The Worst Prebuilt PC Mistakes We've Seen (So Far)

[Music] today's video is going to be really fun we're doing a video about the worst mistakes we've seen and pre-built so far some of them are comically bad to the point where you're crying at the end of it because of the state the world's in because they ship things like this wow that's crazy and also sometimes they ship this there's your uh chassis io built into the motherboard but either way our goal today is to recap some of the worst mistakes we've seen in the last year from pre-built and just in general hopefully this will help some of you with figuring out what things to look for as you buy a pre-built or recommend them for friends and family and maybe if you're new to this stuff it'll help you learn how to fix the problems on your own and troubleshoot them or you can just watch this for entertainment because uh it's either it's either depressing or extremely funny how bad some of the mistakes have been before that this video is brought to you by squarespace we use squarespace for our own gn store and juggle complex multi-piece orders all the time with it squarespace makes it fast for us to roll out new products with detailed pages full of galleries videos and descriptors it's also useful for your own resume sites for photographer or project portfolios or for starting your new small business idea there's never been a better time to try and start your new business than right now and we can vouch that squarespace makes it easy visit squarespace.com gamersnexus to get 10 off your first purchase with squarespace all right so the goal of this content again is to help with a few things on the useful side you'll learn about how to identify problems hopefully before ordering the system and once you get it how to maybe fix some of those most common issues with pre-built on the the not helpful side you get to see a recap of some of our recent pre-built reviews where we've looked at dell hp alienware abs which is a newegg brand we have other ones coming in we can't name because we don't want them to know that we've bought their systems and some of them have already failed the test before they've even shipped the box because they don't know we bought it and then we've looked at skytech and lenovo's legion couple of other things as a reminder as we roll into this we have purchased all these pre-built we've looked at recently with our own money thank you to all of you who've helped us do that by buying things from the store at store.gamersnexus.net where you can pick up your own wireframe desk sized mouse mat blue and black in design with pc components and high detail on it you can also grab one of our large mod mats they have just come back in stock they're shipping out now so if you place a back order it'll ship in the next week or so if you want to grab one of the gn volt mod mods which is a pc building surface for maintaining your computer protecting your table and the parts on it and also providing quick reference materials and then of course we have our shirts like the out of stock shirts and tri-blend and comfortable cotton pick up anything like that on store.cameras.net to help us out with buying more pre-built so we get to talk about bloatware proprietary parts getting screwed hasn't the the screws are rattling around in the case when you pick it up and plenty of other problems like power supplies and coolers and cases and there's a lot of problems with pre-built let's get started proprietary parts are next on the list proprietary parts use the guise of performance or size to mask the fact that it's actually just planned obsolescence of components to force repurchases rather than repairs there isn't an upside though proprietary parts will benefit us in our not too distant dystopian future when humanity desperately harvests metal from landfills left behind by our ancestors dell and hp for example are actually helping the planet they're guaranteeing that someone is throwing away an oem computer with every passing second so these companies ensure that their is perpetually at the top of the landfill thereby making it easier for our successors to find steel out of which they can forge their spears we never said gn staff was optimistic when dell and hp swiped right on each other it was because they both listed long walks on the beach as a secondary joy to stuffing homes and landfills alike full of what could be useful gold copper fiberglass steel and aluminum fortunately system integrators have mostly moved to standardized reusable and easily serviceable or replaceable parts but oems remain entrenched in ways where a motherboard's form factor is defined as you and the cost to replace it is a new computer take a look at these motherboards common motherboard form factors are 12 by 9.6 inches 9.6 by 9.6 inches 6.7 by 6.7 inches or maybe you get into ssi ceb or eeb sizes both of which are well defined these two motherboards however one from dell and one from hp are none of those sizes they're who knows inches wide by who cares inches long because the customer is going to pay for a new one anyway and that benefits us dell and hp want to be able to use cases they designed 25 years ago and that's not much of an exaggeration so instead of installing separate i o for the front they build it into the motherboard the only advantage of any of this is that it's cheap to make but none of it is good it's trash to your components instead of buy once cry once they're following the alternative motto of buy lots of times to keep the earnings reports good that's before even talking about proprietary coolers or power supplies the coolers are about the worst thing to make non-standard because a cooler is just a brick of copper and aluminum with the fan there's nothing in it that goes bad it doesn't have an expiration date and as long as mounting is adapted forward there's also no reason an ancient cooler can't be used on new parts as long as designed well to begin with some coolers we've seen actually screw into the chassis instead of a backblade which is unusable outside of the specific case motherboard and cpu combo that ships with it and as for power supplies we'll talk about that more later bloatware has a superpower it can freeze time as in like it can freeze your system and also it has the ability to turn a brand new 2021 system into a time capsule of windows me coupled with hapless limewire and kazaa downloading acting as an anthropological fossil of a desperate time 