Warnings About Pre-Built PCs: Proprietary Parts, Monthly Charges, & Components

why are we pairing 32 gigabytes of ram with the 7700 and a gtx 1080 why are we doing it in 2021 that's clever i i see you dell i see you sliding that 999 a month charge into the invoice a month after the purchase so no one ever notices right it's okay more than ever people are buying pre-built pcs right now that's a mix of mainstream or casual users purchasing for at home use and uniquely of enthusiasts flooding the market to try and get a video card from anything that means that companies are taking advantage of users using new and innovative screwy and also old tricks this is going to look at the most common pitfalls for buying an oem built or si built meaning a pre-built computer and how to avoid those or at least how to best navigate them so that you get the best value without getting accidentally screwed over before that this video is brought to you by squarespace squarespace is what we've been using for years to manage our own gamer's nexus store and we've been incredibly happy with the choice squarespace makes e-commerce easy for those interested in starting stores but it also has powerful tools to build all types of websites photo galleries for photographers resume and portfolio sites and small business sites are all easily done through squarespace having built a lot of client websites the old way before running gn full-time we can easily recommend squarespace as a powerful fast solution go to squarespace.com gamersnexus to get 10 off your first purchase with squarespace so we're going to outline the most common pitfalls or just traps to fall into when you're buying a pre-built computer this will apply to people who don't really know much about computers and the people who have built a couple computers in the past but might just be trying to get a gpu or helping a friend buy one or whatever some quick vocabulary as we get into this we're going to be saying the phrases oem and si a lot in this video and oem is an original equipment manufacturer they assemble a computer they're very large it's like dell hp acer lenovo and an si is a system integrator that would be a someone like cyber power main gear digital storm falcon northwest whomever it's a sort of more boutique form of an oem but they are less likely to be branding their own motherboards and things like that more likely to be buying branded parts that you're familiar with and then building a computer both groups have their ups and downs we put together though a really small tiny list of common rip-offs or mistakes encountered when buying a pre-built gaming pc now to be clear not all of these are malicious but the end result is the same which is that you end up with just not a good deal also to be really clear for any newcomers most of our audience knows this but neither of these types of companies really make anything they assemble them there's nothing wrong with that we just want to be really clear so everyone understands where we're starting from here the companies like dell or hp they might brand some motherboards cyberpower might do some keyboards to some extent they'll customize those but nowhere near the extent of a peripheral specific manufacturer or a motherboard specific manufacturer typically it's a white label type of thing where they'll put a new company's label on it with minimal changes so that's the maximum amount of customization you'll see for most of these for the most part they are computer builders and that's the service you're paying for that also means you're paying for things like a consolidation of warranties now instead of having maybe eight different device warranties for each thing on the computer you have one you have one point of contact you send it back and forth with that si or oem and that's part of the value they provide which is it doesn't work anymore you don't need to troubleshoot it you call them you send it back they fix it sometimes oems do something that's a little bit more maybe accidentally evil which is tweaking form factors in a non-standard way which means that you now have parts that might be either extremely difficult to find replacements for or parts that are just not compatible with basically anything else dell has done this in the past it was alienware hp where you line up with a motherboard or a power supply or a case it's only one of those three form factor that is just not a real form factor or is extremely rarely used to the extent that replacements can basically only be gotten through the oem from which you bought the system and that sort of obviously it's it's it's a bit of a repugnant move because it sort of condemns the system to a landfill or the parts to a landfill because they are non-standard by nature which is unfortunate and wasteful and a terrible thing but that's one of the things we'll be talking about now not all of the pitfalls are evil ones of course there's also things that are just well not a good deal some of these and that list we showed are just good to know about to save some money like not buying peripherals from oems and sis if they can be purchased elsewhere or using parts that really don't make sense for the rest of the build we'll start with the worst thing we've seen recently some of you saw this in our recent news video so we'll keep it really short we already have a six minute piece on it in our recent news video that will link below technically speaking what dell is doing right now probably doesn't it doesn't qualify as a scam uh for legal reasons but it certainly is in our opinions a ripoff and a bad deal and we think it's highly unethical what dell is doing if you didn't see our news video