I am at Guang Hua Digital Plaza in Taiwan, and this place is flipping amazing. It's six stories of shops just like this one, packed floor to ceiling with tech treasure. But is it a good place to buy a PC? I'm gonna put it to the test. But which shop should I choose? There's so many options. Sporting Goods has technology, I guess, but not PC. Hmm, too console, I think. Yeah, ink is more Colton's thing. Now we're getting closer. Ooh, these look like good deals, but I want a game. Oh my God, Jake found the one. It's up a floor, but like guys, if I was gonna commission a system like this back home, it would cost a fortune. I'm talking like one of my cameraman's legs. What? How much? About 5,000 US dollars. And that's just the starting at price for one of Maingear's Apex Rush systems coming with hardline liquid cooling. And while that config has a decent GPU, they've got it backed up with a Core i5 CPU, 16 gigs of RAM and just 512 gigs of storage. I mean, Maingear. I know you guys make good stuff, but who do you think you are? Apple? I bet these guys can do a little bit better. And I bet I can find someone to sponsor this. Like Corsair. The all new K65 Plus Wireless features pre-looped Corsair MLX Red Linear switches and connectivity options of 2.4 gigahertz. Bluetooth or wired USB learn more at the link below
step one is to introduce myself and set a budget Do you like do you build PCs like this here? Yeah, I want to play
like the best games at like 4k I have a monitor. I just need a PC My budget is a hundred seventy thousand dollars Taiwan dollars, of course But I want something that looks really cool. Like can you build
this? Can you build that? You built it? I was worried there could be a language barrier with
the shopkeeper, but as it turned out, not only was his English great, but he said
he's the one who built those demo systems. Step two, play dumb. I've always believed that our
character is determined not by how we treat our peers, but by how we treat those who might be
in a vulnerable position. So I'm not going to be flexing any of my tech knowledge here. How does it work? I don't know what parts I want. I just know I
want something that can game at 4k, um, like really really fast. Like, like uh, with um, like I, yeah, like I don't want like the one with the floppy tubes
though. Yeah, like if someone come, do I like what? Ironman. Sure, yeah,
yeah, sure. I built an Ironman and a cyberpunk before. Oh cool, okay. I don't need it to have like a special theme or anything though
just like like honestly just like a nice clean look like that is pretty good
but can I get it by Friday? This Friday? Yeah. Yeah I think so. You think you can do by Friday? Yeah I think so. Okay. I can give you a menu of like menu of what I use inside. Oh I mean yeah sure I don't know any of that though so you just got to tell me you got to tell me what's good for that price. Okay. Yeah I'm trusting you. Okay. Okay. I'll again go around I'll just send you a picture and the menu and price. Okay. How about that? Okay. Okay. Oh that's perfect okay sorry it was *name* right? Yeah. Okay nice to meet you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, well that went pretty smoothly I think. So I'm committing to just handing over the money regardless of what quotation comes back. Let's see if they give me a good deal or rip me off. Oh, buddy got back to me. Do I like white or black? I think I like white. It is mind blowing to me that we don't do more of this back home. He's just like, yeah, what's your number? Can I just text you? Boom, sends me a gallery of systems. Like, yeah, how do you want it? White or black? What's your vibe? It's great. It feels so personal. He asked what brands I like. I don't know what brand is good. Just trusting you to put together the best system that looks like you said, f***ing awesome. Man, he keeps wanting to ask me he's like, do you want AMD Intel? I'm like, which one should I get? You tell me man. Let's go. Give me a good system. Step three, payment. I was legitimately pretty stressed at this point. I don't have any idea what my work credit card limit is. And accounting is not gonna be impressed when I hand them a receipt for some computer in some foreign currency with no tangible asset to show for it. What, I'm gonna carry this thing home with me? I'm gonna have to find someone to give this thing away to before I leave. But that's a problem for another day. Just got the quote, time to pay my deposit on what I think is gonna be a pretty sick system. Okay let's see if my card works. When I finish I'll write you a ticket and then... Great and then I can come pick up Friday? Yeah. Perfect. All right, yep should be good. Great. Okay great. So
you'll message me on Thursday or Friday? Yeah. Okay perfect. Thank you very much. Success eventually. Shout
out bank one for the you know fraud detection. This random 5,000 US dollar transaction overseas
and I guess also shout out bank two for having my back and making sure my money can be spent.
