as we open this thing up we're looking for a one gigabyte hard disk uh just to make sure you heard me correctly that's g not t one gigabyte we are also going to be looking for a gt 730 2 gigabyte model we're gonna be looking for a an r5 3600 actually good cpu we're looking for 16 gigabytes of memory and what else we are also going to be seeking out a screen display size that is one centimeters i assume diagonally long we'll be looking for a four core processor even though it's an r5 3600 which is six cores but okay and now it's time to start taking it apart i'm actually going to start by taking the back panel up normally we'd do this last but i do it earlier this time the thumb screws are just normal screws with plastic grips around them it's not the worst in the world but they are the cheapest possible thumb screws you could make it's not particularly clean but it's not the messiest we've ever worked with what the f is this the hell is that it has a growth it's like hopefully it's benign i don't know what that is is the panel that wobbly [Music] not too bad so we've got a god man i haven't even gotten to the components yet we've got a foam strip that is peeling off oh i see what this is supposed to do try and get a shot of this before i mess with it so these foam tape strips are supposed to be holding rgb led connectors into the the header on the pcb here but this um header is actually falling out this is something patrick warned me about he said hey one of the um the fans the leds don't come on look into that when you take it apart well i found it that one was pretty easy uh so that was hidden under here and good eye by patrick for even noticing that one of the leds was off considering they're so ever present at this point that i've become blind to them but this that's not connected was that clear is that obvious enough that's that's obviously uh not connected there's an adata su-650 sata ssd in here which i think is a 240 gigabyte ssd there is no if you look closely you might miss it because it's it's hard to conceptualize nothingness but uh there's no one gigabyte hard drive so we've been scammed we're missing our gigabyte of storage we were promised it had some value to a collector somewhere uh the cabling's a nightmare back here this you know it's a non-modular power supply this is to be expected to some extent but this is just like it looks like they ate all the cables and then threw them back up into the case whereas what i'd like to see is uh perhaps not pre-chewed cables like something maybe still bundled together in some sort of reasonable fashion let's get to the interesting stuff so as soon as i turn this thing on its side i spotted several issues with cabling that are somewhat concerning this is the most obvious one check out how taut that cable is there from the cpu core can you see that okay let's get this ram stick out of the way oh wow that's oh my god we'll come back to that that was that was awful i'll come back to that um so see how this is pulled really tight this should be rotated the other way or there's a longer cable or something so this is pulling on the header and the header on the board is actually not bent but that amount of strain on the cables it's just not good it's somewhere along the line they're going to have rmas from these getting ripped the pins getting ripped it is a longer cable why are we doing this to it what the why are you doing this to yourself come on i don't know if that's i think that's ira power's fault i'm pretty sure they're the ones who built this computer i'm baffled by it but next one up check out that usb 3 header from my angle and we'll give you that angle it looks pretty bad is it clear how bent that is so these cables are notoriously fragile because it's about 20 pins i think it's exactly 20 in there we've seen them held in with glue in the past with the walmart system oh that sounds healthy so that was at a nice steep angle pulling the pins as much as it could it's another issue where it looks like uh it's not physically damaged but you do that enough times and someone's computer is going to be messed up this um this i don't like this uh cooler at all i'm a little bit concerned about this so this is actually you can see what patrick's done here these stickers whenever you see one of these stickers in our videos that's a tachometer sticker so it's for a physical attack where it can we use a laser attack normally to get the fan speed the reason we need that is if either we don't trust a cable so this technically is a four pin pwm fan cable if we don't trust it we don't trust the motherboard reading or if the manufacturer of the fan has made it in such a way that we can't get the fan speed through software through bios then we put one of these on to use a physical attack so this tells me that this is this is more of a matter of me understanding my team than me understanding iway power because no one can do that but i understand that patrick when i see this at some point did not trust this cooler so that gives me something it gives me a clue to look for even though i've told him to keep me in the dark on the quality of the system i'm a little bit surprised they put three fans in this box the price it is but um rgp sells genuinely like it does actually sell so that's why we're gonna use one of our tools from the gm toolkit these are back on backorder on the store it's a 10 piece tool kit very high quality tools useful especially for video card disassembly if you're interested in that for water blocking them servicing them adding new thermal paste whatever you can grab it on store.gamersnexus.net they're on back order they've been in high demand people wanted them for months now and they're finally back it's a great way to support us at the same time as getting something quality in return oh let's come back to that ram when i picked this thing up it was gross look at look at this so he first of all this heat spreader most of them are for marketing let's be honest you don't really need the heat spreaders on most memory but this one is so it's like the most egregious version of just for marketing i've seen because it's really thin material and when you pick it up by the top it's like it squishes together and that's why when i pulled out the board i was like ew oh gross because that that's not a great feeling uh the brand is neo forza um one of the best known brands in memory let's take a look at their marketing page capacity's power speed is kane we are a professional team studying in computer memory and storage devices for more than 10 years neo forza the new force for gaming market okay capital g there neo represents from virtual to reality what okay so to be very clear this memory it there's no spec listed on the website and that means this you might not even get this memory you're probably going to get uh kind of whatever is available at the time they normally do like a dump bin for at least one component on these low end things and it's gonna be memory this time this one is eight gigabytes three thousand uh with it claims the cl-15 we'll look at that more later andrew asked why is the warranty void if you remove the sticker and the only thing i can come up with is the quality of this must be so poor that if you try to remove the sticker it will also peel the heatsink off of the ram that's the best i got let's take the board out okay there was no glue involved that's great good so the motherboard i mean it's not high quality but this is an asrock thing at this point it's also well i don't know you wouldn't want to this is not something you'd want to upgrade and socket with to anything higher end it's an a320m uh you can see the vrm we've got missing caps here so we've got four spots for caps there one spot for a cap there a couple other missing components where there's solder points on the board but but no component that just means it's