Walmart vs. CyberPower for Worst Pre-Built PC: Overheating GMA 4600 BST

we bought a full pre-built system just to review its motherboard since the AMD B 558 chipset boards aren't available for the DIY market well actually they technically they sort of are since they're basically be 450 but with unlocked PCIe gen 4 for the top slot and for the first two m dot two device but the point remains we couldn't buy a B 550 a motherboard without buying an entire computer and so now we're stuck with a system that we might as well review we've all this cyber power GMA 4600 VST from Best Buy without cyber power knowing about it and now we get to take another crack at a real customer experience just like with the Walmart PC previously we've been complaining to cyber power for years about its thermal solution for most of my career anyway and now it's time to see if anyone has listened before that this video is brought to you by Ray Khan and they're each 25 wireless earbuds the rake on e 25 at your buds have six hours of playback time and include a pill case to protect and recharge the earbuds for up to 24 hours the earbuds are socketable into the pillowcase to recharge without a cable making it convenient for travelers and protected from wear and tear there are also capable of relatively long transmission range so you don't always need the phone in your pocket the rake on e 25 s are priced affordably and available for 15% off with the link in the description below or you can visit beret Kong comm slash gamers Nexus the system we bought seems to be mostly sold that best buy for this one it's about $1,100 that we paid for this it's called the GMA 4600 VST from what we understand this is a pretty common model for the type of customer who might walk into Best Buy to buy a gaming computer so first of all we need to just make sure everyone understands the type of audience for this pre-built system because a lot of the system building enthusiasts audience gets really elitist really fast about pre-built and there are real reasons to get them I wouldn't be here today doing this job if it didn't start with pre builds because you start with some kind of box you realize it's not that good and you start upgrading it over time maybe you turn into an enthusiast at the end or maybe you don't that's fine too because there are a lot of parents or grandparents or just people who don't want to build the system for themselves or someone else so who we'll rely on a prebuilt someone's kid wants to play fortnight and they don't have the time to deal with it and learn how to build a computer and so they go to Best Buy and they buy one and that's all fine now what we obviously would like to see is that the pre-built SAR good or at least designs to the standards that enthusiasts have because if they're designed to our standards and to our viewers standards in terms of component choice and cases and thermals and everything else then they're gonna be real damn good for the average consumer who walks in off the street and buys a system to take home there are a couple of upsides of course to buying a prebuilt as well you do have to count in the fact that there's a warranty that's a single point of contact so something fails you send the whole thing in or maybe you get a replacement from one company rather than multiple companies another upside is that there is a support line and they will support you with the entire system as opposed to you buy a video card you plug it in and you have issues it becomes kind of nebulous is that AMD is problem and videos problem where is that Vav partners problem or something else entirely and will they even support you in terms of what you pay for that and what you pay for the assembly which is a labor cost it's actually not too bad Zaira power did and always has done reasonably well on the pricing of the components their execution not so good we'll talk about that but pricing is good so what you get is a MDR 730 700 X rise in CPU you get 16 gigabytes of RAM across two sticks which is way better than expected we often see one stick for this stuff and you also get an AMD rx with the 700 reference card the motherboard was at asrock B 550 am gaming which is supposed to target the sub $80 motherboard market but isn't available to DIY that's a B 450 board we have a whole separate video on that the cooler is a cooler master downdraft cooler that's cheaper for cyber power to purchase than buying the AMD stock cooler coincidentally the stock cooler from AMD is also made by cooler master but saira power bi CPUs by the tray typically and then buys coolers separately in pallets so their downdraft cooler is a lot cheaper and a lot worse than a stock AMD cooler but we'll talk about that later you also get a WD green 240 gigabyte SSD and you got a 2 terabyte uninitialized hard drive in terms of pricing again not too bad the price ends up to be about a hundred to two hundred dollars above DIY part for part for the most part there's a few things you can't match but that's about where it is which isn't too bad now the problem is one hundred two hundred dollars more a better be built perfectly because that's what you're paying for and that's where we run into the first problem with the system it was not built perfectly and we don't mean in a nitpicky sense of the cables were managed this way and we want it this way we mean in the sense that the hard drive wasn't even initialized you can't use it out of the box fail so bad so when Patrick set up the system and came back out of the test room maybe a minute later to say you won't believe this it was like a flashback of what happened with the aiwei power system the prevail and with the Walmart system so we are now oh four three on pre-built out of the box nothing's configure drawn experience we're not even looking for is it good we're looking for did they set it up correctly and this is a matter of right-clicking a drive in Windows and setting up a simple volume so and that's what by the way if you bought the system you're trying to figure out how to fix it go to just start typing disk management di ask a.m. GMT I think we'll get you there and initialize the drive you'll be good but it's easy to fix it's just you should not have to fix and out-of-the-box issue with a pre built computer the whole damn points of the pre-built computers so anyway the I read power system last year didn't have BIOS configured to run XMP and that was after Linus's big secret shopper video that exposed similar issues previously we also found more problems on that but that was the main one the Walmart PC booted to a boot media not found of screen when we repurchased it recently because the wrong device was selected in BIOS CyberPower is turned on and even had the right memory speed but only had the 240 gigabyte SSD visible in Windows the two terabyte hard drive wasn't