Dell's Dumpster Fire: Bloatware Uses 30% GPU (G5 5000 Review & Benchmarks)

here you go i clicked on uh system health and the first thing i came up with was what is malware i feel like it should just be a picture of this application so we've got dell support assist remediation dell supportassist dell hardware support dell digital delivery services dell data vault service api dell data vault processor dell data vault collector dell client management service i just really feel like they're connecting with me it doesn't feel like a faceless corporation when there's an emoji what [Music] in the second and final part of our dell g5 5000 pre-built gaming pc review we're going to be evaluating the bloatware that comes with it and also gaming performance thermal performance will be in here as well the oddities of the bios and the options that are not given to you as a purchaser of this 900 box and of course coming to conclusions as to whether or not you should buy the dell g5 those come with this keyboard though before that this video is brought to you by the thermaltake tower 100. thermaltake's tower 100 is a mini itx case to serve as a showcase system for your components the tower 100 has received many revisions since we first saw it and the case now has an open vent in the bottom for intake a mesh cutout in the side panel for some gb ventilation and additional mesh along the side skirts and the side panels of the case the tower 100 is mostly focused on building a showpiece pc that's small enough to fit on most tables learn more at the link in the description below in part one of this series we did a teardown of the dell g5 sitting next to me here it's a small box it's a gaming enclosure you can purchase from dell directly or from major retailers we bought this one from best buy and we have an alienware system on the way from dell's website and in part of our evaluation process for pre-builds one of the things we were looking at was but is it okay is it okay to settle in any capacity in a market where gps are hard to get that's an absolutely valid reason to buy pre-built and we're not trying to be elitist about going the diy approach but there are pre-builts that you shouldn't buy and there are pre-built that would be okay even if you had to rebuild it in a different case this is one that as we discussed in part one which you should watch if you haven't is mostly made of proprietary components including an odd cpu cooler a motherboard whose front io is not just a connector for the case but is literally the cases front io so they have to go together and a power supply that isn't even atx 12vo but it's also not atx really bizarre but anyway that's part one and this one we're going to talk about uh some of the other software side of things and the bio side of things and configuration from dell out of the factory let's get into it so before we look at all the benchmark numbers time to look at some software pre-built systems often come with what's commonly referred to as bloatware no particular reason and we're going to look at what the dell system has before looking at the rest of this so starting off we have 15 windows notifications let's go ahead and see what these are we've rebooted the system a few times and it looks like we've got dell mobile connect which is pre-installed and included with the system welcome dell mobile connect allows you to use your phone from your pc why would i want to do that dell already used my cell phone earlier to try and access my own account to see what i ordered so i think i'm good with not sharing further information with them next thing to do obviously we have some games on here from our testing but let's type in dell and see what's pre-installed so we have my dell dell update dell mobile connect dell cinema guide dell digital delivery dell customer connect i'll type c status display application what what is this it's just going to say yes right now why it went to the system tray about this application is used for the usb type-c status display and is supported on optiplex what why is this here what is this the only option is exit and about all right well let's exit alienware command center let's see what that is that's good you open it and it immediately says downloading with no user input it did boot fast i mean the ssd is doing its job so i click on it it immediately starts downloading something and i don't have an x here can i exit here all right let's go ahead and let that download though and see what kind of garbage comes with that in the meantime let's go ahead and get my dell open this looks useful another great start to continue using my dell please update the application it's worth it i just really feel like they're connecting with me it doesn't feel like a faceless corporation when there's an um emoji happens if i say no stop using emojis stop it you must update to continue using this app in the meantime how many dowel applications do i have the writhing corpse of bloatware i guess is alive and well at this point we haven't i haven't really seen antivirus software in a while so was it actually installed oh god i see it's working as well as it always has so if there's any question about where's the value in this computer it comes with 14 at least control panels and applications right there ready to use when you turn it on good looks good what i'm going to do next is open up windows task scheduler and see what we have hiding in here dell support assist agent auto update triggers every saturday every week uh at 7 44 p.m that's odd mcafee remediation repeat every i don't know is that day indefinitely mcafee log on oh got some audio crap in here okay and most of these are nvidia and microsoft so some antivirus stuff and dell stuff eight dell services that are all running excellent all running in the background uh so we've got dell support