This MUST be a Scam... "Treasure Box" Gaming PC

this glitter bombed Dell Optiplex is not only a real product you can actually buy but it's just a small part of an entire hidden and plain sight industry of refurbishers who seem to be bulk buying retired office PCS dazzling them up and then offloading them to wannabe Gamers I have so many questions right now are people actually buying these who are the companies building them is it possible that they're a legit good value and why is it taking so long to tell you this message from our sponsor the ridge it's time to ditch that bulky wallet because the ridge wallet can hold up to 12 cards comes with a cash strap or money clip and is available in tons of colors check them out at ridge.com line us now and save up to 40 through December 22nd the treasure box first popped up on our radar and a back to school flyer earlier this year but other than having a little chuckle about the creative idea of throwing glittery lipstick on Pig computers to blow away debtstalk we didn't pay them much attention that is until we saw them in the next week's flyer and the one after that and the one after that and then upon further inspection we realized these things are everywhere in some shape or form Amazon Walmart Newegg Best Buy some site called you buy based out of the country of Jordan now most of them aren't explicitly marketed as gaming PCs but given the aesthetic and the imagery it's pretty clear what Market they're going after and truthfully why not we've shown multiple times that a cast off office computer with some strategic upgrades can be an unbeatable value for Budget Gamers maybe these are too so to find out we bought a couple of them starting with the best treasure box brand unit that we could find 4th gen core i7 32 gigs of RAM a one terabyte SSD RGB lighting and a fully licensed copy of Windows 10 for the low low price of just 300 US dollars Secrets will be fine inside your head I actually really like the way they've done this finish I assumed it would be like spray bombed or something like that but it actually appears to be like almost like a grip tape type of texture pretty good in person oh it's not sticking very well here but you got to give them credit for being completionist about it they not only do the top and front but also the sides and bottom actually looks kind of sharp doesn't it oh wow that is the genericist memory ever just bear dims no stickers whatsoever with SK hynix packages on it it even looks like very clean like almost too clean to the point where they might even be sourcing this stuff new that doesn't make any sense I would think given that it's older like there is so much used DDR3 on the market that they wouldn't bother to Source new sticks but it might be as simple as they're just peeling the stickers off whatever it is they happen to find and then throwing them in to genericize them why would they do that because then they would have difficulty claiming warranty from whoever they're getting these sticks from what about our SSD okay it may be a terabyte but it is certainly nothing special King fast not exactly um the leader in performance ssds oh okay there we go oh mother are you bleeding oh yeah it was here and it was so sharp that I didn't even slide be right back this is great though even a cheap SSD can make a world of difference to the responsiveness of a system the SSD that I paid in blood to identify turned out to be a king fast F10 one terabyte not the world's fastest SSD and because it doesn't have a dram cache there are cases where it could actually end up being slower than a mechanical hard drive but with light desktop use those cases would be few and far between and it would be a substantial upgrade over whatever mechanical storage might have been in the system also because many businesses shred their storage devices when they donate or liquidate PCS it's likely that there wasn't anything in here in the first place since we've got a better look at the motherboard now seems like a good time to look at that there is a pcie 16x slot down here that could be used for GPU expansion but because this is a slim chassis you'd be limited to cards that are half height but full length as long as they don't have a bulky dual slot cooler that would interfere with your SATA ports over here that's curious there's an RGB strip in the front but I don't actually see what's powering it oh wow it's two separate RGB strips in there hey wait a minute the front of the case only has two cutouts for USB ports but the system itself has four oh crap I just powered it on they stick it over them as best as we can tell the only reason to do this might be because there are versions of this chassis that only have two front USB ports and this way they would only have to stock one version of this front bezel sticker but then we found listings for treasure box PCS that do have all four ports cut out so we're really really not sure what the deal is with that time for some USB port surgery and ideally I won't cut myself again this is a very sharp knife Jerry rig everything lttstore.com uh Brandon just don't get too close to this hey yeah sure oh failed the second one