What did we BUY?? - $1500 Gaming PC Secret Shopper Part 2

[Music] today's episode the moment has arrived not the moment per se but the systems have all arrived so we get to go through and look at exactly what came out of those cluster phone calls and evaluate both the packaging the shipping and of course the physical build unboxing experience so come along for the ride oh by the way Alienware is going first disco cool [Music] with glasswire you can instantly see your current and past network activity you can detect malware and you can block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device use offer code Lynas to get 25% off at the link below okay ah no I actually don't have a knife on me yes so first up is delay lien we're thanks alright so this is our Alienware something-or-other ah here we go our Alienware Aurora system with one x MDOT to nvme clearly these guys are new to retail packaging that is going to mean so much to the average consumer so Dells total was 20 days from the time of ordering to the time of the system arriving and that is 20 real calendar days not 20 business days so about 2/3 of a month now the invoice they sent us was a really weird aspect of the Aurora system because it was full of a bunch of like jargony things and there wasn't really we didn't have a clear idea of exactly what was coming or we wouldn't have if they hadn't walked us through it on the phone in terms of accessories did you know this thing comes with like nothing like look at this so we get a warranty safety and regulatory information pamphlet we get a Quick Start Guide which basically says connect the keyboard and mouse which is not present if you see connect the network cable optional connect the display connect the power cable and press the power button ok and we get a power cable is that really it well did you try selling us a $10 keyboard and mouse I guess it's better to not include it and not have to pay for it then to pay for stuff you don't need in terms of the quality of the packaging job that they've done here there's already something that I've noticed yeah it is not a good thing to have a system loosely packed inside a box you want everything closed up as tightly as possible so there's still a fairly good chance that our system is just fine because at least Dell is using a very high quality closed cell foam here so you can see that it's it's strong but it's also not gonna crumble and crack if the whole box gets impacted by anything so that allows it to stay strong and it has some it has some give to it which is really important when it's sitting you know vibrating on the back of a truck or whatever else I actually haven't seen an Aurora system in a very long time it's got some heft to it that's probably as much to do with it being a steel case as anything else I guess we need a screwdriver hey screw me that's good all right I don't really have any complaints about the plastics I mean Dells done a pretty good job of these kinds of things for a long time now get some of that peel action going on here Oh interesting it's perfect it's perforated just in case you're like one of those horrible people who leads the plastic on your electronics it's still gonna die that's awesome it's like actually an idiot proofing measure cuz it's the same thing here at the back - it's all cheese grater that is freaking hilarious terms of Io not bad USB 3 USB 3.1 type C another USB 3 Osseo can't take headphone jacks for granted these days [Music] there we go so our side panel does actually make use of the chassis intrusion detection so we're probably going to get a notification about that there's our RGB PCB for the lighting in this sort of triangular do that they got going on here we actually can't see a lot about the internals of this machine so we've got a 120 millimeter cooling fan sucking air in from the front here we've got a very oh em great looking gtx 1060 that's with a rear blower design plastic shroud so it's not like a like a high quality like founders edition metal shroud or anything like that but at this price point I wouldn't have expected that this is nice to see so we've got card support so even though there was some extra space in the box the chances of this card coming out of that slot or breaking it off I've seen that very slim I got a kick out of this yep a swing out I think so so I think you unlock these and then yeah oh that's kind of cool so all the cabling stays in place for our SATA power our PCI Express all that good stuff and this gets us our first look at our motherboard so having reviewed a high-end Alienware desktop a little while ago back when am do you launch there thread Ripper processor I'm not surprised by any of this but they are using a proprietary motherboard this is the IPC FL - SC it's got that little alien silk-screened on it so this is definitely specific to Alienware it's got a mere four pin power connector for what ended up being a this is an 8700 k processor they want a faster remember ten times faster very important to remember that this is the exhilarating power to it and then this no this is GPU power Oh so that's weird hey actually there's small weird stuff in here so look at this they use an adapter here instead of just plugging their 24-pin connector directly into the board and I have to assume that it's because they're actually using a proprietary wire layout for