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 bloatware is easily one of the most egregious offenses on pre-built and on laptops alike it's been going on for decades now so it's not new but it's still happening system builders often partner with bloatware providers i think they call this software but we're not really sure if it qualifies for that definition norton for example would be a common one or mcafee or whatever this control panel is the oems and the sis can get mdf for marketing development fund or affiliate fees or some form of cut to increase the install base they then figure that since they are burdening a new nvme ssd to the point of simulating seagate's best effort anyway they might as well fully commit and load it with various warranty registration pop-ups support desk pop-ups presumably so you can get support to remove the support desk pop-up command centers whose command is solely over your cpu cycles and anti-virus software that presumably doesn't work since it doesn't kill any of this other malware anyway this included software doesn't just make the system obnoxious to use it's how it can profoundly negatively impact the system performance as well especially in a latency sensitive application like video games we've run numerous bloatware tests in the past showing that real-world scenarios of bloat like on the dell g55000 can produce significantly worse gaming results than when the system is cleaned up after the fact hp also was offensive in its bloatware in fact the constant background services were so bad that the run to run variants in our cpu and very memory bound hitman 3 benchmark resulted in us assigning the hp legion a did not finish score many years in the past we even reviewed an msi laptop specifically for its bloatware showing how much it impacted the 0.1 lows and frame-to-frame consistency of games in this regard bloatware's sort of like pokemon you've got to catch them all and our recent alienware system review certainly showed alienware's attempt at collecting them all at least it's probably pokemon it could be like diseases too it's the same idea many of the smaller system integrators don't do this and that's fantastic that's their main advantage even if they're a little more expensive than an oem like dell or hp or lenovo these three are the guiltiest for novices these applications make the entire experience worse than it should be likely resulting in a lot of the initial swell of apple users over the past two decades for experts it's still difficult to remove a lot of this stuff because it behaves like a root kit it's stealthy it hides in the background and it buries itself in services so a lot of times it's easier to just do a clean install the next one is for ram just in general everyone screws this one up in some capacity cyber power i buy power dell alienware lenovo pretty much any system we've brought through the lab at some point has messed up on the memory it's always ramp although not every channel needs to be populated in a multi-channel platform at least using two channels is ideal and just to be clear there's no such thing as dual channel mode or dual channel ram sticks it's just how many channels the platform has sometimes oems will basically lie and say they're selling you quote-unquote dual channel ram except it's one stick going into a board that can support two channels so it's not actually two channels it's just a really clever way to sort of make it sound like it is we've also seen companies use cheap modules with fewer memory packages on the pcb resulting in potentially worse performance depending on what the memory is look at how lonely these memory modules are they have no friends or just memory with horrific timings instead like cl22 on 2933 memory we see this pop up in games like rainbow six siege where a system with otherwise good performance will absolutely balk in the frame time consistency as a result of poor memory configurations oftentimes it's not even more expensive to do this right they can just add another stick and run half the capacity per stick while getting potentially more performance this is common among every manufacturer we've looked at even though abs's challenger we bought had two sticks of ram not every model from the newegg owned house brand does as a consumer you need to keep an eye out for particularly bad memory for whatever reason this seems to be the component where they'll avoid giving you any specs beyond the stick count and maybe the capacity so you're out of luck for timings in most instances but a lot can be gauged from appearance as well assuming they even show you what it looks like in the photos we also commonly see manufacturers push way too much capacity for an otherwise underpowered system this ends up just being a waste of money if you're buying a strictly gaming pc and they're pushing 32 gigabytes of garbage ram on you just know that the difference between 16 gigabytes and 32 will almost never be noticed in daily use for something like gaming or web browsing unless you have a really bad tabs habit outside of more production focused applications but the difference in cost towards a better gpu cpu or just actually having more money to be less stressed that will be noticed the extra ram probably won't be unless you know you need it extra memory can definitely be better it's certainly better because it lets you be lazier with how you manage your applications the background it's also better for something like adobe photoshop or premiere to some extent but if you still have a low end i5 in there at the end of the day there's a limit to how much that ram will help before you're just stuck somewhere else anyway of course there's no reason to limit getting screwed to just these parts you can also get screwed by the literal screws in the computers we've been to screw factories in the past some of which even advertise a screw class try your worst commenters but we've never been screwed quite like how oems do it partly due to shipping and partly due to well let's be honest largely due to qc shortcomings we've had systems with screws so over torqued that they've bent steel panels in cases they've scratched off paint on the side panel and they've applied an unsettling amount of force to socketed cpus with fragile pins way unnecessary amount of force way way way too much we've also had the opposite where some systems have had screws loose enough that they ended up rolling around the case instead if they were ever even threaded to begin with well that sounds