Final Verdict - $1500 Gaming PC Secret Shopper Part 4

we bought them we unboxed them and we endured tech support hell and now finally after three weeks of waiting we're ready to share the performance of our $1,500 gaming systems in both gaming and Game Capture workloads but not before we share with you some interesting discoveries that cropped up while we were taking a closer look at these machines because uh oh boy there's far more here than meets the eye Thermaltake say 500 has a modern minimalistic design with brushed aluminum panels and duel him swinging tempered glass doors check it out today at the link below [Music] okay I know I am just as psyched to find out which of our rigs produces the most FPS as you guys but we've actually got some other really really important stuff to go through here first let's start with Alienware so this thing shipped with a reasonably recent version of Windows 10 build 1803 and needed very few updates in order to get up and running the theme wallpaper and boot logo were all set so you'd know that dude you're getting a Dell I mean Alienware and bloatware didn't look too bad so let's see here we've got updater mobile connector customer connect alien effects whatever for lighting and overclocking control but let's come back to bloatware later first something got weird this system uses over 4 gigabytes of RAM at idle that is double our other machines and after we manually killed any and all Alienware / Dell processes it barely budged then we subjected the machine to a CPU stress test and this is even weirder normally this kind of stress test loads up all of the course to the hilt but on this machine the load fluctuated not only that but the CPU would boost to 4.5 ish gigahertz hit temperatures in the high 90 degrees Celsius then do this weird thing where the cooling would rather super hard then the temps and the clock speeds would go down rinse and repeat what because like if the processor can't handle the standard load why on earth do they have overclocking support well to see how bad that would be we fired it up and wait are you sure you got this right this is bizarre this shows that the CPU while overclocked neither overheated nor dropped below 4.3 gigahertz that is the max six core load per Intel spec that means that enabling OC stage 1 was faster and cooler than the out-of-the-box settings and not to mention essentially required to get the processor running the way that it was supposed to to begin with stage 2 was not as rosy with our processors shooting up to 4.8 your hertz occasionally but then quickly toning itself back down to 3.7 okay what made this even more puzzling was that after we disabled the software Oh see that weird turbo up in overheating behavior completely disappeared and that's not even the end of our software and firmware and whatever issues with this box but we really need to move on to hardware now so our graphics card is a standard-issue GTX 1060 that behaved entirely predictably - the driver set from six months ago so that's alright but there are some issues here that we missed during the initial inspection first we found that the machine had a sloppily wired Wi-Fi module then we noticed that while the Box said nvme our configuration is actually equipped with an N dot to drive that uses SATA rather than PCI Express meaning that there is no performance benefit over a traditional two and a half inch drive now our invoice was marked correctly it's not false advertising or anything like that it's just kind of a drag anyway much more interesting is the topmost PCI Express slot that runs at only 8x electrically rather than 16x no matter what we did and that our multi-gpu approved power supply only has 385 Watts combined on its 12-volt rails with no eighty plus certification whatsoever now given that this Sheen already pulls around 300 watts from the wall under a combined CPU and GPU load calling that sli capable is misleading at best one positive note is that the power supply fan does stop under low load and our machine idles at just 26 watts furthermore after the rev up throttle down behavior magically disappeared the system would only hum up under load with no sharp fan Rev ups those naked vrm modules that we were concerned about before by the way those did not end up heating up pretty much at all and finally when it comes to the UEFI BIOS settings they were about as sparse as you'd expect with a pre-built machine like this with no option to save a profile and SATA mode set to raid which then disables BIOS recovery from a hard drive which is enabled by default so I guess all we can really say is let's move on to the HP omen unlike the Alienware our HP omen shipped with Windows 10 version 1709 from over a year ago so between that and replacing the graphics driver from five months ago it took over an hour to get this thing updated out of the box I've note is that the issue with games running slower off of the hard drive versus the SSD that we encountered while using this machine in our Walmart PC video has gone away so that's good and we were also pleased to see less than two gigs of our RAM being used at idle that is half of the Alienware onto software the so-called omen command center commands almost nothing except for enabling dual force mode to send low priority networking traffic over the integrated Wi-Fi and then higher priority packets over Ethernet but I mean given that they both terminate at the same modem I'm I'm having a hard time understanding what the point of that is also of note our omen included McAfee Antivirus so if you want to uninstall it John says hi now here's something weird our 8700 nan ka processor boosted to about 3.5 gigahertz with all core turbo now this is well below the 4.3 gigahertz all core boost that gamers Nexus measured for this CPU and only 10% above base clock now why HP might have handicapped the CPU frequency in this way is not clear but what we do know is that this can only hurt it when it comes to performance moving on our graphics card is a bone-stock gtx 1070 with as expected behavior and then finishing it up in here we found a Wi-Fi module that we actually didn't notice during our unboxing also it turns out that our power supply is rated to 470 watts max on the 12-volt rails with 80-plus certification so far more sli ready actually than the one in the dell moving on to the bios well actually you just don't get to pressing f2 at boot takes you to a diagnostic screen for just about every subsystem in The Omen from CPU and RAM to USB and keyboard then going to advanced reboot yields a mostly useless grey on blue setup screen straight out of the 90s all right let's move on to the iBUYPOWER rig now then which is apparently so advanced that Janus is not even worthy of opening it and you're not able to help me through that not my ability to manage your ability to look inside a computer nothing better with the part it's gonna be very difficult to do anything inside while this one shipped with a recent version of Windows 10 the machine still did require quite a few updates and the graphics driver here is the oldest one yet I mean I guess that's what they had rolled