though look at that clean almost as clean as the windows install on the treasure box PC I was actually really impressed to see that outside of VLC and the games and applications that we've installed this machine contains no bloatware like antivirus or freemium games or anything like that uh does this ever load like is this no I'm surprised it's still up honestly unfortunately this is about as far as we get Beyond light games from like 10 years ago this thing is going to struggle to do pretty much any gaming and given the marketing there are almost certainly parents or grandparents who have ended up with disappointed kids when their new computer can barely run Minecraft but if we adjust our expectations a little bit the treasure box is actually looking like a pretty okay value I mean sure it's based on an older platform and it doesn't have the latest bells and whistles like USB type-c but as long as you're not trying to run applications it doesn't support day to day the responsiveness of the system is actually pretty okay thanks to that basic SSD boot drive now you could build one yourself for cheaper we ended up pricing out all the pieces inside for anywhere from 185 to 240 dollars depending on promos and availability but not everyone has the technical know-how or the desire to do that and for peace of mind it comes with a one year warranty I had some doubts about that warranty actually being honored but if user reviews are anything to go by these guys mostly stand behind their product I would be interested to test that ourselves though can we give it a shot maybe post a little note in the video description with how it goes yeah we'll do that okay cool but as we showed before these machines are everywhere and not all of them come from that same company meat the techdale PC for um Dale this one doesn't have a catchy name like treasure box but they've certainly gussied it up a little bit we've got this uh what appears to be like a blue vinyl sticker whatever this is I guess we'll figure that out later they've also added a like a some stickers on the top oh interesting that's just to make the case look less scuffed and beat up there's a little lip here see there's a sticker and you can actually see the like beat up case in there I was wondering why they would bother to do that and they've got a cut out for where the original Windows KOA went paddle too they actually vinyl the whole thing it's just way more subtle maybe there's treasure anyway um now there's dust it's a sort of uh but dead skin cell treasure I think only 256 gigs but this one was cheaper I have never heard of hajjan Apparently that is a house brand for techdale um they call this the most powerful SSD I think not we've got not one not two but three different types of ram in here I have no idea what the meaning of these two x's wiped into the dust are but we've actually got a GPU in here n30 not the most powerful thing in the world but it should manage CS go at the very least more compact RGB controller but oh there's definitely RGB let's go ahead and fire this thing up not as nicely put together as the other one but I gotta say even if it's only a GT 1030 it's probably going to make a pretty big difference to have a discrete GPU of some sort in here oh that's cool look at that RGB strip here and an infinity mirror RGB strip only 16 gigs of RAM this time third gen processor and only a 256 gig SSD but we also have a 500 gig hard drive and this machine was only 300 Canadian dollars it's not strictly advertised as a gaming PC but it comes with this multifunctional RGB backlit gaming three in one combo so I think it's fair to say that CS go should probably at least launch on it oh wow I have never seen a keyboard whose RGB is controlled via remote before first time for everything we're actually not 100 sure of the price for this one because since we ordered it the page has completely disappeared and the guy who has the invoice isn't here right now so you're going to see an on-screen correction if I didn't get it right what is this is this a is this a USB thumbstick oh this is a wireless dongle for what oh it's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth yeah there's the WPS button okay that makes sense okay yeah sure that can go in the front why not oh that actually looks pretty cool not bad and it turns out that the remote is actually for the oh wait oh for the oh for that oh okay wow it's all RGB [Music] oh do like the shiny lights oh this is not a good keyboard in case you were wondering but I'm getting it's on dip to 30 there felt it about 60 FPS I mean it's not the greatest gaming experience though In fairness techtail doesn't advertise this as a gaming PC even though clearly that's their intent and they do have a history of selling gaming PCs that are in the thousand dollar range and still use a GT 1030 meaning that the gaming experience isn't going to be much better however yet again it's not technically a terrible price if you take into account things like the legit copy of Windows the ease of setup and the warranty through whatever platform you purchased it on this one would even be able to play some games at low to medium settings