Best Pre-Built So Far: ABS Challenger ALI521 $1000 Gaming PC Review & Benchmarks

what is oh gross that cable's really gouged that is bizarre what the f i'm relatively impressed [Music] we're back with pre-built reviews and in our first round of a pre-built roundup we had three systems our goal for that set of systems was to find one that we could reasonably recommend for our own friends and family that would hopefully help those of you who act as i.t in your own groups or just as a system for when you can't get a gpu standalone unfortunately we had to lower our standards well that sounds good wow that's crazy why dell what the actual between the first round of three systems and this round of three systems the standards have now been reduced to is capable of turning on without a problem it's what we're looking for now so we're starting with the abs system this is a newegg house brand much like rosewell is roswell as the case that's being used the system's a thousand dollars let's get into it before that this video is brought to you by asus and the asus tough gaming b550 plus wi-fi motherboard ready for amd ryzen cpus the tough gaming b550 board comes in atx and micro atx variants with key features including a wi-fi 6 module 2.5 gigabit ethernet a fanless chipset heatsink for quiet operation and a focus on stability and uptime learn more about the tough gaming b550 plus wi-fi motherboard at the link in the description below as we continue our quest of finding a computer that actually works and has the gpu socketed when it arrives we are now looking at a computer has a 1660 super much like several of the others we looked at recently and this one has an i5 10 400 f so abs has a number of computers on newegg of course the one we chose was the ali 521 and this is an open front option there are colon inversions as well which look like they're solid glass front and they are but they have a wide side intake we actually reviewed the colon in the past it was okay for airflow but then there are also more closed-off options so for purposes of this review we can only talk about the ali 521 that's the airflow focused case as a reminder the first three we looked at included a dell g5 5000 that's a 900 system and it had a lot of proprietary components in fact most of them were somewhat proprietary the only shining light in that entire computer was the power supply unfortunately also proprietary but we'll move on we also reviewed an eye by power system the ira power computer was a 680 computer was the cheapest of the first three that we bought and its primary issue was that apparently 680 doesn't get the treatment of using packing materials when shipping the computer and so the video card was basically falling out of the slot the pcie slot was damaged the rear i o usb ethernet all that stuff was hardly accessible and the system had a number of physical issues in its assembly we also looked at a cyber power computer it was a thousand fifty dollars it was the most expensive of the three that we had started with and that one had one primary issue which was the cpu overheating it was hitting tj maxx 100 degrees celsius because of a poor cpu cooler choice coupled with a very strange all-exhaust configuration the cyber power one out of those three was the one that we said it's an okay starting point as long as you're capable of replacing the cpu cooler on your own it made the most sense out of the three of them and so it got the prestigious it's better than dell award and that was the baseline for the last round this time we've got a thousand dollar computer we will be comparing this one most directly to the dell g5 and the cyberpower computer and this has a few advantages immediately one of them two sticks of ram hey we've got two channels we can use now and it's also running 16 gigabytes which out does the eight gigabyte solution of many of the previous systems we've looked at our biggest concern going into the abs computer is new exit support or abs as support however you want to look at it abs is part of newegg again roswell's part of newegg they're sort of like house brands and we've had some experiences recently helping out our viewers push through support requests that have given us a lot of concern about how newag or abs would handle support but we'll start with the hardware if that passes the tests then that's the main thing getting something that actually performs well let's start with the teardown of the system we have already done all the benchmarks at this point just as we always point that out but i have not looked at the system internally yet so we're gonna be seeing this the first time so the case is using the punch out kind of pcie slot cover these can't really go back in uh they're not secured with any you just push it it comes out that's it there's room for a 140 fan we've got a 120 in there not necessarily a bad thing so we've got a thermaltake 500 watt power supply 80 plus white label which means it's not um it's below bronze a little bit of kale management effort has gone in here there's not a lot of cables to manage though okay let's get started so first thing i'm noticing is actually not here reason uh it looks like micro atx board in an atx case i mean whatever it's a little bit unnecessary but it is cheaper and let's play while they're doing it what i'm noticing though is actually up here in the front so there's why are these here what is oh gross it's like sprue from uh like warhammer figurines or something or what or model building so there's we've got a metal really thin metal mesh plating that's behind the fans for some reason it can be twisted you can see that you can twist it and pull it out these case fans are not mounted to the case they're mounted to the panel this should be as simple as that that is bizarre what the f what are they doing i don't