this and you can you can actually see they are so orange drawings black red orange real ugly no black red black black red black grey purple yes wait white orange yeah but can yellow does might just be whites what is going on here what are you doing that's so weird what so just so you can't use a normal power supply we should find out if the system runs will help this plugged in because I'd be willing to bet that it does also notable down here is our nice robust thick cooling fan Wow actually that's really nice on our AIO cooler and our 120 millimeter radiators right up here in the top where it's got clean access to exhaust there's actually this is a lot more open than it actually looks like so I would expect cooling on the system to be quite strong but check it out DS arnott cooled that's true and then as usual Dells using just generic green PCB Dems like you would get from all direct from micron overall I am less disappointed than I was expecting as long as you have compatible components and right now the motherboard and the power supply our big question marks this is a standard ATX if motherboard standard ATX power supply and it is easily user serviceable if you wanted to add a hard drive or whatever the case may be so the HP ordering experience was a little bit unique the invoice still didn't have a full spec list it looks like yeah it looks like it is actually written on the side of the box though so we're gonna get a better idea of what we're dealing with here very shortly but was what was really interesting as they put themselves at a disadvantage by canceling our order five days after we placed it and letting us know that the issue was that we used hangouts to call and so the number didn't match our credit card after we resolved it though the system was shipped the next day and so they still even with the five day head start that they gave everybody else still managed to deliver the gaming system to door ready to be gamed on first alright we get a keyboard a mouse I follow the packing job they do definitely gets extra points versus Dell because while the quality of this material is slightly lower like it's still a nice flexible foam rather than the brittle kind it's packed in tight so once you close the flaps there's no room for it to move around one plug to push button so our final spec 8th gen core i7 8700 non K so it's gonna be about one-tenth the speed of the Dell then 16 gigs ram 256 gig nvme SSD a 2 terabyte hard drive 2x2 Wi-Fi and holy crap HP is putting themselves in a pretty good position here to run away with this this is equipped with a gtx 1070 now the 1060 versus the 1070 is not a small step up that K series processor that Dell upsold is going to have to have some serious performance benefits in order to outweigh the improvement in GPU that we get with our omen here that's nice carbon-fiber replica actually I'm liking their industrial design a little bit better as well too so I don't know what the deal is with the O's optical drive includes an optical drive did the Dell even include an optical drive nope if we're not making other compromises it's better to have it than to not have it this is a really interesting window too they've got like this really dark tinting on the window and I can actually just see through it I think we're gonna get some nice illumination effects there you can also see there's a couple of little extra steps they've taken with the chassis here so powder coating now powder coating doesn't cost a lot but you can tell HP spent the extra couple of bucks to make sure that even the back of their system which you wouldn't normally look at is all black including the power supply IO is another strong point we've got an SD card reader to type C's and to Taipei's along with our audio ooh the inside of the system looks a lot better too much more standard though so there's no swing out and gain access to key components for upgrades or anything like that and one place where HP is clearly behind Dell here is the case cooling configuration and CPU cooling so rather than using a 120 millimeter exhaust to balance out the 120 millimeter intake at the front HP is just using a mere 92 millimeter exhaust and what's really weird about that is that it looks like it actually has space for a 120 mil here they're using an adapter bracket so that's a case of kind of spending 30 cents to save a dollar from my experience because the 120 mil can doesn't cost that much more what if they're going for positive case pressure on purpose that's possible but they could also just order a case fan with a lower rpm that would solve the same problem not weird hey mounting the adapter then mounting a 92 mm fan to it I've notice that their graphics card while still an HP specific SKU goodnight an HP sticker here HP part number there these put a little bit of extra into making it more stylized so if you were to ever open up your case you've got this graphic on the shroud you've got this sort of like Chrome's GeForce GTX logo here and it uses a matte black PCB which I'm always in favor of another interesting note is that the VRMs again have nice big heat sinks on them and in this case it's across all of them above and to the side of the CPU socket still 16 gigs of ram and bears are nvme see down there that looks like another HP specific model it starts with an M and IC SEC somewhere in there so I'm