without too much hassle a fact that techtail has included in the description without too much Hyperbole and because both of the machines we looked at are using industry standard or at the very least Dell standard Parts either of them can be maintained or upgraded with better gpus down the line turning them into surprisingly competent little gaming boxes it's no wonder these things are so popular but we still haven't answered the biggest question where are these things all coming from China India no Toronto Ontario Canada that's right both Advanced skytech Global maker of the treasure box and techdale are headquartered within 20 minutes of each other and a little bit farther down the street you'll find high-tech Bay yet another Glam furbisher as we've started calling them we can't be a hundred percent sure why there's such a high concentration of these companies in that area but we do have a couple of guesses first up is that Toronto and its surrounding suburbs is the business capital of Canada so the regular supply of machines like this likely greatly outstrips the local demand meaning that they can easily export them to other regions second is that Markham in particular is a tech Hub that contains the Canadian headquarters of countless big names like Asus AMD and also our friends over at infinite cables finally one of the defining characteristics of the PC industry is the Shameless copying that takes place between competitors so my best guess then is that word about how effective a quick coat of paint or sticker as it were got out pretty quickly leading to almost immediate copycatism and given a little bit more time I'm sure many more of these companies are going to be popping up near business hubs around the world as an advocate for keeping E-Waste out of landfills I'm actually pretty happy to see these machines finding their ways to new homes and I also feel like it's worth giving a shout out to Microsoft's role in all of this every one of these companies claims some form of legitimacy by being part of the Microsoft authorized refurbisher program skytech and high tech Bay are both listed on Microsoft's website and techdale we think is probably purchasing these licenses from a Microsoft authorized refurbisher member which makes them legit now none of that means that these guys won't take your money and run when it comes warranty time but overall it seems like there's a fair number of happy customers out there and like I said before I think that's a really good thing to be clear I don't think that Microsoft is providing cheap Windows 10 licenses to these guys out of the goodness of their hearts some money is probably better than the no money that they'd be making if refurbishers did what they used to do and simply pirated windows but legit Windows adds peace of mind for would-be buyers keeping these things out of the landfills and honestly I doubt this program really moves the needle for Microsoft compared to the work it takes to maintain so I'm glad they're doing it the question remains though should you buy one well this is Linus Tech tips so obviously our first choice would be to Cobble something together ourselves from hand-picked used parts if you need a very simple PC that requires no knowledge to set up or build and you don't have much of a budget and maybe you need some semblance of a warranty this could be a good choice I would at least consider the extra 100 bucks for something brand new like this unit from HP even if it's just to ensure that I'll have support for future Windows updates but Windows 10 still got a lot of life left in it and in this price range an extra hundred dollars is a lot of money that could have been used for a GPU upgrade I was expecting to dunk on these things for the somewhat misleading marketing and general cringiness of them but given that they've basically just commercialized but we've been advocating for for years I guess I can't go too hard on them at least not as hard as I go segwaying to our sponsor vesi do you ever struggle to figure out what to wear in unpredictable weather well Vesti says their shoes are 100 waterproof keeping your feet dry in the wettest of weather they're lightweight and easy to pack sneakers offer you reassurance when the snow and rain start coming down putting them on and taking them off is super easy and their shoes are made from cruelty free products right down to the glue and whether it's a rainy city or a Rocky Trail the herringbone tread design is there to help stop you from slipping around so treat your feet with Messy Footwear and save 25 with our offer code Linus Tech tipsy.com Linus detectives if you guys enjoyed this video you might enjoy some of the more detailed guides we've done on how to find and buy a cheap workstation on eBay and turn it into a sleeper gaming monster

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,359,700

Keywords: Dell, refurbished, treasure box, used computers, e-waste, Gaming PC, budget gaming, budget pc, recycled pc, used dells, optiplex, optiplex gaming

Id: W8snwlE93aE

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 07 2022

Reddit Comments

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