know why you would do that so they they've screwed the fans why would you do that that's so weird they've screwed the fans into the front panel there's i can't show you too easily because all the cables are running to the front panel so it's not fully separable and the front i o up here you can see is also that cable is really gouged front i o is also embedded in the front panel rather than attached to the chassis so we can't completely remove the panel panel could be done better case could be done better that's takeaway here but you can see there's actually mounting points four fans that's what all these holes are all the way down here so you could mount the fence to the chest to the actual frame but instead they're on the case which means this this is what happens does it matter a lot not really for a pre-built but it's definitely odd and it makes it harder to maintain not how i would have done it and it's not even easier to do it this way that's the weird part about it oh there's a mesh we've got the triple mesh going which so let me make this really clear this case from an airflow perspective compared to the others we've looked at is like basically it's like god tier like it's really sad to say that but the other pre-built we've looked at have been completely stifled for airflow so this is on a different level from it's not a different plane of existence from the other pre-built it's not better than other cases we've looked at we've looked at a lot of better cases and the reason i say that is because even though it's got mesh on the front it's and it is kind of an ultra fine mesh so that's a good thing but behind the mesh they have a foam filter which is going to be difficult to remove compared to a more standard dust filter that you could pull out of a side so harder to remove harder to clean and it's two layers of filtration so you've got basically imagine like the holes for the mesh like that and then you've got a foam filter that goes like that and now there's a little bit more blockage and behind it there's another mesh layer sort of still far better than the design of the other cases for pre-built we've looked at so far so abs is still off to a good start and by the way we are working on our anti-static modmat pc building work surface for protecting your table and the parts you work on you can grab these on store.camerasnexus.net if you'd like one they're also great for tracking screws as you disassemble things and uh this one this designs on back order on the store they sell through very fast so if you want one place an order on store.gear texas. that also helps us to buy things like this okay internally so we've got an msi card this looks like maybe a vent is it does have the plastic back plate i hate these it's a terrible waste it's it ends up putting an insulator on the back of the card so it's not doing anything other than aesthetics which is msi's trying to make the whole card look gamer and that means sharp edgy lines and black paint unfortunately in this instance it also means plastic which serves no point however the video card is not abs's fault so as you can see the memory is not really covered by the thermal pad i've seen this before again so that's an msi issue uh it's i mean i don't know it is what it is at this point you can't get many cards but i'd like them to i would like msi to not waste to their supply with stupid designs all the cables are connected properly and fully seated i'm going to start removing these i have seen this before i've never worked with it as far as this bag it's 3000 megahertz seal 16 and we'll talk more about the timings once we get into the benchmark section this cooler looks real we've already done thermal testing i should clarify when i say this cooler looks real i don't mean good it looks a little more real than some of the others we've seen oh wow look at that man that is the is that the coolest thing you've ever seen or what there's flames in the molding for the blade wow it's you know it's it's really a good thing that abs didn't put this in a case that's suffocated thermally because putting using a cooler with fans on with flames on the blades would have given me a lot of ammunition for jokes in the future we'd turn this into a meme really quick the board they used from gigabyte actually bothered to screw in the heatsink why is that impressive you might ask check out some of the asrock motherboards we've looked at recently where you push on it and the heatsink comes off that's cool the board is a b460m ds3h acb2 there's no copper to be found here this is an aluminum cold plate aluminum fin stack so mounting pressure looks okay this is not centered this cooler so this is a thermaltake mounting bracket issue i'm looking down at the holes here and there's three hole options depending on the board the socket they are using the same one in each so this isn't an abs problem so that up there we're off center on the ihs in fact you can see it here zero coverage right there which aligns with that so that makes sense as for what that means the silicon die is in the middle and uh it's pound yeah i the the contact isn't great but neither is the cooler so it's kind of hard to say that the contact particularly matters when the whole cooler is is not good to begin with fortunately a 10400f is also relatively low power so they can get away with the lower end cooler pending the case not sucking and this one is certainly a lot less suck than the other ones we've looked at okay now i'm going to pull the power supply out of here and we'll look at the spec since this is all new egg stuff abs after all i suspect that newegg may be pushing components that it has stuck on shelves into abs builds or at least components which it has the most quantity of it's actually from a business angle a brilliant way to dump access inventory