guessing that's a Samsung yeah it's a Samsung model of some sort and then there's our hard drive right there yeah check that out we've got hot swap cages here so you just well somehow presumably really you guys just slide it very cool that's nice here there's your easy upgrades this is just bonus dang HP this is a good omen but get it for the videos to come okay so this next either divert power yeah very funny okay yeah so cyber power they wouldn't recommend a system so they were booted from the running which means I know who's next it's gonna be I by power now this box looks like it went through hell to get here this side really does look like someone gave it a good quality sidekick now did you notice that nobody asked us like what kind of case we wanted I don't think I actually had options door well normally isn't that kind of like I buy power and CyberPower stick well in this case guy actually found the best system for the budget and he'd never really asked about stylist because she didn't specify either so the double-edged sword of having such a wide variety of configs to offer your customers is that you have selection but the disadvantage is that it's harder to make a cohesive package out of your systems so we've just got the box for the system in like a master carton that quite frankly probably isn't giving it a much better chance of arriving intact than if it was just shipped without it cuz assuming that the shipper adheres to the this side up sticker which you can see is right there then yes this is actually quite a firm sort of eggshell carton style foam and it would help with impact significantly but there's so much room for it to bang around from side to side and I mean come on we've all seen the videos let's see how our system did so we got as you see two gaming mouse and an Aries II one gaming keyboard with spill resistant structure you've got a customer service line we can call and a Quick Start Guide well they already lied package includes a desktop Tower and gaming keyboard gaming mouse nice high quality foam here though really soft but really strong so our modular clearly EVGA power supply that was included gets all the extra cables bundled up nicely for us and a handy resealable bag little touches like that make a difference when you're trying to upgrade your system three years down the line oh where do I put all that stuff so we've clearly gotten Asus graphics card MSI motherboard EVGA power supply they're all gonna be brands that you recognize again this is one of the challenges with having any number of different case designs is you can't have custom packaging and you can't have custom brackets to hold everything together in shipping so what they've done is they've included this foam packaging material inside to prevent your system from getting damaged in shipping you'll also notice that these instructions are for this like ancient I think that's a raid Maxx case from like 15 years ago yeah they don't correspond to the way that you would actually open this chassis it doesn't have screws at the back and you don't need a screw driver that's something that I really think they could do a better job of for new users to their credit though we actually looked into using these at NCIX in the past and I had wanted to do it like if I recall correctly these cost a couple bucks each for 50 there you go so that adds a significant amount to the cost of a system but it's all about getting it there in one piece for the buyer wow that is a very bare-bones looking system compared to our our HP omen there so just like our alien where we've got better cooling for the CPU but we've compromised on our cooling floor of the CPUs VRM which may or may not matter because what CPU is actually even in here this is actually a 9600 I 9600 will check whether it's kilo note and a member they sold it to us before it was launched so we're honor ordered it that would probably explain why even though this is a fairly simple build they still took what about 20 days to deliver the final system now the thing is what happened in the middle is that the PSU were usually ordered was out of stock so they gave us a free upgrade with a 750 grammes really yeah that's pretty good speaking of the power supply they've done a better job at the back of making sure that you use the correct video port so Alienware had onboard video but didn't specify in their QuickStart guide where you should plug your monitor into these guys say hey don't plug it in here and they've got a sticker on the back to make sure that you don't plug in your system and run it before you remove the foam insert because I've talked to sis before it's like a big problem people just turning the system on and letting it cook foam taking up the entire inside in spite of the kind of bareness looking of it it's obviously modular and easily upgradable because it uses all standard off-the-shelf components and they're all free quality brands that I would trust so we've got MSI motherboard a Zeus gtx 1070 graphics card to go with that 9 series cpu a day to ram looks like 16 gigs of it corsair liquid cooler EVGA power supply and we've got a toshiba one terabyte drive for the back this thing is gonna shred when it comes to gaming performance and a processor is the cake the only drawback here is gonna be that this is a SATA SSD rather than an nvme SSD and that might affect system