into their OS image and they just haven't bothered to update it I mean frankly back in NCIX we did a lot of stuff wrong we did but we did regularly update the bloody graphics drivers for our gaming systems like I with that said this behavior doesn't seem that surprising given the clap it together and ship it overall build quality that we observed there were zero changes made to the UEFI BIOS so that means no optimised profile was saved even though the option is present on this motherboard and in practical terms this means that while our invoice boasted a free upgrade to three thousand megahertz rams concede in there it's all shiny ours was only running at the default twenty six 66 megahertz don't get me wrong everything worked and it was stable with our CPU boosting to 4.3 gigahertz max across all cores as expected and our graphics card was factory overclocked with idle RAM usage that was normal it's just that we didn't really get a you know we care a lot vibe from the overall build quality like again this kind of sort of sloppiness doesn't affect performance which we will see is definitely a strong point for this system but not even one of the CPU cooling fans is plugged into the CPU fan header they put the pump there when there's an empty pump header right here I mean why and like we found a grand total of exactly one zip tie and one twist tie in the entire system let's move on to the next Oh so this is what you get for fifteen hundred US dollars from Origin PC a core i5 processor and a gtx 1050 Ti I mean at this point it almost doesn't really matter what else they do right does it but for the sake of completeness let's take a look the OS the machine shipped with was recent and so was the graphics driver that shouldn't be worth bonus points but apparently it is idle RAM usage was sub 2 gigabytes another good thing but we did notice that when we looked at the UEFI settings but while our XMP 3000 megahertz profile was enabled for our RAM the speed field was left on auto which for some reason caused it to clock in slightly lower at 29 33 2 origins credit even though only that one setting was tweaked on the machine it was saved into a profile which we could load onto it for our performance testing but profiles are only as useful as how enabled they are we've really hoped that our tech would prompt us when we call them for tech support to load the profile after that hole only half the ran is being detected incident but he didn't looking under the hood we found cable management that on the surface looked pretty good until we noticed that our pump was powered via molex which means no speed control and no warning if your pump dies and then making matters worse we noticed that there is an available header on the motherboard that they used that they plugged the front intake fan into instead then this is the worst thing yet we came to the pass-through power cable that connects the rear plug on the back of the actual system to the power supply inside because it's got a really unusual internal layout this here uses non soldered hobby-grade connectors and on our machine the metal contacts were slightly exposed with no power off switch available at the back of the system that means that while it would be unlikely these can slip off and someone could accidentally bridge those live wires full AC power with their fingers this could and should be done better let's move on to main gear first we need to make a correction here during the purchasing part of this system the rep mentioned the two-year extended warranty and we laughed oh oh here comes the warranty pitch well you see wait for the last you know oh man he mentioned it because it was free and that's a good thing but we were mostly laughing because we'd sat through so many warranty pitches in the last two hours we should have corrected ourselves because free is free baby so thanks to our commenters for noticing that as for the machine itself well the software side was virgin other than a custom boot logo wallpaper and a red theme both the OS and the graphics driver were recent and our GTX 1060 was a factory overclocked version the processor clocked itself at about 3.9 gigahertz on all six cores this is exactly what we would expect for a risin 2600 ex and we noticed that the machine had its high performance power plan enabled by default this would help explain why it had the highest idle power draw out of our competitors at around 50 watts but that is considered best practice with Rison processors the UEFI did have a factory settings profile set but there was really nothing in there that would affect performance just a couple of networking related settings and boot mode forced into UEFI only mode a closer look at the insides revealed that well in terms of issues we had a really hard time finding fault in this build they even cable managed the backside of the motherboard tray digging deeper the power button was slightly off-center I guess but that's more of like a case QC issue and actually no this was one the hard drive SATA cable clicked when we pushed on it meaning that it wasn't actually in a hundred percent but the drive was detected and did work out of the box and given main gears support if that did come out and shipping I'm sure they would have been able to help us with it pretty quickly so then line them all up here I guess let's finally do it for you let's summarize the specs of all the machines we ended up with Alienware shipped with a liquid-cooled 8700 k processor 16 gigs of 666 RAM a stock GTX 1060 with a 128 gig SATA OS drive coupled with the 2 terabytes of storage and it was powered by a multi-gpu approved 460 watt power supply HP shipped our Ohlman with a non k 8700 processor with 16 gigs of 24 hundred megahertz ram a vanilla gtx 1070 a 256 gig nvme drive they were the only one to ship an nvme boot drive weren't they and 2 terabytes of mechanical storage they also threw in a decent 80 + 500 watt power supply and they had a 200 dollar Canadian 150 dollar US promotion at the checkout it should be noted we bought all of these systems though during intel's gamer days promotion so every SI had the same opportunity to take advantage of that ibuypower jumped the gun smartly selling us a pre-order of the core i5 9600 K before it was formerly shipping they cooled it with an AI o water cooler threw it in an MSI z3 98 a motherboard loaded up 16 gigs of 26 66 megahertz ram and through a 240 gig SATA OS drive with one terabytes of storage in it we've got a factory overclocked gtx 1070 the most powerful graphics card out of the bunch and that was powered by a quality 750 watt power supply that we got upgraded to for free on paper this one should be the fastest system for gaming origin uh origin we've got a liquid-cooled Core i5 8400 with a gtx 1050 TI and a hundred and 20 gigs of SATA SSD storage with no extra mechanical storage for our game library the power supply is a high quality 450 watt unit but the fancy Z 390 overclocking capable motherboard even though it's it's quality doesn't make sense for this config our CPU doesn't support overclocking honestly this config is a total dog's breakfast finally main