the initialized or formatted so it wasn't usable this by the way is also part of what has allowed Apple to grow because Apple as much as you might dislike it and I personally do have a lot of issues with Apple's Hardware Apple wouldn't get this kind of thing wrong and that's why it's gotten itself into the position it's in it'll get a whole hell of a lot of other things wrong but this type of thing is so basic so the point being that it's driving people away from just Windows and and towards other things anyway this over all the tracks from the confidence that the rest of the build will be any good if they can't even initialize the drives that's problem and you're gonna have customers who bought this saying I thought it had two terabytes I need more memory by which they mean storage space but and then they're either gonna return it or buy something else or buy something an addition to it or get ripped off so that's the problems there so cyber powers credit the company did do a number of things well the sticker on the back of the case is a great way to make sure purchasers don't make one of the most common mistakes of plugging a monitor into onboard video if present the company also has always done exceptionally well on packaging we filmed it probably six or more years ago but the packing foam used internally basically inflates to conform to the internal components of the system so this protects the video card and shipping it's good attention to detail and it works well as far as the rest the main upside is that CyberPower didn't install any bloatware on the system so that is a really genuinely nice departure from what you might get out of a huge OEM like the mainstream ones most companies will install bloatware on systems because they get some sort of marketing development fund or a profit sharing agreement so it makes sense because from a business perspective they want to make money back but for a consumer perspective it's a horrible practice and one of the things that companies like CyberPower ibuypower origin and the other more boutique system integrators do they've always had the advantage of not putting bloatware on the systems for the most part and that's a big upside all right we need to talk about thermals on this thing rather than implementing any of the usual controls we would do for a thermal test like with case reviews where we control fan speeds carefully and we set the RPMs for every device so that we know exactly what it's doing we decided to instead test this out of box and in a way a real user we still control the ambience and all the usual environment variables but we didn't control anything that the system was doing at all other than the software that was running on it that means whatever fan speeds CyberPower configured whatever bios settings they pre applied and whatever case they decided to use we left all that alone our first test is a thermal torture test where both the CPU and the GPU are loaded first off you can see that the pretest idle period has the CPU oscillating between 43 and 33 degrees Celsius and we need to look at what the fan is doing once we get to the next chart the CPU ramps extremely hard at the outside of the thermal load and is unable to spit up quickly enough for the load spike I mean 80 degrees Celsius within about 90 seconds of the test starting remember that this is an AMD 3700 X CPU so every 5 degrees Celsius or so increase will reduce the frequency of the processor during the first load spike with the CPU and GPU combined the CPU caps out at 95 degrees Celsius and the system only stays on thanks to thermal throttling otherwise it would have shut down from t.j.maxx the GPU is still steadily climbing at this point and it ends up hitting about 94 degrees Junction temperature that's actually not as bad as we'd expect out of an AMD stock cooler especially since it's a secondary exhaust in this choke enclosure the GPU edge temperature is about 80 degrees which is fine it's not great really but it's ok but of course it's not impressive if the fan RPMs are deafening so we'll need to check that as well Jiji dr6 thermals are running about 85 degrees here so we still have about 20 degrees of room for t.j.maxx on the memory the system is running exceptionally hot for CPU and GPU especially CPU and this is overall an inexcusable lack of thermal awareness from cyber power frequencies next this is where we can really show how truly bad it is we've intentionally zoomed the scale of this chart so that it's legible since you wouldn't otherwise be able to read the frequency numbers if you think we're always just complaining about temperatures simply because the numbers are bigger than if they were lower temperatures this is where we can show you how to smaller than just numbers it's also performance it's different numbers but the numbers that impact how the computer actually works the frequency starts at about forty to ten megahertz but drops slowly down to forty thirty megahertz eventually they're in a heavy load spike we sink to about thirty hundred megahertz average all-court frequency and later to about 38 70 megahertz this is exceptionally bad performance in an impressive way and we're not sure whether cyber power should be ashamed or proud that it was able to assemble a system that runs this hot the Lawson frequency is about eight percent from temperature alone the cores are all loaded the entire test so this is purely temperature dependent it's not just normal boosting behavior other than the fact that it's normal to clock down when it's overheating remember that a reduction in all core frequency of 8% can extrapolate out to a loss greater than 8% in some applications because that's going to be a loss of 8% on frequency per core since we're looking at an average of all core frequency with some worse than others here's our RPM plot the fan rpm is bouncing around when idle which would explain the earlier temperature numbers and the audible annoying whirring going on when the system was sitting around doing literally nothing as the load ramped the CPU fan reached about 2800 rpm with the GPU fan mostly around 2,000 rpm albe it with a hard drop in the middle from something more likely related to AMD drivers than anything else the 2000 rpm GPU fan has it around 49 to 50 DBA at a 20 inch distance not counting the CPU fans noise finally for a gaming thermal benchmark we're reducing the CPU load significantly and maintaining the higher GPU look the CPU ends up oscillating a lot in this one as does its fan not shown here and it bounces between 45 degrees and 55 or 58 degrees Celsius the temperatures are fine in an absolute sense but the lack of a smooth line means that noise is inconsistent which makes it a lot more noticeable we'd rather have a more sustained higher noise in terms of volume than having different types of noise fluctuating