good so that hole that's supposed to have a screw in it the motherboard is not even in or motherboard screws that were nearly falling out of the threads and could be spun back in just by tapping on them a normal part of setting up your new pre-belt it seems should be to pick it up and shake it around a little bit to see if anything rattles loose coolers are the next common corner to cut we already talked about this a little bit but we saw this especially with the cyberpower build we reviewed recently the build was otherwise actually pretty good and that's the depressing part about it at least it was better than some of its competitors we reviewed what the f okay i spoke a little soon it's just like the molex centipede or but it failed our review because it was thermal throttling it was actually hitting 100 degrees celsius which is unacceptable literally they had one job and it was to build a functioning computer the build is completely salvageable with a cooler replacement even something like a to the consumer 30 veteran v5 or similar but the fact that the oem didn't even bother is the part that's offensive the alienware r10 we reviewed despite having water cooling suggestions on its box actually just had a cooler that's worse than an intel stock cooler and that was on an amd r75800 cpu so once again we see an example of a cpu which is woefully undercooled compared to the rest of the basically two thousand dollar computer you could literally buy a better cooler for about seven dollars on aliexpress than what was in the alienware two thousand dollar r10 we reviewed that's not exaggeration it's also common for pre-built to include one twenty millimeter aio liquid coolers in their system presumably because the words liquid cooler means this is good or something to consumers who think that water is magic especially though ira power and nzxt's bld series with for example the m22 in the past like to use these small liquid coolers 120 ml liquid coolers in a word are bad we've tested a lot of them over the years and we basically stopped testing them because the conclusion was always that they're bad they're a waste of money when compared to a cheap air cooler 120 millimeter aos makes sense for some gpus and for many itx or sff pcs that just strictly can't fit better but in an atx build or a mid tower or micro atx it should either be a larger liquid cooler or a small tower cooler the reason oems do this though is because they can get them for cheap with a pump plate that has their logo on it and then it sounds good in the marketing of course we can't leave power supplies out we've had shockingly good results in some cases like the dell g55000 power supply being actually really good in some ways then we've also just had straight up shocking results [Laughter] we've seen a lot of pre-built include bad power supplies and to the great credit of oem's it does seem like a lot of them have learned and have taken parts from their server business and repurposed them they're not flashy they're actually kind of annoying to work with but in our testing thus far they've been reliable meanwhile system integrators use whatever because who cares it's a power supply and the only thing they put on it is how many watts sometimes that means newegg starts cramming gigabyte exploiting power supplies into abs pre-built and nzxe build has done the same for some of its pre-builds in for example germany when we were looking at their options there we've also discovered power supplies that are just horrifically inefficient like the raid max one and one of our pre-built we reviewed and could be significantly better at minimal cost to either the user or the manufacturer pre-built manufacturers also often over spec the psus but not in a helpful or good way budget gets spent on high capacity or high wattage because saying 800 watts somehow makes you better than the company that says 500 watts even though they're actually supplying the same components with power this is as opposed to spending the money as the manufacturer on actually useful features like protections and efficiency while sticking closer to the needed amount of power and all this is without even talking about the weird once again proprietary parts where it's not quite a tfx power supply it's definitely not an atx power supply and it's not technically 12vo because it doesn't have a 10-pin motherboard header no these are special power supplies that again large oems like to use where the power supply might otherwise be fine and pass all of its protections but can't be used in anything else ever because that would be bad then you wouldn't need to buy another one so that'll be it for the most obvious and egregious mistakes we've seen recently there's a lot more of course we had the one issue where the ibuypower system shipped and the video card had basically ripped the socket partly out of the motherboard that was pretty cool there was also the time that walmart filled the usb 3.0 header with hot glue that was also a really unique and innovative tool for building a computer it didn't happen this year though so we left it out and there's plenty more we can talk about if there's something either we've looked at or you've found on your own in a pre-built please feel free to leave it in the comments below we can't possibly fit all the mistakes in the video but this one's got the most common ones hopefully this provides some educational value for what you can look out for how to fix the problems as you learn more about pcs even if you're not building them yourself yet it's shockingly easy to immediately improve a system from an oem especially by just going through a few of these things on our list and trying to address that one issue at a time like the bloatware for example and if you're an expert then it's still helpful because it gives you something to point at and say i build computers better than that billion dollar company that's about the best that's the most positive angle we have for it thanks for watching as always you can subscribe for more like this go to store.gamersnexus.net to help us out buying more pre-builds and just to get something quality in return that you can use or you can go to patreon.comgamersnexus for behind the scenes videos and some extras and check out our new pre-built pc review playlist we'll link it below in case you want to see some of these systems in action maybe find some of the better ones thanks for watching we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 482,028