to basically build computers out of the stuff no one wants doesn't mean it's gonna be a bad computer either but the part may have it could be as innocuous and innocent as having bad marketing or something and uh that may be why they have extra or it could be an exploding power supply depends on the power supply in this case i've not tested this one the gigabyte one we've been working on slowly is the one uh one we we'd be more concerned about seeing this i've not personally tested yet uh it has a qc pass for high potential which we've actually shown high pot testing in our power supply factory tour if you're curious about seeing that ratings we have 12 volt at 37.5 amps which allows us 450 watts shaving 50 watts off the total power uh it is a single 12 volt rail we've got 5 volt standby 12 and a half 5 volt plus 3.3 at 110 so we don't have full 12 volt potential at 500 but we're pretty close certainly better than some of the other ones that's going to be all we have to say about the power supply for now non-modular that's completely fine there's no reason to go overkill saves a little bit of money benefits no one in the pre-built instance if it's modular and even if you pull it out for something else later it's not a huge benefit there is not a molex centipede in this one may have seen that some of the others we worked on is that plugged into something wow that's quite the hiding place new egg is smuggling contraband with the system it was sitting in here on top of the hard drive cage with the magnets holding it up like that upside down as i was fishing the cables out trying to see if they were just hiding them which is totally fine by the way i noticed they were getting unplugged from something and it's this rgb controller and fan controller uh this is non-standard unfortunately these fans will not be useful without this controller all right so here's how it works these three right here on this side that's your fan these two that's going to be led so they merge them into one connector to minimize the amount of cables yet still have two discrete cables functionally going to the same thing and no reusability but at least it's workable in this controller if you transplant it to another computer in the future not a total loss so we've got parts that can move into other computers it's positive it was built relatively competently the component selection overall is compatible and okay there's a couple weaker parts in here but we'll see how it doesn't testing front panel could use some work for reasons we described otherwise though i'm relatively impressed so that's that should be like our our award there gn relatively impressed award it goes right alongside the better than dell so that'll be it for the teardown let's jump into some of the benchmarks we'll start the benchmark section with thermals in torture testing on the cpu and gpu we measured an average cpu core temperature of about 71 degrees celsius in a controlled 21c ambient environment this is fine and we have a lot of room to run hotter in fact it's the best we've seen on these 1000 pre-builts thus far despite the weak cooler overall that's largely thanks to the intake at the front combined with the low power of the cpu it could be better for sure but it's in a good starting spot you'd only need an upgrade on the cooling solution if upgrading the cpus later the gpu ran at 65 degrees celsius for core or about 76 for a hotspot also completely fine the vrm moss thermals were around 58 degrees celsius and so overall abs as far as the components that it controls is in good shape time to get into the game testing so as always game results are going to be based on more of the components that were chosen by the system integrator or the oem rather than the whole system itself however there is an impact sometimes profound that the system configuration can have on the results so it's possible that an s i or an oem drags down the performance of its own components chosen by pairing them with other things in a stupid or incomplete way we'll start with cyberpunk 2077. cyberpunk 2077 tested at 1080p medium settings has the abs challenger swinging hard and it's for all the right reasons it's not overheating and thermally throttling like cyberpower was on the cpu that is and it's using two sticks of ram to benefit from both channels abs is defeating a system with a superior cpu and at a 50 lower price the overall lead is 4.8 percent shunting cyber power further down from the top of the chart in an embarrassing fashion maybe cyber power will start pushing to improve as a result now that we're giving them some ammunition for the pm's to use to try and make some changes internally rainbow six siege could run on the tamagotchi so it's not surprising to see some of these systems actually hitting 200 fps average at 1080p the shocker however is in the 0.1 low matrix it's actually insane how much this tells us about the computers and moreover how much a stick of ram can matter at least when you're bound by ram or by the cpu in some instances we'll look at a frame time plot in a moment to illustrate this the averages are tied versus cyber power but they tie at 50 cheaper which is a victory for abs clearly and the average is only part of the story one frame time consistency is so much better in an objective fashion on the abs system this is a frame time plot if you're new to the channel these lines are the most empirical representation of frames as seen by a user that we can create it shows the frame to frame interval or the time required to create render and present each frame to the gamer that would be shown on the vertical axis on the left the measurement on that vertical axis is in milliseconds lower is better but more consistent is best and fps is just a derivative of uh it's an abstraction away from frame time anyway excursions