constantly and seemingly at an almost like pulsar frequency we could hear it whirring up and down from the next room over and overall this is something that needs to be fine-tuned by the user if they want to not go crazy from it the GPU edge temperature approaches 80 degrees Celsius with the junction temperature at about 90 degrees Celsius even with the reduction in CPU load this pre-built system is struggling to keep up before the GPU technically every is fine and so far as the GPU frequency isn't dropping but it's not good now that we're through all that let's take the system apart and get a better understanding of how it's built well cut over to a teardown shop that we took after we tested it but before opening it or inspecting any of it so it'll be a blind disassembly where we had no expectation of what was inside the front is completely closed off you've got this diagonal stylization and then even within that a triangle really weird small triangle at the bottom where actually there's no fan behind that it's the only place in the front where there isn't a fan that's both fans are up here you have a solid panel and then your air is technically there and that's kind of it so what we need to do now is take this apart and look more at the assembly quality of everything at this point we should have talked about the component selection and some of the smaller stuff like the sticker that they have on here to help the more likely buyers figure out where their video plugs in and that's all actually a good feature but internally let's take a look internally it looks like there's a you've got the 5709 xt reference and a bigger cooler match there's some actually rattling noise when I did that it's concerning a larger cooler master cooler on it that is not the stock and the cooler but still down draft so things immediately that they've done well the power supplies PCIe cable is actually routed through the power supply shroud cable cut out this is something that Walmart had trouble with on their PC and it's fully socketed and connected into the video card oh man that is super in there but they're not glued in so that's good that's something I have a power used to do so sorry power is using daisy chaining here technically that's fine with this card you're not going to be over the power budget of a single cable assuming the power supply is not garbage I personally like to run to individual cables but in all technical senses this is fine let's get the video card out of there so I'm gonna pull a few things out that I suspect could potentially be problematic on it hit those first my suspicions are gonna be GPU usb3 because those are the things that have been glued in slots in the past and then SATA okay so that's not glued in that is good let's hop side USB three is not glued in good job CyberPower you are already ahead of them of a Walmart okay none of these are glued well cool let's flip it over and check out the SATA that that finns deal wobble okay and this is where we start to see some of the problems this one's not too uncommon SATA power is backed out halfway on one side so it's not fully seated if it were connected properly it would look like that you get a small click when you push it back in there so shipping partially pulled out could be a concern you could potentially lose connection the end user might not know that's what the problem is Best Buy won't know that's what the problem is because they don't know much of anything these days and then the this just kind of compounds with the other problem we had which was that the two terabyte drive wasn't even formatted and ready for use so some some just general drive storage issues these cables they have taped together this one was actually coming apart and the tape wasn't not on there so the cables separating here I can see why they taped it now should probably CyberPower you should probably to wraps with this electrical tape if you're gonna try and secure stuff that way this is because RGB cables don't really sock it together if they're pretty loose so they're trying to prevent that from separating but it was separating definitely would want to see two wraps on that if they're trying to actually do anything terms of cable management I'm gonna give a CyberPower credit for actually managing these into a single Channel and still getting the panel to close without too much bulge in it this is tight a little bit tight for my tastes I'd be concerned with with potential damage units unit if there's some variance there this rear power for the fan plugged in via molex so we're not using PWM or a 3-pin for that into the motherboard which is their space on the board alright so those fans coming down here there's its RGB LEDs right there that's for the rear fan like another very tight cable and then this is its fan power so they're using molex for it which means it's just gonna run at full speed and Patrick did you change this or now okay okay so cyber power could have run this this is the fan that's plugged in to molex they could have run this directly into the fan header that's right here and it would actually be mostly obscured by the GPU to so it wouldn't even really show and it would be able to be controlled by the motherboard at that point which would just be objectively better for everybody so they've instead plugs it into molex not really sure why they did that kind of a weird thing and this I don't know what this is I just noticed this a second ago but when I tipped the case over I did hear that rattling noise that I thought was maybe a loose screw this is what came out when I remove the side panel so I don't know what that went to it looks like a piece of plastic broke off something in the case but that we haven't actually taken us apart yet so that's not our doing so the front fans are also plugged in the via molex which is it's not like it can't support it molex to support more current than say that but they're just not using any of the motherboard fan headers except for the CPU fan which is just sort of strange really whatever so that could be improved by using actually the motherboard and either set a fan profile or maybe at least just let the motherboard do what it thinks is best so it's not just feed you know straight off of molex and then that's just a bunch of bundled wires for USB 3 and RGB LEDs so let's take the let's take the motherboard out at this point and see how the cooler paced job is I'm curious about that okay so internally we've got RGB we have USB - these are routed well I'm gonna give them credit for that and see if these are connected properly that's right that's power there's a hard drive light that's correct reset and power button we know are correct we've got a 2 SATA cables one of which goes to the hard drive that was uninitialized audio oh that fan wasn't die the shroud I just pushed on