is sliding in a 9.99 or 4.99 a month support option for a pre-built system that's we think buried on the page below all of these other internal component peripheral options you can add or change or whatever by the time you get to the bottom you're you're bored of it and you want to just buy the computer but there's no add to cart button down there it's at the top so the chance of seeing this we think is relatively low and the chance of thoroughly reading and just getting past the the unspoken understanding between the two parties the seller and you the buyer the unspoken understanding that uh the seller is not going to try and rip you off monthly for something you don't want when you're trying to buy a single purchase item like a computer all of that is what makes this we think unethical dell is doing a promo of a free support option that is it's free for the first month and if you uncheck it then it's 9.99 less to buy the computer so that's the opposite of free but anyway dell's agency emailed us to argue that it isn't a problem uh because we assume they're morally bereft but the real problem is that this is a thing that it's a promo they don't charge you for the first month but then after that they'll start charging you and this is a feature which at the end of the day you shouldn't need to use we saw someone in the comments of the news video saying i actually got used to this because my rtx 2016 my dell machine died and they sent out a technician to replace it here's the thing if that's happening within the normal warranty period which is at least a year for the systems we're looking at then that's gonna happen anyway you don't have to pay extra to get that that's kind of like through origin when you buy a pre-built and you pay 80 to get it shipped in a box a guarantee it doesn't break on arrival which is obviously ludicrous marketing because the whole point of reasonable merchant ability is that when you buy it it arrives working just as an easy example we sell glassware on our site and every now and then the carrier will put the package in a trebuchet and hurl it about 300 meters and when they do that if it breaks on arrival all the customer has to do is email us and we'll replace it because it needs to arrive working otherwise what's the point and it's the same thing with a computer if it arrives and there's a problem within the normal warranty period you don't have to pay extra that's them gaslighting you we think our opinion into paying extra for something which is already provided anyway we'll keep this one short just watch out for that stuff when you're buying the system make sure there's no sort of subterfuge going on where there's this sneaky extra payment per month for something that either you don't want or you might not need if you want to add that support option go for it but we just want to make sure everyone knows that it's intentional okay overpriced peripherals are next and one of the more interesting ones if you scroll through say cyberpower ibuypower origin you'll normally see that they're trying to offload peripherals onto you with the purchase of the computer that's fine that's a normal upsell this is a standard part of buying something you go buy a car they're going to try and offer you bluetooth and what else do cars have i don't know what they offer anymore my car is old but anyway they'll probably try and offer you things that are newer than my vehicle uh so this is creating the the appearance of an all-in-one out-of-box experience but a lot of these things like a monitor or a keyboard or mouse it's not like cyberpower origin either power or anyone else is doing additional setup for that there's one exception that's internal components where there might be drivers involved but for the most part if you get it and you open it it's going to be the same whether they ship it to you or whether amazon new york or best buy ship it to you it'd be like paying the restaurant not only for food at the restaurant but also to sell them to another restaurant and order your food at their retail prices then mark it up so this is a lot different than buying a case that digital storm designs but liam lee built in that instance the si or the oem is still designing something and making something unique it's just via another factory and that's completely fine it's common practice very few people own factories and that includes us for our own products but the difference is reselling someone else's completed branded peripheral like say corsairs at a higher cost than retailers is just a bad deal it doesn't make sense in this cyber power listing for instance we found several offenders the msi mag-27 cq monitor is listed via cyber power for 450 but it can be had from retailers for 74 dollars cheaper at around 376 dollars you would pay 20 more at cyberpower but it's not like there's any setup involved to the monitor that cyberpower can even help you with there's no value here they're just shipping it to you another example is the corsair k95 rgb keyboard which cyberpower is selling for 190 despite being readily available on retailers for as low as 130 the evga new audio card is a little trickier it's an optional add-on via cyber power for 209 bucks it's normally 250. cyberpower in this instance is 60 to 100 more than newegg where the new audio card's 150. it's higher than amazon's 170 higher than walmart's 160 to 170 and even still paying 50 for installation seems steep since they're already building the whole system anyway and the markup on that isn't that much higher than what you're paying on this new audio card iowa power continues this trend where you can pay i buy power 70 for a blue snowball ice microphone it's