a stripped down model but if it's a low end system they're gonna strip it down somewhere just they decided it to be the motherboard and the ram and also the hard drive uh and the video card um but the cpu is right so okay so that's gonna wrap up the teardown we're gonna get into the benchmarking now we have thermals noise gaming as always look at gaming's gonna be pretty rough with this uh i was informed that this computer couldn't launch any of the games that we normally test with so we had to modify it a bit but let's get started time to get into some tests and we won't spend a lot of time here even though we ran a lot of tests because you shouldn't buy this thing unlike the redux pre-built we just reviewed eyewit power definitely didn't overdo its cooling solution the tiny deep coil heatsink kept the r5 3600 between 92 and 93 degrees celsius throughout the entire test t dye shot up immediately and then stayed there taking fewer than just four minutes to go from idle to 90 degrees temperatures this high will affect performance especially on amd cpus and are also bordering on tj maxx trips or hard throttles if the ambience is too high or sufficient dust accumulates of course that's not all because of the cheap cooler the case is also to contribute removing the front panel dropped that steady state temperature to 89 degrees gpu temperatures weren't as bad with an initial steady state of 72 to 73 and dropped to 65. that's still kind of hot since the gpu is a decade old but we'll take it moving on before we get into the game results we're pushing forward with bios and software for some important background out of the box the 167a shipped with nvidia driver version 390.65 which is the oldest that we've seen on a pre-built this driver dates all the way back to january 2018 and it's not because this system was built in 2018 no in fact it was built this year uh but it still has old drivers and they're from the era of the 10 series gpus that's for all the reasons we already talked about where this isn't the real gt730 the real gt730 if it would please stand up is still supported the gpu here is pathetic it sucked when it was new 10 years ago and it sucks in order of magnitude more now iron power's product description for the 167a says quote booting up alongside the r5 3600 is an nvidia geforce gt730 this gpu is no slouch but instead is one great for light gaming uh no no it's not it's not even good compared to the real gddr5 gt730s it borders on unusable not just because of the performance which we'll show you but software compatibility issues as well all of the games we tried to test warned us that the drivers were three years out of date and the last driver that shipped for this card was 391.35 because it's a gt440 this will never receive another driver update the only defensible use of a card like this is as a cheap display connection to something like a nas or a home server but msi's packaging and the cooler design are obviously targeted towards budget gamers iowa power is saying it's for gaming and nvidia branded it like it's for gaming so this was destined for a landfill the moment it was conceived which is presumably where i buy power dug it up from nvidia msi and ibuypower all should be ashamed here while we're on the subject you might as well finish out the bios segment xmp was not applied to the single stick of 3000 megahertz memory limiting it to 2400 but there also isn't any particular ram speed advertised on the system's product page no cpu overclocking is allowed the r5 3600 is an unlocked cpu but the asrock a320m is not an unlocked board ryzen master doesn't work either the product page advertises quote no bloatware which is true unless ibm power installing radeon software to system without an amd gpu and having it launch on boot by default counts as bloatware in which case it isn't true with that explanation out of the way hopefully it'll make more sense when we tell you that out of all the six games we attempted to run three of them wouldn't even launch from our normal pre-built suite only red dead two and rainbow six siege worked and just barely with both warning of driver issues we added rocket league as a one-off just to throw this thing a bone in red dead redemption 2 the 167a managed a solid 3 fps and that's faster than even the sloth's eye can see this is being sold as a gaming pc but it has difficulty even launching games much less playing them the aya neo outperforms the system think about that the the io neo a handheld made by a company endorsed by a plant-based product company called wizman outperforms this whizman needs whatever eyewit power has because they're high if they think this is a gaming pc there's a decent chance that the atari vcs would outperform this system either power has actually dethroned the previous wars performer and it's done so in an impressive way one of the other games we were able to coax into launching was rainbow six siege which was at 1080p since 1440 isn't even on the table here the average here was 9.6 fps again undercutting the redux system which was 130 fps we'd like to apologize to all the innocent r5 3600s trapped in these machines never able to achieve really much of anything uh and at this point it feels like we should launch a rescue operation for cpus out of these computers we don't have any comparative data really for rocket league with the pre-built systems but we ran it anyway since none of the other games tested were even close to playable by setting everything except render resolution to the absolute minimum the element many scraped by with a 45 fps average and an unpleasant 13 fps point one percent low compared to everything else we ran this is playable in a literal sense but it's miserably low on the averages we run the same benchmark on igp's and even gaming on last gen uhd630s did better than this and it had fewer compatibility issues so that's enough of the testing we actually did a bunch more like noise and power and everything else that we normally do but uh we're gonna cut it because it's all irrelevant this thing is incompetent regardless of how it performs so that's it then the biggest thing obviously is 690 bucks you're better off buying almost literally anything else especially computers you can get a laptop that gains better than this and is the same price you get a desktop that's better than this and is the same price why this exists is an anomaly this this 167a is an enigma of some sort we're not sure what exactly but we'd like to not find out further so obviously the answers don't buy this thing uh there have been good pre-built we've looked at skytech had one of them abs had one of them and there were one or two others as well that were good in some ways bad in others so there are things out there that are okay this is just not one iv power may have fixed its qc issues with the shipping problems previously we're not sure we wouldn't know from this this really doesn't need the packing foam it'd probably be wise but that card doesn't weigh anything and frankly if it gets destroyed in shipping then ups is doing everyone a favor at that point by removing it from the pool of hardware out there so uh msi should be ashamed either power should be ashamed and nvidia should be ashamed they've all done a great part here in creating this concoction of a video card and the 3600 should be rescued there should we should form a new charity group that buys these and rescues 3 600s out of them so they can go on to live a better life somewhere else that's how bad this thing is so that's it for this one don't buy it thanks for watching go to store campers access dot net if you'd like to help us out directly our toolkits are on backorder if you want to make sure you get one of those or patreon.com slash gamers access for some behind the scenes posts and videos and we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 1,393,579