gear sold us the only AMD system in the lineup with a 200 40-millimeter AIO cool dries in 5:20 600x this could end up very interesting because we did specifically mention to everyone on the phone that we wanted to not only game but also record our gameplay for YouTube they went with an MS I'd be 350 M pro vidi motherboard with 16 gigs of 26 66 megahertz ram a 256 gigs SATA OS SSD a one terabyte storage drive and a factory overclocked GTX 1060 all this was powered by an EVGA 500 watt power supply and of note is that the 200 US dollar discount that was applied to our check out due to intel's gamers days promotion was something we were able to take advantage of however that works for an AMD based configuration okay so which one of these is the fastest for gaming well in a massive surprise to no one I buy power and HP omen dominated our suite of gaming benchmarks with I buy power edging out its closest competitor pretty handily thanks to its factory overclocked graphics card and the fact that its CPU was turbo Eng correctly I mean you want your CPU turbo incorrectly that seems like a good idea right who knew main gears machine and our Alienware Aurora then traded blows thanks to their similar grade of graphics firepower in the next year down and as for our origin Chronos well it didn't manage to break 60 FPS in any of our gaming tests aside from csgo also for the sake of completeness we actually tested the origin machine with both the core i3 that fit within our budget and the i-5 that they upsold us to make there's not only the worst performer in the bunch but also the most expensive system that we purchased now on to recording videos to post to YouTube now this is presumably what led main gear to recommend a 6 core 12 thread AMD system now we never mentioned streaming so we were actually kind of hoping for someone to recommend using shadowplay because it mostly just works and comes with very little performance penalty if you want to just you know cut together your frag vids but no I think everyone kind of assumed we were streaming anyway on to testing we said OBS to the same 1080p 60fps 3500 megabit per second CBR settings on all machines and then we just kept cranking the x264 encoder until we started dropping frames which actually brings us back to alien where did what so check this out regardless of encoder quality our aurora dropped a savage number of frames and spit out rendering errors so the benchmark that we chose would run at 60fps like so our game was fine our CPU usage remained reasonable and yet the end recording was unwatchable every single time and this behavior persisted even when we switched to the N Bank Nvidia encoder which has nothing to do with the CPU so Ivan's like racking his brain for a week on this stupid thing trying different settings recording to a different drive resetting and reinstalling the software using a different graphics card out of our inventory and even going as far as asking one of the key OBS dance what the heck is going on here finally we relented and popped one of our bench boot SSDs into the Aurora only for it to immediately stop having the issues but then the mystery goes deeper still because we tried our alien where OS drive in another similar spec testbench machine and continued experiencing the same issue so while we do not know what precisely is going on we've done our diligence and we've managed to deduce that something we're pretty sure is just broken and software on our alien worm machine maybe it has to do with the high idle RAM usage onto the rest then our main gear machine hung in there until the medium quality setting that's our best result with our HP omen coming in 2nd iBUYPOWER came in third as expected starting to lose frames at the faster preset when it came to CPU encoding and then as for the Chronos well see that's it right what were we really expecting on a system that couldn't hit 60fps in the first place so what's the takeaway from all this when it comes to raw gaming power for the price I buy power took the prize that is if you're comfortable with their quality tech support but that also doesn't necessarily mean that HP lost thanks in part to their promo price they put up a surprisingly good fight when it came to gaming performance and there were aspects of this system that don't directly impact gaming but are certainly benefits like the nvme boot SSD versus a cheapo SATA one in the iBUYPOWER rig not to mention the carrying handle the excellent i/o and the handy easy harddrive upgrade slots now their tech support was far from perfect but they weren't dismissive or rude to us and they did eventually solve the problem after those two we would have a tie for second if Alienware could get their preloaded OS figured out and also if their pre sales and after sales support weren't both abominable across the board now I'm sure Alienware would say that we got unlucky but here's my response to that between all the call transfers that we went through I'm pretty sure we talked to probably half a dozen people who worked there and every single one of them was worse than both of the people that we talked to at main gear so there's just no contest here main gear comes in third speaking of no contest origin PC they did do some things well their staff were polite competent and helpful but at the end of the day this was a pretty simple transaction we you $1,500 give you us gaming PC send and while they did a good job of taking our $1,500 I would argue that they didn't really hold up their end of the bargain this a gaming PC well it's a gaming PC but certainly not for $1,500 so I guess that I guess that's it right are we done for this season for this season oh lordy are we doing this again boy this was time-consuming but we really hope that you guys have enjoyed it I know Ivan's been tearing his hair out but I mean was it fun at least yes you know you know you know it was actually it was a lot of fun to go through this maybe we'll do something like this that's similar in the future leave us a comment in the video description with with what you guys would like to see us secret shop you know Lynam tech investigator and stoy ski and all that good stuff so now it's time for our sponsor master on the mast Rob Sennheiser HD 6 xx headphones sound fantastic and why shouldn't they they're based on Sennheiser's legendary HT 6 50s with pretty much nothing tuned that is why they have sold over 50,000 units of this stuff just nice natural bass and a really full sound to these open backed cans we've got a detachable six-foot cable now instead of the 10-foot one that's based on community feedback because people don't want to get tangled up in it and they include a 1/8 inch plug that's versatile for everyday use a quarter inch adapter so you can plug it into anything you'd want and Sennheiser's long-term support check out the link below to join the drop today oh we have them here yes look how nice they look thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video or even the entire series go ahead and hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like not bees and our community forum which you should totally join