a usb mic that you put on your desk and it's 50 on amazon origin is another one it's really actually kind of embarrassing because it's owned by corsair which also owns elgato and yet it still over charges for products that are within the family of these three companies origen offers the elgato game stream deck mini for a hundred dollars which is available via retail for eighty dollars the k95 is 200 via origin which is cheaper via competitor cyber power that isn't owned by corsair and that's already by the way too expensive at cyberpower too the display section offers an asus vs248 h-p for 200 bucks which is otherwise 130. the asus pa-278 qv display is 371 dollars at origin but it's 300 via retail and there's again no setup that origin will do for you on this the keyboards and mice are at least mostly the same as retail so maybe there's value here in that it's in the same box but if you can buy it locally or just get it elsewhere with some other shipment it might be worth doing that to be sure we will give main gear props for this one it doesn't look like there's any upsell at least on the systems we checked it looks like they're really just trying to sell the computer you add it to the cart they offer a free warranty and then that's it there's no games played the point is pretty clear here when it comes to buying accessories and extras from the oem with si it's not this is one where it's not evil for them to try and sell that to you for a markup and there is a reason that it costs more and it's a valid reason it's not like the warranty thing where it's kind of it's it's a little bit on the shady side uh but it is more expensive and there's no added value for you maybe the exception of something like an internal sound card where they can at least socket it for you and so it's probably better to just buy it somewhere else if you want to be more cost conscious and economical most beginners would be able to handle something like installing an audio card but maybe there's 50 bucks of value there if you really don't want to mess with the drivers or your time is that valuable which is certainly possible in instances where oem brand a peripheral like dell and the alienware monitors or corsairs mice and keyboards for example when you're buying a pc from corsair those are instances where in theory it shouldn't be an upsell to you it should be about as cheap as it's going to get but that's pretty uncommon dell is one of the major examples of that with its monitors so it's generally cheaper to just buy separately we talked to an si about why this is just out of curiosity and it was what you would expect it comes down to economies of scale and order volume where the sis especially more so than the oems are not ordering sufficient volume to get the volume discounts that a company like uh newegg best buy micro center or amazon might get where they're populating all these stores they might be buying thousands of units at a time depending on how big the retailer is and because they're not buying that many uh the cost is going to be higher per unit so they sell it for more one si told us off record that it only sells three to five high-end keyboards that'd be like that 200 class keyboard per month compared to thousands of systems in the same window so you can see why this is not particularly popular and it doesn't even look like they're trying to make a lot of money on it because if you're selling three to five and it's in the tens of dollars increments higher than full retail it's not like they're really profiting that much compared to all their system sales and that's why we think that main gear here probably has the better idea of decluttering all the bs out of the purchasing system different topic entirely but reducing the chance that the user abandons the cart in the process of buying it or becomes distracted or wants to research something goes somewhere else registers it and then never comes back because they're just you add it to the car and it's like here's the computer do you want to buy it or not and that probably is is a more straightforward process if your core business is the computer and not the upsell now the other side of this is attachment this is interesting we'll do this in another video but uh it's the idea that a board partner selling video cards might be forcing an si to buy a bunch of peripherals sometimes power supplies backpacks things that the board partner that would be a company like gigabyte msi evga asus whomever parts that they can't get rid of but they know an si like cyberpower or i buy really might be desperate for a box of gpus because they can't sell any of their product without those and so they'll say you know what you want this box of gpus you have to buy this pallet of backpacks and mouse pads that we made for a trade show and we were never able to get rid of and so that's how you end up with some of these things on the site when it's it really doesn't make a lot of sense otherwise some interesting behind-the-scenes information for you all this leads us to the next topic of mismatched components this is an old tired topic among pre-built but we'll go over it quickly mismatched components within a pre-built by the visage of anyone who knows what they're doing do have a tendency to create the perception that there's wasted money pouring into the build for little yield you can look at some of our walmart coverage for that here are a few examples when we were ordering an alienware system upgrading the gpu from an rx 5300 which we didn't even remember existed to an rtx 3080 enforces a required power supply of 1000 watts capacity the default for the system was 550 watts so we don't really disagree