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, ibuypower pc review, best prebuilt pc, ibuypower element mini, ibuypower element mini review, ibuypower review, ibuypower any good

Id: sqK9wR6KMLs

Length: 28min 53sec (1733 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Flaimbot]

quite the achievement to get a "worse than dell" award

[u/DOugdimmadab1337]

GN has been at this for a while now, and they have literally only found 1 good one. I knew the ones from major pre-built manufacturers were gonna be garbage, but wow this is a whole new level of garbage.

[u/anguishCAKE]

a "gaming" desktop pc that gets outperformed by handhelds is quite something.

It's borderline upsetting that most likely nothing is going to come of this.

[u/nanonan]

The white pcb was nice at least.

[u/DenuvoSuks]

at what point does a company say to themselves, maybe this is too much of a scam even for us?

[u/Amaran345]

These prebuilts are kinda like walmart bikes, they have the looks but not the quality or performance, and they need lots of adjustments and reassembly just to make them barely safe and usable

[u/bluppiemcblupface]

molex centipede hehehehe

[u/KevinKingsb]

These companies just love to prey upon the ignorant.

[u/DL7610]

You can get an HP prebuilt with a 1660 Super and a Ryzen 5300g for $607 (on sale with a coupon code). It's proprietary but good value for what it is-- barely more expensive than a 1660 Super's eBay prices.

On the other hand, there is a bunch of $500-$700 "Gaming PCs" which have lots of RGB lights but non-gaming GPUs. There are even ones out there selling for $500+ with a i5-2400 and a GTX650 or GT710 and such.

Steve rightly trashed this. However, he also trashed a different model of HP pc-- a horribly-priced $1400 one with RTX 2060 Super for sure, but Steve mostly ranted on how it is all proprietary-- when there are configurations on the website that makes sense for shoppers with a $500-$700 budget.

The issue I see with Steve's video series is he trashes basically everything that doesn't look like a custom PC when he should have focused on items like this-- which won't ever do what it claims to do. If you find the Dell or HP units in the correct configuration with the correct sale, I think they are just fine for people getting into basic gaming.