Ended up using that card. Sorry accounting department. We'll get it reconciled. Now we play
the waiting game. I can't believe it. Let me just tap a card. I didn't even have to
enter my PIN. Just like scribble on a touch screen for my signature and poof
money gone. Let's see what I get in return. I wouldn't blame you for thinking. Does the world really need another handheld gaming PC at this point? Here it is, my friends. Concrete proof that satire is dead. I think you can take notes faster than that. Like the speedy segue. To our sponsor! Who's laughing now, Colton? Woo! Woo! Well, he says it's ready. Good luck, everybody. Can't believe he finished in three days. I don't know what this is, sorry. It's a computer. Oh, we spent five grand on a computer. U.S. U.S.? The best part is we have absolutely no way of transporting this thing home, so we're gonna have to like give it away or something. Oh, okay. Yeah. All right, well that's probably fine. Oh. Hi. Just picking up the system. Okay. Wow. That looks awesome. Wow, hold on, I wanna get a picture of it. So you did like a thermal test already? Yep. Awesome. I guess I should have asked this before is there some
warranty on the system or how like how if I have a problem with it Can you guys fix it? Yeah for how long? One year, okay, great Three, four years you can still find me.
Oh, okay. Hmm. I came here on the bus. Good luck. Yeah Its about 40K.
Wow, okay, how many computers do you guys build every day? About five.
Wow, okay. Wow busy Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good doing business with you.
Thank you. I will I didn't have any problems. It's slimy. Okay. Sounds good. Thank you. You know, I gotta say, other than the lack of a, you know, I don't know, cart or something to carry the system out of here, that's about as boutique an experience as I could have expected. I mean, he had it running a test suite and everything right when I walked in the door so I could see everything running, including thermal testing. It's all packed up nicely. He gave me all my accessories. He seemed confused by the fact that I wanted a receipt for such an
expensive purchase, but other than that, pretty good experience. I want to know, is this system so custom, that if he didn't give
you a receipt, you would still know how to work with it, or is that it? Uh, I mean, he's only been at that location, he said, for seven
months, so I don't know how they would have known. Do they just take people's word for it? The level of trust seems pretty high. I mean, he doesn't even leave
his store supervised, so... Why did I choose to shop on the fifth floor? I don't know. This is very reminiscent of our early days, though. Are you following you around a tech hall or tech spot? Are you
calling weird stuff? I thought you meant the early days of the channel, and I was going
to say, yeah, it was fun doing a video like this. It's so hard these days, because, like, a lot of the time people
recognize me. I wasn't sure if he was going to know LTT. It's possible he did, but he just has a good poker face, I'm not
sure, because I did kind of seem like a real idiot. No, I don't know what Intel is, you know? If I was anywhere other than Taipei, I would not want to ride a bus
with this thing. But we're not, are we? Okay, so he said he builds four to five systems a day. Wow. Does that seem about right? In the shop, yeah, probably I mean looking at how much inventory
that you're carrying probably not systems like this But okay, then why were you surprised by three days? Because I thought he might have to wait for you know water blocks
to come in stock and stuff like that like there's a lot Of specialized parts in here. I Didn't think he'd necessarily have a 4090 on hand small shops back
home stock almost nothing when it comes to high-end hardware I mean look at the stuff. We cleared out of Keith's shop Oh, yeah, I think you guys are gonna be pretty impressed when we