that the 550 watt one might be unsuitable depending on the rest of the build but 1 000 watts is well past overkill there's a chance that some of this cost is absorbed by dell and that it's just easier for them to offer two power supplies instead of more reasonable options of 50 watts 650 watts 800 watts whatever because it might start to complicate things in warehousing but either way there's also a chance that you're paying for a needless upgrade i buy power offers a mainstream amd system that's the name of it with an r55600x and an rtx 3060 included this ibuypower system pre-selects a 600 watt power supply as the default that again is overkill by about 150 watts somewhere in that range for the 5600x and the 360. remember 5600x can run at something like 65 70 watts but it becomes a marketing game as well to less winning customers where they might be looking at bigger number better mentality in the same system either power is pairing a single stick of ram with an rfi 5600x ryzen is notoriously fussy about memory and dropping to a single stick especially depending on the ranks can have adverse consequences to performance meanwhile the company is charging one thousand six hundred and fifteen dollars for this computer and it has one stick of ram and it's also including an rgb led liquid cooler so the priorities are completely out of place by the way that liquid cooler is not any good main gear has at least figured out that its r5 3400g apu only pairing should run two sticks of ram but it's also a 700 computer with an apu only and it's an apu from 2019 that was 140 at the time of launch this computer has maybe 300 of core components and value and those are ones that are in stock by the way but it's 700 but don't worry it includes rgb lighting kit and rear rgb fan because that's what we need to spend the budget on the dell g5 is another great example this is a 900 system this model you get a 10400f a gtx 1650 super with a green pcb plugged into an unpainted motherboard and using what appears to be a decade old rear fan we saw one in our local best buy it also has a single stick of 26 66 megahertz ram a one terabyte hard drive and not even an ssd for the boot drive which will be noticeable at this point if they weren't so busy trying to sneak things like monthly subscription support into the sale they might realize that an ssd would be an easier value add for the customer and finally 120 millimeter water cooling solutions are really commonly thrown into cheap pre-built these are often as we've shown time and time again in our cooler testing worse than a cheap tower cooler companies do this to tick a marketing checkbox and to get an rgb logo in there while saying the words water cooling it's a waste of the customer's money that could go towards something more effective like a second stick of ram or another component coupled with the stock cooler instead so we're pointing out the low hanging fruit here the easy ones that obviously have some kind of mismatch in there but not all of them are like this there are actually several very well matched components from system builds that we've seen in the past couple of weeks but it seems to change daily and it's not particularly worth calling out the specific models because they snap in and out of existence depending on the weak and the gpu supply but the point is to pay careful attention you probably will end up buying something you don't want in the system in order to get most of what you want and that's just the nature of buying something that's pre-assembled and for enthusiasts in the audience you are more likely to notice this than someone who's never built a computer before or done any research and obviously that's the original audience for oems and sis and they do provide valuable service and we do think it's important but we just want to make sure everyone's aware of what to look for when buying because there are really good options out there and then there are some that are not good at all it would just be a shame to overspend on things like maybe a thousand watt power supply rgb leds and too many fans it's another really common one we see where it's just got fans in every slot but it's running on i3 and something like a gtx 1650 or a gt 1030 where you're now wasting all of this budget in the system all the bomb on components that don't really improve the quality of life for the user so keep an eye on that enough of this topic though this section was mostly just to say look at the sum of the system not just the cpu and the gpu common places to look would be power supply and the ram especially check the frequency and they might screw you on xmp but more on that later and the the the number of sticks especially for an apu system where it starts to matter a lot more and beyond that you're looking at things like the cooler if you can step down to an air cooler from a 120 ml we normally recommend it there are worse air coolers that are really small but if you get a tower cooler it's a very good chance that it's better than a 120mm liquid cooler from asetek one of the oldest tricks in the book for oems not sis here is to use proprietary or less than standard parts it's not as common as it used to be but especially in non-gaming systems that might be marked as a family computer you'll still run into non-standard power supplies motherboards and cases that make it difficult to upgrade fortunately most systems our audience would likely buy don't fall into this category and are primarily immune if you're buying the lowest end possible office or family pc though keep an eye on the internals especially if you think you might want to upgrade it later to keep it alive you'll sometimes find