from frame n minus one you can see the frames on the horizontal axis greater than eight to twelve milliseconds one frame to the next start to become noticeable to a player and lower than eight milliseconds is irrelevant for perspective a constant 60 fps would be 16.667 milliseconds for each frame plotting abs first we see a highly consistent line wherein each frame is within a few milliseconds of the previous one and of the next one this is what the line typically looks like in our standalone component reviews but those standalone component reviews use high-end test platforms that are specifically designed to eliminate bottlenecks wherever possible the cyber power system plots immediately with several spikes and excursions from the meat despite a good average frame rate and some of the spikes here the ultimate 0.1 lows that we saw previously are influenced by these spikes these are the reasons that the 0.1 lows were lower on the non-abs systems these occur on all of the other systems we've tested thus far allowing abs a unique advantage at 1440p the abs challenger again leads an average one percent low and 0.1 low metrics all three factors in consideration and the competition doesn't even come close this machine at least from our experience was the best built in a slew of incompetently assembled or minimally cheaply assembled machines that we've seen thus far abs breaks the mold hitman 3 is next this one is tough for cpus in particular and the dell g55000 even with bloatware intentionally deactivated such that it can be still struggled thanks to its single stick of ram with four packages and its background mcafee services that silently influence everything you do the abs challenger ends up leading the charts again this time with an impressive 11 lead over the powerful cyber power system so abs was the winner in that one red dead redemption 2 is up next this is gpu bound in our testing for this one the abs challenger again leads now by five percent uh versus the cyber power system and that's despite having the same gpu as a lot of these other ones hopefully cyberpower is seamless and realizing that now that media is going to start ranking pre-built on charts like back in the late 90s it's time to patch up the cost saving bs the lead over iowa power system is again about 46 to 48 percent linear once again with the price scale here's a noise chart helpful for understanding some of the thermal numbers earlier ivory power has been the loudest ramping from about 36 at the floor to about 44 at load and the abs challenger lands just below this at 42 decibels but above the results of about 38 on the others finally we arrive at power testing the abs system is shown in green measuring at about 135 watts under a cpu only workload both pre and post tau uh given this isn't high end enough to boost to the extent that something like 600k or a 900k series cpu would this all makes sense pulling 230 watts under a combined workload puts the abs system about where the cyberpower one is it also means that we're well within the means of the thermaltake 500 watt psu that's included in the abs build with plenty of room for an upgrade maybe two if you swap the gpu out in this system at a later date or even the cpu and the gpu if you don't go too crazy and you stay in sort of the mid-range uh bracket then you'd have enough room on this power supply yet although as a note we haven't run this power supply through our psu testing it may have other problems but purely from the sticker on the side of the box it has enough capacity the abs system ends up more power efficient than cyber power and that's thanks especially given to rainbow six and and its performance being often a couple percent ahead at least up to 11 percent ahead in some cases not counting the massive lead in 0.1 percent lows in specific instances so it's more efficient now that we're done with all that some quick notes on system setup the bios and the configuration out of the box we noticed on initial setup that the gpu connection sticker that points to the correct display out was on the wrong side it was also upside down so that could maybe confuse some novice users there was a quick start guide unlike iowa power and it was well documented and had clear instructions that's one of the key things we look for for a pre-built because we assume a lot of buyers probably don't know a whole lot about how they work not that this is particularly relevant but we did notice that the ps2 connection doesn't work at all it's just straight up broken and it appears to be a defective port fortunately not many people use ps2 connections anymore but we need a larger sample size to know whether that's a board level a bios level defect or a one-off defect with our unit all the other ports however worked fine when we tested them we noticed that page 34 of the gigabyte manual for the motherboard makes reference to options that do not exist it talks about usb sata and ps2 enable disable options under the boot tab in bios but alas they're not there in fact these options don't even exist in the screenshot that gigabyte used in the manual to show that they exist how this gets past whoever made the gigabyte manual is beyond us this is obviously a gigabyte problem and not necessarily an abs problem but abs did choose the gigabyte board this seems like a case of oversight at gigabyte the board has bios version f2 installed which is dated august 28th of 2020 that's a fairly old revision for something that's not been sitting on a shelf for more than a week at a time because this is technically an oem model of an actual motherboard updating bios has the exclusive benefit of being a massive pain in the ass threads on reddit and gigabytes forums show users struggling to jump through hoops and to contact support to try and get updates we also had issues with