assist remediation dell support assistant hardware support dell digital delivery services dell data vault service api dell data vault processor dell data vault collector dell client management service we also have running two three four five six seven mcafee services web advisor uh validation controller pef module core service firewall service are all present and a couple of others there's so much garbage on this computer okay with everything open let's click through it all so mcafee we've seen that before dell update package it's a notice that there's an update for alienware command center which was a self-updating application that immediately started downloading things as soon as we opened it without a prompt this is already behaving like malware but it's got another update notification for it so there's a what else is on here killer network uh whatever an advertisement for dropbox that was paid uh how would you rate your experience with a g5 5000 no dell digital delivery you do not have any applications available dell mobile connect wireless pc smartphone integration for ios and android you can get notifications so now you can know that you will need dell mobile connect from your phone and from windows dell update so this is for basically their drivers page by the way the driver page for this thing has amd drivers on it even though there's no amd parts in this particular system and they're marked as urgent so that's kind of not great and then finally dell my dell one-stop shop for everything related to your g series what about your device setup software and dell settings here you go i clicked on a system health and the first thing it came up with was what is malware i feel like it should just be a picture of this application how do i know if my computer is infected browser redirects pop-ups homepage changes we've had at least these two things happen in the last five minutes of using this computer wow five gigabytes what what is the gpu doing what is that is one of these like mining or something cpu so not much on the cpu 30 gpu usage is insane let's figure out which one of these this is wow that was crazy that application the one that said what is malware and warned about high resource utilization was causing very high resource utilization thirty percent if you had that thing open while playing games the performance would be dismal and it's still by the way at twelve percent man a hundred three really the update manager and dell mobile clinic any oem especially the big oems often have an arrangement between them and some major antivirus provider largely irrelevant ones at this point and you're gonna end up with stuff on your system so our advice is always to clean it up first thing or just install a new os because frankly i don't trust the oems to install an os that i want to use that i want to put my information into so if you have the ability it's not hard get a usb device get a windows bootable media burned to it microsoft distributes it install your own os it's all gone you just blast it all away as soon as you turn the thing on and that'll be a lot better bios is another critical part of the computer even if you never use it dell's uefi here is pathetic it's completely barren and it looks the same as it did in 2009 literally it's like the same skin first there's no fan control which is completely insane because there is a pwm header and there's really no reason not to just have a bios option exposed for the user to change the fan speed other than it was an oversight or laziness or incompetence dell has a new uefi version as well that claims a fan speed reduction or a noise reduction which would be a fan speed reduction and there's no magic here it's they are able to control the fan speed of course it's just not visible to the user for whatever it's worth looking through the rest of the bios for small details dell has sata mode set to raid on rather than ahci for some reason maybe some new form of shadow raid sponsorship and smart check is disabled during setup dell has memory set to 26.66 megahertz on the 3200 megahertz sticks but the genex settings table for 2666 is loaded for its tighter timings this actually does make sense and it's a good thing this isn't dell's problem in this instance it's a matter of the chipset and the processor being limited to lower speed in this instance the 10400 f being a non-case skew on a non-z skew motherboard can't go above 2666. another positive is that dell has noted the specific physical location of each usb port and its speed and bios and this is a nice feature more boards could use this we've seen it in a couple over the years but it's not too common dell also has some built-in recovery tools for diagnostics which is another worthwhile feature that an oem can supply unfortunately the bios for this proprietary non-standard motherboard lacks memory and clock controls of any kind other than turbo control making it basically useless for future upgrades it's time to get into benchmarks we'll look at thermals for this hotbox that has the deceptive appearance of openness and we'll also look at the gaming performance the power consumption and the noise as a reminder all tests were conducted by patrick pryor to the teardown so the teardown did not influence the results as it was done after testing we'll start with thermals on that dismal cooler thermal testing was conducted with various loads to give dell the best chance of performance as always thermals were conducted in a heavily controlled test lab with a constant ambient temperature of 21 degrees celsius we wait for steady state to be achieved prior to analyzing the thousands of rows of data and we allow a cool down period for internal ambient to stabilize between tests our cpu-only blender workload didn't involve the gpu at all the cpu ended up running at 80 degrees anyway