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 3,576,924

Rating: 4.9516616 out of 5

Keywords: secret shopper, undercover, investigation, gaming pc, system integrator

Id: VRFEr3rAizY

Length: 27min 51sec (1671 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Origin selling a 1500 dollar pc that can’t do 60fps is criminal.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/dudemanguy301]

ibuypower: was best value for money by far, but you should probably be knowledgeable about computers or know someone who is.

main gear: was the best all around experience by a long shot, middle of the road in value for money. definitely the best bet for the general public.

HP Omen: meh whatever.

Alienware: made me hate them even more, I knew for ages that they were overly expensive, but their support was also poor, and the bloat ware seems like a complete nightmare WHAT THE FUCK.

Origin PC: Shameless rip off pricing, every other section could have been an A+ (it wasnt) and it would still be unjustifiable.

[u/SpicyRamenAddict]

Those exposed power cable things on the origin pc seem like something very dangerous, like that should never be allowed.

[u/shakaroni]

This series was one of his best. Definitely hope he does more like this.

[u/Aardvark1292]

Ooo! I'll always take opportunities like this thread to tell people to never buy a PC from Origin under any circumstances! Walk with me, friends.

For Christmas one year my wife blew the budget off and got me a computer. She got in touch my with friends who "tricked" me into building a dream computer on the origin website, and then she bought it for me. Damn near 3 Grand. Don't judge, just listen to the story.