this this is because gigabyte's model number is just very slightly modified despite being literally the same board so gigabytes official bios updates for the retail variant the ones that actually get updated don't work on this board a user posted an update solution by using the ami command line tool to force an update but we would be cautious about advising this because a bad update can brick a board so it may be best to just leave it unupdated it's unfortunate that abs chose the special version of this motherboard that comes with pre-broken functionality and a proprietary bios the system did not have xmp enabled out of the box and that's partly thanks to the 10 400 f's incompatibility with higher than ddr4 2666 speeds the memory was running at an odd ddr4 2660 stock but despite inability to push frequency higher on this platform leaving xmp disabled still leaves performance on the table xmp would have run better timings while defaulting to jedec and auto timings resulted in a 1919-1943 set for primary with a woefully slow 734 refresh cycle or trfc in windows we didn't find any missing drivers in device manager this is one of the main things we check right when we boot the system and before we plug in the internet this is a good thing sadly it's better than some of the competition that left device drivers uninstalled and unusable nvidia's april 14th driver was installed for the gpu that's relatively new so they get points for that and we did notice that the system was configured to launch the xbox app on boot for some reason annoyingly as it kept stating your pc comes with xbox game pass beyond this the only bloatware pre-installed was the gigabyte control panel app which also launches on boot and asks the user to update in somewhat of a frustrating out of box experience you don't really want to get bombarded with update messages right when you turn on your new computer as a bonus an actually legitimately mechanical keyboard was included sort of legitimate it's a game ds1 but it's the game ds hermes e1c it's not a great keyboard it's available in bundles for less than 50 bucks retail on newegg so it's not a huge value add but it's better than what dell ships for a similar price so that's it for the benchmarks then this thing is out doing the other three that we've looked at we have a couple others in by the way for this next round we've got actually we have three other computers so one of them will be pushed into the next grouping of three as a reminder as with the last round we are purchasing all these ourselves so a huge thank you to everyone on patreon.comgamersnexus and on store.camerasnexus.net where you've picked up things like our mouse pads mousemats and modmats for making it possible to go out and buy a bunch of systems in search of ones that are actually good that we can recommend to you for your own system choices so overall then the abs computer is far superior than the other three that we've looked at in a few key categories those categories are overall competence of assembly it was built properly cyberpower did extremely well with small attention to detail but it completely lost sight of what it was doing with the bigger picture and that would be things like a cpu cooler that doesn't doesn't allow the cpu to hit 100 degrees celsius i think that's a really basic thing apparently not so thus far then this is actually something we would be comfortable with saying you can purchase and as assuming that of course it's basically the same config we got we can't speak for all the abs builds but for the one we looked at this is the challenger box in this configuration it did well and it outperformed competition at similar prices sometimes cheaper so that's good we didn't find any major issues there was nothing show stopping and uh sadly that's that's really the most you can ask for a lot of these pre-built at least the ones we've looked at so that makes this something we can recommend the one thing that we're concerned about though is new egg support we recently had a viewer reach out who spent 8 500 canadian dollars on a system via newegg and a newegg seller and had a broken fan it's it's an 8 500 computer one fan was broken doesn't seem like a big deal so the viewer reached out to newegg and asked for a fan replacement as would be reasonable newegg was unwilling to help so we ended up stepping in and just connecting the viewer with leanne lee directly lee lee makes the fan that happened to be failed in that system and leon lee was more than happy to replace it for the viewer so awesome job by leanne lee terrible job by newegg and again abs is newegg so that concerns us a little bit and that means that if if you run into problems with this thing we can't vouch for newegg or abs whatever their ability to solve the problem in a way which is reasonable and treats you as you should be but we also haven't found great support from ibuypower or dell or in the past ndxt or cyberpower so they're not alone in being perhaps deficient in that department an overall recommendation on the build quality and the performance the only thing again that mars that recommendation that makes us a little cautious about recommending it to a to a user who doesn't know really anything about computers or repairing them or working on them would be the lack of support from newegg but hopefully you can take it somewhere else to get it worked on if you need that or learn it yourself or there's no problems that's it though thanks for watching subscribe for more as always you can go to store.gamingtexas.net or patreon.comgamersnexus if you'd like to help us out directly in buying more of these computers hopefully one of the next three is going to be promising as well if not more of them we have high hopes for at least one we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 881,094