and that's only for 106 watts for the entire system's power consumption that's not good but it's at least an acceptable territory for the cpu and not hitting tj max cv temperature climbed to 89 degrees celsius when we also loaded the gpu for additional throughput the cpu isn't pulling more power here it's actually the same as before and so this means that the extra 10 degrees hike that we saw was caused by the gpu heating up the air inside of the case and since there's nowhere for that hot air to go except right over the cpu we end up with both parts directly influencing each other's temperatures gv core temperatures were okay at about 73 degrees celsius with hot spots in the 80s but the gpu actually got warmer when we increased the cpu fan speed manually again we had to do this with an external solution because dell decided that fan control is too much power for one user to have and that gpu temperature increase is now easy to explain the cpu is now dumping its hot air partially into the back side of the pcb for the gpu and ultimately into the gpu cooler it also changes the pressure dynamic between the rear exhaust fan and the cpu fan temperature isn't in a runaway thermal scenario but it has no business being this high for parts this low power consumption dell could fix most of this with a better case sadly so more expensive parts wouldn't even be needed just less plastic on the front of the case or a 120mm intake fan instead of the 80mm exhaust fan that doesn't even really move the bomb of this system vrm thermals are next the board actually did okay here without the heatsink that dell only includes on higher power models we can thank this power limited cpu for reasonable vrm thermals and the downdraft cooler the mosfet's measured didn't exceed 70 degrees celsius in testing although equating the cpu cooler fan noise to that of a shrieking banshee did reduce the vrm moss temperature to 62 degrees celsius that's expected of a downdraft cpu cooler dell gets away with a lack of a vrm heatsink in this one you're far more likely to have one of their myriad other questionable components fail prior to a mosfet anyway so it's actually doing fine here power consumption for the dell system was about where we'd expect given that the components are already well documented in our reviews running only blender to load the cpu we measured about 133 watts immediately or 106 after the usual tau window where it expires rainbow six siege has a gaming workload pulled about 190 watts with the gpu benchmark settings or 165 watts for total system power with the cpu benchmark settings testing with a torch or workload we saw a peak power consumption of 240 watts with blender and fur mark on the gpu or 210 watts after tau small fans mean whiny and loud fans that attempt to move equivalent air to a larger fan except through a smaller hole which means more noise noise is taken at a 20 inch distance in a room with a noise floor of about 26 db this is similar to a quiet suburban house without any fans ac or street noise in the background the dell system has its own noise floor in this environment of about 32 decibels we ran at idle for the first 120 seconds and then we began a cpu and gpu workload similar to an intensive gaming scenario there wasn't much hysteresis in the fan ramp with the cpu and gpu fans immediately spurring to about 34 decibels on our measurement and then dropping to 33 then climbing over a span of 170 seconds to the maximum fan noise that the system will ever hit the noise is limited to peaks of about 40 decibels and has an ebb and flow pattern that occasionally cycles it down to 37 decibels or so in our environment with an average around 38. as a reminder these numbers aren't universally applicable it depends on the test scenario that they're in the important part with this chart isn't necessarily the hard number it's the change the problem with ramp up and down like this is that it's more noticeable than just a constant hump this is louder than the system should be also given its 900 price tag and it's low tdp components but it's not the worst we've heard dell's new bios would actually reduce this fan curve further but we'd advise against installing it if for that reason alone because you'll completely sacrifice the thermals and they're already barely handing off dell drops the ball hard with the cpu cooler the cooler is capable of spending up to 4 700 rpm but dell only ever uses 2 000 rpm of the capacity we'd at least like to see a more intelligent profile instead of just hard limiting at 2000 rpm and even worse with the newer bios the fan rpm in fact stays at just 1 000 on this tiny 80 millimeter cooler all the way until 70 degrees celsius and that's for the cpu cooler it then ramps to 1500 rpm by 83 degrees so we've got a thousand rpm or the first 70c of our cycle and then the next 13 it jumps 50 percent and eventually it jumps to 2000 rpm at and beyond 90 degrees celsius we even externally and artificially heated the cpu with a heat gun at this point to see if the cooler would ever go into a hail mary mode and max the fan but it didn't budge the curve should be programmed to ramp really hard when it gets into dangerous thermal territory otherwise the user risks damage to the system as it ages and gets dusty or in the best case loses performance from throttling there's no compensation here these numbers were taken with an external tachometer since dell doesn't report the fan rpm for some profane reason but without any compensation for those high thermal runaway scenarios the system is just built in a way which is irresponsible and will leave users with something that is throttling without them knowing or as it ages risks may be dying sooner from something like a lower temperature rated capacitor failing gaming benchmarks are next we use a mix of games for our