things like tfx power supplies in place of atx or just custom power supplies limiting options for keeping the system in deployment later on we've also had a lot of experiences where systems don't boot out of the box or have missing secondary drives if you run into this a quick way to fix it is normally to navigate into bios and change the boot device to the correct one it's normally there it's just we've seen oems and sis mess up bios with the csm options or with secondary drives they just forget to initialize it and if you need to do that check disk mgmt.msc disk mgmt.msc and make sure the disk is initialized be careful not to format something that you don't want to format both of these issues have popped up in previous reviews we've done of course it's possible that they also just forget to install the drive altogether but less likely as for memory and xmp even after years of being criticized by reviewers for the practice system builders still often neglect to enable xmp to actually achieve the higher memory speeds that are advertised on the product and that's the real problem we've seen manufacturers like cyberpower and iowa power and walmart and nzxt misrepresent systems in the past by our opinion by listing the memory speeds that the modules can achieve while failing to configure those speeds in bios the end result is that you're overpaying for something that isn't even configured as advertised especially for someone who doesn't know better this isn't even hard to fix but it should be fixed if you think you're paying for 3600 megahertz ram and you're running at 26.66 instead additionally some manufacturers claim that xmp violates the warranty or that it's dangerous but don't let them scare you away from using something as simple as xmp it's just a profile that's preset we've never heard of xmp actually causing damage in the real world and frankly it's not like anyone would know you used it just pull the cmos battery and finally as a general warning we noticed that some sis are listing systems as in stock on the page where you shop for them but then they state that the gpu extends the lead time by four to six weeks this isn't really a problem it's the whole industry right now but what we want to point out is that because it's not immediately obvious you might be adding to cart and purchasing something without realizing that you're actually purchasing it six weeks out instead and next pay attention to the warranty or the support offered by the si or the oem if you know how to maintain a system maybe it's less important but if you don't this is one of the main reasons you would buy from a pre-built manufacturer assembly line because then it's one point of contact like we said earlier so manufacturers will often provide two to three year warranties on individual parts that'd be like a video card or a ram kit or whatever from if you bought it from newegg directly and so a one year warranty on a pre-built computer isn't great it's somewhat common but computers are complex things so either way though you might be able to claim a component warranty through that pre-built manufacturer at a later date even if you're outside of the one year but just pay attention to the warranty policies if it's something that matters to you and of course if it's less than one year then we'd say just walk away and buy from someone else if you feel like doing a quick check it might also be worth putting in a call to tech support to see if you're able to get through this is only really a step worth doing if you're maybe buying multiple of these like for a small office at that point you're invested enough where you might want to call tech support and see can i get to someone how long does it normally take and do they seem competent if you ask some basic questions about what computers you should buy even if you know what you want to buy but as stated this step's not really worth it for someone just buying one system because you might end up on hold for half an hour and they're probably all going to do that to you finally we've also seen manufacturers trying to take advantage of the current market by dumping old systems this is actually a good thing in a sense in that it's better than going to a landfill but the pricing is obscene in some instances so we saw a one thousand dollar corsair one system one of the small ones with an i7 7700 non-k and a gtx 1070 in it for a grand so uh just just don't don't do that don't buy it but that's it for this one hopefully that helps someone out there uh slis and oems absolutely have a place in the industry they do provide a valuable service but the value of that service is sometimes inflated in ways to the point where it is no longer valuable to you so just be careful on the the pitfalls of accidentally overspending on stuff and watch out for things like the support and warranty options where everybody wants you on a subscription model now so that's it thanks for watching as always speaking of subscription models you can subscribe to our youtube channel for free by clicking the link in the description below or you can go to store.gamersnexus.net if you'd like to buy something like one of our modmas shirts or other items thank you for watching we'll see you all next time the

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 445,747

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, pre-built pcs, pre built gaming pcs 2021, best pre-built gaming pcs 2021, pre built gaming pc reviews, gaming pc, cyberpower, ibuypower, origin pc, maingear, gaming pc reviews, best gaming pcs fortnite, budget gaming pc

Id: cKxBogvUe_c

Length: 26min 13sec (1573 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021