So when you buy an Origin, it comes in a wooden crate stamped with their logo. I set up the computer, turn it on... Nothing. Call tech support - my first of many... Many calls. Guy on the other end is clearly irritated at my problems, but ultimately turns out there was just a loose connection, which I understand. It was shipped, after all, shit happens. While I'm inside the case I notice there's fans just... Like... Out. In the case. Not connected to anything, like I can slide it around. I ask the dude, he tells me it's probably just for looks. I know now that the fan portion of the fans had shaken loose during shipping, and the I was running with about 3 fans that were just metal spinning a housing that didn't exist.

So I'm playing for a few days, and I bought dragon age Inquisition to play. I notice that as in using it, the computer is putting out this high pitched squeal, very quiet but ultra high pitch. My dog won't be in the room with it, and it gives me a ripping headache. Call tech support, they've never had the issue before, guy can't hear it over the phone, tells me it's coil whine and I'm just unlucky that I can hear it. Turns out of much later, it's the damn fans spinning with no fan.

So a week later I've started wearing headphones any time I want to use the computer. I turn it on to use it one day, it powers up, runs to the bios screen, turns itself off, waits about 5 seconds, turns itself back on. This repeats indefinitely. I unplug it from the wall, give it a bit, plug it back in, it works. Over the next few days it starts power cycling like that constantly, and nothing I can do will make it work. What I know NOW (spoiler alert, this story ends with me making my own PC) is that they had overclocked it to an unstable point and it just wasn't working. Had I known enough at the time to revert all the OC it may have just worked. In fairness, had I known that much I'd have never paid them.

So I call tech support. The don't know wtf. Dude tells me I have two options: they can send me a motherboard which I can install myself, or I can pay to ship it to them to be fixed because the standard warranty doesn't cover shipping. Shipping is over a hundred dollars. They send me the motherboard and the guy walks me through the install, which is where I realize that building a PC is pretty simple. I turn the shit back on... It power cycles. To this day I have no clue why, my best guess is that one of the components was damaged somehow, I genuinely don't know.

So here's the fun part! In the time it took them to ship me the motherboard, my warranty expired. Their basic warranty at the time was like 30 days iirc. They will continue to provide tech support for one year, but they're not replacing anything. I tell them that's bullshit, I haven't had a working product since I got it. We argue, they eventually agree to service it, but I'll have to ship it to them. Whatever fine, fuck you guys I'll pay the shipping. My wife is upset that her gift to me is just a stress and isn't working, we just want it fixed, dragon age was so pretty. Ok, how do I ship it to you?

"It has to be shipped back in the crate it came in." I threw the crate away, it's a goddamn crate on a full size ATX rig, it was huge. These mother fuckers tell me I'll have to buy a new crate, pay to have it shipped to me, load the computer, and pay to ship it back. At this point I'm done, fuck you I want a refund. They say they don't do refunds after 30 days. We argue, I threaten to sue them, they say they don't care, my wife and I begin calling their tech support in our spare time asking them to fix the computer. After 3-4 days they get sick of us calling and agree to refund me for their product which never worked.

I still had to buy a crate and pay shipping. 275 round trip (ish) counting the cost of a new fucking crate. Wife gave me the 3 grand and said to get a new computer. So I built one. Better, faster, better specs, for 1700. With the extra money I bought a gaming mouse, mechanical keyboard, gaming chair, and an ASUS ROG 144hz monitor. We still had money left over.

Fuck origin, DO NOT give them your business.

[u/aBeaSTWiTHiNMe]

Seriously messed up some of the responses. Like not recommending a system at all, to not helping SUPER BASIC tasks like reseating RAM.

If you properly someone through that like an actual professional, it would be easy.

The whole series was an eye opener on prebuilts.

[u/Netflix-_-Chill]

Haven't Origin PC been sponsors of Linus before?

[u/joshmaaaaaaans]

That origin PC is absolutely disgusting lmao

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/bG6XBb

Tried my hand at building a $1500 PC, just a bit over, but you can probably find equivalent parts a lot cheaper or on sale at some point like half of the PCs had the 'Intel gaming' sale. Most wont even need the windows OS so like $50 can go into other parts, might even be able to fund a similar build with a GTX 1080 for a total of around $1650 after moving some parts around. Can't even imagine the prices these prebuilt resellers get on buying bulk parts from manufacturers directly, the PC probably costs them 500$ including customer support and paying the builders.

Pretty redic what you can get for 1500$ as long as you're not buying prebuilt, or at least not buying Origin, lul.