it and popped down into place that was actually not fully in place and seated let's pull the power cable pull EPS 12-volt oh do they use all the screws that's something I'm actually curious about all the screws are in for the motherboard and it's all the same type of screw which we've seen problems with in the past as well for a user build whatever but for a prebuilt that doesn't kind of matter okay we're suspended that's a pan I'm suspended by the cable for the LED is on the cooler I forgot oh and it's tied in place this tables awesome okay so here's the board taken out this is the B 550 motherboard that we talked about in previous content that should go up before this video does so if you don't know about this board check it out there B 450 X is something that some of these boards were called early on because they were rebrands but it's been branded now as B 550 what I care about here though is just the rest the build quality so we're not talking about the motherboard too much in this content we are gonna pull this CPU cooler out see how the paste job is in the contact and this is a cooler master downdraft cooler just like the stock AMD ones except it is uh it's obviously not the Andy version but it's still downdraft still very similar if not maybe the same thin stack oh come on come on cyber power or cooler master both of them kind of so basically if you look at the cooler cold plate and then you look at the CPU you could see what happened they could have gotten a bit more spread in the corners yes like it could go out to the QR code and up to just under the AMD and made a square but at the end of the day it's not full coverage and that's because the cooler is just not it's not possible to be full coverage so in this capacity I do wonder whether and these would be better and this is something we can test so perhaps separate video on this or maybe included in whatever ends up being the full review of the saira power system we don't really know how we're gonna break the content up yet but we can do a separate test on this versus some of the AMD ones and see if sorry powers should have just used the stock Andy cooler that said because it's all om pricing I actually don't know whether maybe it's cheaper for cyber power to buy the CPUs and trays which they probably do without coolers it's not like they buy retail and then potentially buy the coolers in bulk and maybe it's cheaper to do it with this Plus that rather than stock so disappointed to not see full contact with the paste paste is pretty hardened which is okay but depends on the type of paste they used it is in fact a 3700 X so it's not like they rip the software anything it's just not a great contact memories in the right slaps though that's not something we always see something that a lot of system builders screw up to this is oh that's right as you'll see in the review content it was even set to XMP with the correct voltage which is another rarity that's not something I buy power did they screwed that up for Linus's video and then they screwed it up in hours months later so they hadn't fixed it but it was correct for this one so anyway that's gonna be the disassembly of a cyber power system only pull that case back up here see if there's anything else the blades in these you'll actually see there there's this sort of circular outer reign and there's probably some marketing BS about that helping with flow guidance or something but my suspicion was would be that it reduces the amount of blade you get for the service area and probably reduces performance of anything but whatever kind of weird that that wasn't taken out since it wasn't in use by default they could just include it in the box so that was a bit odd just to leave in there for a vertical video card for the riser if you wanted a PCIe riser that's what that would be for man okay so here's the problem this power supply if you want to get it out it kind of hits this lip right at the bottom corner of the case which just seems like an oversight on case design especially cuz that's meant for a screw like maybe for a tempered glass panel but they don't use it for any screws so that could actually be cut off all right that's kind of tight a PVA I haven't heard that name in the years it's an epi via power supply I haven't heard of them probably since about the same time I heard of logis is so 600 watt 80 plus gold allegedly a PBA power supply obviously non-modular that's whatever all seems pretty standard cheap plastic fan in there but that's power supply choice for the record that remembers our power supply review of the great wall power supply from the Walmart build that one was actually fine great wall is a supplier of even Corsair power supplies so it wasn't like it was an unknown brand it's just one that's normally behind someone else's sticker they put on it but this is it tries to appear perhaps a little more branded so that's going to be disassembly of the system and now we can get back to the rest of the content concluding then cyber power has just disappointed me so cyber power has done some really cool stuff over the years we've covered a lot of the things they've had at their CES Suites they've genuinely done some cool things and I know our point of contact really cares and wants to provide a good like experience but one person one point of contact isn't the whole company and so the problem is some of these complaints we've had over the years we we pass them along but you know they might go up the chain and they stop and hopefully this time they won't stop because the are just stupid the case is entirely that's a fully avoidable problem it's some Thermaltake age 500 something or other but completely avoidable the thermal issues with a better case it doesn't even have to be more expensive just put holes in it I don't know the initializing the drive thing CyberPower tells me they've fixed they say that they have now put in place some QC measures to check for that type of error but overall we can't recommend the systems right now and we need to see some improvement so seriously we've we're over three we've picked up three pre-built systems plus sort of one half since we bought the Walmart one twice in the past two years and in that time not one of them has been plugged in without a single issue when we turned it on and actually I lied we didn't buy the iWeb heroine we bought the other two so it's actually even worse for IRA power because they sent it to us knowing it was a media sample so yeah we'll see we'll see if any one tin can get that turned it on and something isn't not wrong experience right so that's it for this one thanks for watching subscribe for more we go to store like Aaron's Lexus net to help side directly or patreon.com slash gamers and access check out the be 550 a motherboard video separately I'll see you all next time [Music]