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, prebuilt gaming pcs, worst prebuilt gaming pcs, gaming pc build mistakes, pc building mistakes, hp pavilion review, dell g5 review, cyberpower review, ibuypower review

Id: E-d8P_7gqp0

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/DL7610]

Steve missed the actual worst mistake that that a person can make buying a prebuilt gaming PC.

That you end up with something like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Gaming-PC-Desktop-Intel-i5-16-GB-1TB-WIN-10-NVIDIA-GT-710-2GB-Girly-Pink-Style-/333879111387?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l49286&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0

A box with RGB lights, i5-2400 and GT710 for $700+

[u/Lazy-Choice7445]

Honestly, I love GN's style of critical reviews. They aren't afraid to call companies out for their shit, and are doing a good job currently at pointing out just how much of a disaster the prebuilt market really is. On one end you have the large SIs like Dell and HP somewhat competently putting together systems, but using proprietary everything cheaping out at every last opportunity, and smaller companies using more open DIY components but failing miserably at basic things.

[u/InvincibleBird]

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - This Shouldn't Be Hard
• 03:08 - Proprietary Parts
• 05:52 - Bloatware
• 08:52 - RAM
• 11:40 - Screws
• 12:54 - Coolers
• 15:10 - Power Supplies
• 17:06 - Conclusion

[u/IceBeam92]

Anyone else would like to see Steve doing a video on an iMac or any other Apple computer as a prebuilt now? I think that would probably be a comedy gold.

[u/inaccurateTempedesc]

I think the elephant in the room is laptops. Can't help but wonder if the same stuff is happening there.

[u/Amaran345]

Prebuilts are not that enticing these days because of pricing, they now have good sales numbers so the prices are up, and they still have all the disadvantages that are mentioned on the video