standardized cpu and gpu review suites so that allows us to make some comparisons between this system and a well-built test system if we needed to this suite is standardized and will be applied to all system integrator or oem systems going forward so we'll be able to build out comparative charts and compare multiple pre-built which is useful when looking at the value proposition of each one remember that gaming benchmarks are pursuant to the gpu and the cpu more than anything else so the oem and the si contributions whatever they may be won't really appear here the dell system struggled to maintain 54 fps average during cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p medium lows weren't good here and we'd recommend lowering the settings a little further to better sustain gameplay especially if you get into more complex scenes to render than our bench scene like in firefights rainbow six siege did as it always does running at ridiculous frame rates where cpu bound at 1080p and were gpu bound at 1440p with rainbow six so everything is running predictably hitman 3 ran poorly also expected because our testing is configured to run a high cpu load these results for hitman are really bad they're about half of what they should be for these parts we should easily be in the range of 60 fps for this benchmark you'll see that in our next system integrator system review but the problem for dell is twofold first mcafee runs services constantly in the background and those services seem to be attempting to do some sort of optimization for hitman 3 assuming optimization means the i can't see more than 24fps they're doing a good job in in that instance secondly dell's four chips on its single dim mean limitations of performance and a single dim means limitations of performance as well because we're not able to run the two channels that the board is capable of running and the cpu is capable of running so the memory is actually coming into play here and is a problem it's not just capacity it's performance and it's wasted clock cycles on background processes that chew away the capacity so dell here for hitman 3 is running abysmally compared to where it should be red dead 2 ran at about 54 fps average with our gpu settings overall it's doing okay but it's not a good value nor is it well built with functionally proprietary parts but for whatever it's worth the intel cpu and the nvidia gpu are working basically as expected it's just that dell put them in a computer finally let's look at the bloatware benchmarks with dell's bloated software in use we saw a 15 reduction in average fps and cyberpunk to 46 from 54 which is a massive falloff in performance ironically the pop-up application that warns about pop-ups and high resource utilization was the highest resource drain here the rainbow six siege 1080p results also fell hard a 12 reduction in average fps from dell's utilities in the background we saw a similar reduction in hitman 3 with a little change in red dead and 1440p rainbow six but some of that just happens to be when the applications were doing things versus when they were briefly dormant for instance while testing cyberpunk we had one bench pass that cratered to 6 fps for the 0.1 lows not shown here meaning that we had a hard visible stutter actually set of stutters during gameplay as a result of dell software this is a tangible impact to the gaming experience and functionally renders the game unplayable and for no reason these parts can play it but not with that software doing weird stuff in the background that'll pretty much wrap the series at this point we're not sure what to do with this computer right now but they're good options out there for people who do want to buy pre-built we haven't found them yet but i'm sure they exist we're working on it though our goal with this series of pre-built looks is to do an in-depth set of tests and disassembly analysis look at the support for several major oems and sis or system integrators to try and finally find one that gets it right and in this instance dell does not get it right but again like we said in part one you could buy something like cyberpower ioi power whatever and even if the configuration isn't correct these are things that most people can fix especially if it's something like bios a layperson user could look that up and figure out how to resolve it and if you just want to buy video cards in the form of a whole computer because they're difficult to get otherwise that's fine too but this isn't the way to do it because you end up with a bunch of parts that you're going to have trouble reselling and you're going to have trouble repurposing for your own uses so we see no value in the dell g5 5000 other pre-built would be better and even if you step down a leg and the tiering for the cpu or the gpu or something it would be worth it because with this especially you buy it from dell's website you're just paying to get ripped off and it's it's not a good customer experience it is not a good hardware assembly and it has really no value going forward so that's it for this one this is functionally e-waste we will find something to do with it don't know what yet but uh we can definitely find a use for it we just wouldn't buy another one and we wouldn't recommend you buy it either that's it for this one thanks for watching as always you can subscribe for more go to 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Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 693,059

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, dell g5 5000 review, dell g5 5000 benchmarks, dell g5 5000 gamersnexus, best prebuilt gaming computers, dell prebuilt gaming computer, dell g5 5000 gaming benchmarks, dell g5 worth it, top gaming computers

Id: 5N7aYtkzKJc

Length: 24min 47sec (1487 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021