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 752,445

Rating: 4.9049516 out of 5

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, cyberpower pc, cyberpower gma4600bst, walmart gaming pc, cyberpower, cyberpower drive initialization, cyberpower pc overheating, cyberpower computer too hot, cyberpower pc throttling, cyberpower pre built throttling, amd ryzen 3700x, amd ryzen pre built pc, amd ryzen pre built gaming pc

Id: rRlCtp_q1YM

Length: 29min 21sec (1761 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 26 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Cozmo85]

If you don't spec it out the default parts cyberpower uses are total fucking garbage. Motherboards will simply be low end but the fans and psus are junk.

[u/COMPUTER1313]

The cooler was just sad. Even Intel's stock cooler has more CPU coverage than the one in the PC. I wouldn't be surprised if the AMD's stock cooler had better performance.

Also the fan being plugged into Molex instead of a fan header. I've always wanted to hear a fan run at full blast regardless of the CPU/GPU load. /s

[u/kryish]

GN should do a quick google search on Intel voiding warranty when enabling XMP.

cyberpowerpc/ibuypower is great when they have a sale on their main website and you could customize the parts to your liking. for their ready to shop systems, there are occasionally massive deals such as the one available yesterday where you could have gotten a 2080ti/3900x system for for 1730 - a 300-500 savings.