have a look at how this stacks up to that Main Gear system Finally, let's have a look at what we got. Haven't done an unboxing in a long time. I'm rusty. No, no, I don't need help. I got this. Dang it. No, I'm not gonna break it. I'm not gonna break it. Okay. Oh, right, I forgot to mention, really good packaging, by the way. It's double boxed and uses a really, really nice closed sell foam. Even though this system is probably too heavy for the packaging, if it was a more reasonable one, I think it would survive shipping pretty well. Not that they would normally ship the systems to the customer at a store like that. It occurs to me, I don't know what the store is called. Oh, not bad. Wow. Those U-bends though. Okay, buddy's got skills. Let's get this side panel off. This is so flipping clean. It wasn't that long ago that Bykski would have been considered a budget tier water cooling brand, but I gotta say, they do not look out of place in this system. And the craftsmanship of these bends is just. Outstanding, this length right here is the hardest one to nail
because this one or this one. Well, you can always do the bend and then make slight adjustments
to it after the fact. This one right here, you can't adjust and he's got it perfectly
parallel to the rest of the case. That is awesome. You know, I'm looking for flaws here and I just I can't find them. When an ignorant customer gives you a budget, you could just. Not bother buying a vertical GPU mount. You could just pocket the difference. You could not bother putting in the extra work of grabbing a reverse direction fan so that from the inside, you know, all the hubs are facing in, but they put in the work. Okay. Maybe the backside, maybe the cable management sucks. Let's have a look. Not bad. Not bad at all. Oh, I found a flaw. Andy. Ah, he's an Andy man. The peels are still on. Okay, not a flaw for my camera operator. He's into that. I like peels removed. No, keep that. No, no. And while we're back here, we've got a Seasonic Vertex 1200 watt fully modular power supply. Multiple opportunities to cheap out there, chose not to. All right, time to fire it up. How convenient is it that our hotel has a little gaming room? Look at this. Why don't you put English windows on it? Yeah, maybe. Let's hope. You ready? Big moment. Wow Wow, buddy When the instruction is make it look F*** awesome and you deliver this You followed the instructions. This looks great And I'm just admiring again how parallel these tubes are this one
coming off the reservoir is Perfectly aligned with the one coming off the GPU which again he
had to spend extra in order to achieve to put in these spacers I can't find a cut corner at least not yet. What about the spec?
Maybe main gear comes out ahead there Conveniently we can check that with the preloaded ida64 extreme.
Very nice It's a trial version, which is technically not what you're supposed
to do. But let's have a look at the specs here. Oh my god Andy Main gear just got taken for a f**king walk They had a core i5 right? This has a 7950 x3d top chip on the market Okay, they had a 4080 super which is pretty okay 4090 they had 16 gigs of ram. I'm looking at wait, wait, wait,
wait, hold on. Oh, I don't know. How about 64? What do we got for storage? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,
whoa, whoa, whoa, dude. They had 512 gigs of storage This has 8 times that amount. Okay. It was a little sloppy leaving
my uninitialized drive That's not great. It's a lot better than not having it How are we doing for bloatware though? Aida64, Ryzen master Furmark obviously those are not part of a bare windows install, but
I don't consider them malicious in any way So i'm okay with that msi center and video track. Yeah, i'm the one
who put obs on it Nothing Zero bloatware. I feel like this is too good to be true though. No
one can be perfect Oh, I got something. Expo is not enabled and my RAM is running at
3600 mega transfers per second. That is very slow for a Ryzen system. Let's
see if we can turn it on. To his credit though, that's a nice up-to-date BIOS.