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware

Id: b2vrvQydVIw

Length: 29min 56sec (1796 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/fistymcbuttpuncher]

Feels like I fell through a time portal and am back in 1998 seeing prebuilts compared to each other.

[u/Starsky7]

I’m interested in getting this! I haven’t build something in a decade but need a starting point. Could this be it??

How does it compare to CYBERPOWERPC Gamer Xtreme VR Gaming PC, Intel i5-10400F 2.9GHz, GeForce GTX 1660 Super 6GB, 8GB DDR4, 500GB NVMe SSD

[u/FarrisAT]

Not to be that guy, but price is always the most important issue here.

The Dell XPS (which is practically the same as the G5) was being sold with an 11400, 8gb 2933mhz RAM, and 1660 Super for $649 for a few hours straight last week.

Got perf around what Steve did (even with my 11400 upgrade) before I changed anything, with concerning temps in the VRAM of 104°c. CPU at 82°C with throttling, GPU at 75°c. That's after a few consecutive TimeSpy runs.

So I added an 8gb stick of 2933mhz RAM ($38 on Amazon), an extra intake 92mm fan, and a 120mm fan I had lying around. I put one at the front and the other aiming directly down at the CPU and GPU. $50 total of upgrades.

Ended up getting average perf and temps after removing bloatware of 75°c on CPU and 64°c on GPU, with scores of 6421 graphics and 8466 CPU on my third consecutive TimeSpy run. VRAM peaked at 98°c. All for $700 and 2 hours of my time.