Love to see that. Okay, moment of truth. Did he validate Expo and maybe it just
reset? We're gonna find out. Does that basically CPU block have a coolant
temperature? LCD on it? Three hours later. No post. Oh wait, wait! It changed. The code changed from 15 to 64. Oh. The good news is the fix should
be as simple as removing half of the memory, still giving me twice as much as my
main gear would have had as long as I can actually get it out. The water
tubes are a little bit in the way. Still no dice. But I do have an idea. It's been a long time since I've seen this
really matter, but I noticed that my two dual channel kits, you can tell from the
serial numbers, are separated. So here's the two I pulled out before, which were in a dual channel
pair, and here's the one I pulled out just now. 1010. That's a kit. And the one that's in there in this one are another kit. Usually doesn't make that big of a difference, but if the sticks
have different ICs on them, it can cause compatibility issues, especially running at maximum speed. Wait. No way. Was that it? Dude. Okay, I haven't seen that in years. That's like ancient troubleshooting from the dark times. 5600 mega transfers. That's it. It's such a simple error. You open up two kits, you just have all four sticks, you put them in in any order, and... 50/50 chance. You get it wrong. Let's put the other two back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's put the other two back. Let's see. I'm gonna give it one more chance, and then I'm gonna pull those
two sticks, and we're gonna call it 32 gigs. Yeah. Well, there you have it. It wouldn't be an LTT video without a
little bit of troubleshooting, and I still consider it a win for the system configuration, but I'm not super thrilled about my memory running at 3600
megatransfers per second by default. And needing to spend a bunch of time moving memory sticks around in
order to get 5600. Which, on this platform, would result in a measurable performance
difference. Hmm, I just noticed Google Chrome was pre-installed too. It's one of the first things that I install, so I just didn't
really register it, but... Questionable. While this is some stress tests, why don't we have a look at how
the shop handled all of our included accessories? Okay, good. Power cable in a pretty obvious spot right here. All
manuals included, extra cables included for our power supply. Pretty much as expected. GPUs don't come with much in the way of
accessories these days, but the reason I want to open this one up is I want to see what he did
with the stock cooler because that card is not water cooled by default. This is S
tier. This is exactly what I would do if I was taking the time to do it
myself. He pulled out every screw, obviously, to get the block on, and he put every screw back in where it goes. So putting this card back together is as simple as undoing it, remembering everything, putting the PCB back in the middle, and doing it all back up. If there's one thing that I could criticize, it's that maybe I would cover up this thermal paste so it doesn't get goop on my hands when I'm trying to handle it in the future. That's really such a nitpick, though. This is really good. There's my two kits of memory, one of which works at a time. Legit Windows 11, can't take that for granted in smaller shops, but there it is right there. It's worth noting that we did find some minor errors, but I'm still extremely happy for the price. Buddy was extremely responsive, and the customer service was maybe too much. He messaged me at 2.30 in the morning last night, being like, "Did you set it up?" It's a fair assumption that someone who just bought a $5,000 gaming
PC is probably up all night playing on it, but maybe not at 2:30 in the morning next time. Still, it's cool to have that personalized touch, and I genuinely
felt like he just wanted to know if I loved this system. Let's go find out if we love it. Not bad. 10 minutes of FurMark and Prime95 blend. Nothing has crashed, and the hotspot on this GPU is under 70
degrees. And, okay, it doesn't get that Quiet at idle. But it isn't any louder under load, so I consider this extremely acceptable. Let's fire up a real game. Casual 350 FPS at 4K, anyone? Sure, why not? Well, it works great. I think it's time for us to take this out and find somebody to give it to. We're gonna keep it simple. The first person who walks up and says hi, they get a computer. Mainly, I just don't wanna carry it for very long. Maybe I'll walk to the bakery I like. I feel ridiculous. If we were at the show floor, we'd probably have better luck. Hello? Sorry? Are you Linus? I don't know how to pronounce it Yeah, hi! I love your videos! It's an honor to meet you Oh cool, so it's your lucky day Yes, it's very lucky for me No no no, you don't know though You don't know why it's your lucky day Because I'm giving that computer to the first person who recognizes me on the street I don't know what to say, I'm in shock, thank you. Is this real? Yeah. You might need to get an Uber or a taxi or something. I can give you some cash to take a cab 'cause I think your bike is gonna be not able to carry it. All the accessories are in there, all the cables and everything like that. Congratulations. Enjoy your computer. Thank you so much. And enjoy this segue to my sponsor. Vessi, here in Vancouver, we learned these past couple of weeks that just because it's June, doesn't mean we're free of rainstorms quite yet. But thankfully we have a secret weapon, Vessi. They claim their shoes are extremely waterproof thanks to their Dymotex technology. So even that June monsoon won't leave us shaking in our boots. The Stormburst shoes are now available in low profile form so
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guys enjoyed this video why not check out the time I built a computer at a tech mall in
China.