responsiveness but from my experience not much I buy power is looking pretty good here yeah that's a pretty poor application of that sticker yeah they could have put a little more effort into that I think it was origin before main gear right yes its origin okay so far the unboxing experience feels pretty special but based on what I'm expecting about the specs of this machine it had better be really special so they include what seems like a reasonable quality mouse mat that's kind of nice to see did they ask for shirt size yeah you get to pick you told them XL Oh Janice thanks Janice so they actually benchmark the system somewhat since in the bench yeah so they're assembled on one day QA the next burning and ship on the third day the interesting 450 watt Silverstone power supply again recognizable brand names and the sy motherboard and this is interesting it's a core i5 8400 so what happened here was we've got an 8400 which they up sold us telling us it would be a lot better which of course it would be but it didn't technically fit in our budget so we resolved to benchmark this system both ways with what they up sold us and with what they would have originally shipped and honestly given that it they did send it with a GTX 1050 Ti I'm not expecting it to improve much remember this is a 1500 US dollar system and this poster and what else you got over there scums team code a Star Trek Vanguard starter pack and shroud of the avatar steam code along with call of duty black ops for still these better be some amazing games on that 1050 Ti very high quality foam credit to them for that and it was all packed tightly within the outer box and credit to origin there Chronos is a sexy little machine a sexy little machine that probably should have had some plastic filled stuff on the front see that oh boy origin PC the thing with someone like origin is that we are paying a fair bit extra for the custom chassis and it has some cool features of the Kronos which we've actually featured before has these magnetic feet as well you got to do is move them and then you can have it in a tower configuration or a desktop configuration and it is extremely compact so this is the smallest of the systems that we've looked at today it looks like it has managed to stay in position and because they're using a PCI Express riser to install the graphics card it doesn't seem to have come out yet but given enough time this would cause a problem please tell me at least have 16 gigs around all right so cooling we've got an 80 ml on the front that goes directly over these perforated two and a half inch cages for our solid-state drive remember that is a mere 120 gig solid-state drive quality components you got a silverstone sfx power supply here eeda graphics MSI motherboard Kingston or HyperX memory with Origin co-branding on it so this is again your motherboard accessories your power cord your extra power supply cables and any documentation that came with your parts also they throw in a USB Drive that's actually they recover a USB I believe okay that's a nice touch that is a nice touch and it's 16 gigs and then you've got their own a i/o cooler it's an ASA tech based unit though so it sits just fine to me the big disappointment was that our unboxing experience was marred by these these handprints on our system and that it seems like Origen gave up a lot to have their custom chassis with their fancy motherboard and ended up with a bit of a miss SPECT system like I would I wouldn't recommend this to someone who's purely after gaming performance this brings us finally to main gear PC these guys were also right in that funniest day range and they did a really excellent job of keeping us updated on the status of our order throughout so after placing the order they said hey you know we've got your order hey now your systems being kitted you know here's all the parts that are picked hey its assembled hey it's shipped and bippity Boppity here's our system so right now this is kind of main gears competition to lose because they definitely did the best job of the pre-sales experience and honestly so far the packaging and feeling pretty good about as well as is a nice high quality phone it's all packs nice and snugly within the outer carton and there's a second internal carton I think the odds of this getting damaged in shipping a quite slim okay more solid packing materials really nice phone Wow these guys go all out so they have also invested the what do you say it was about four dollars into foaming up the inside of the system it's dangerous to go alone take this cute you can tell they actually use the actual system that I mean not the exact one but the same configuration for their startup guide also in here our invoice windows recovery documents and accessories resealable very nice that's another board table case screws in case you have any want to upgrade and you got a pen and some sticker the keychain coaster I'd say that's a b-minus mousepad it doesn't have a stitched edge so it's gonna frame more than the other one you can see plus they write you a little note on the inside of your box enjoying Yvonne alright before powering on you must first remove the packing foam inside your computer no real instructions on how to do it though that's something that I think I buy power for all the deficiencies in their instructions did a better job of making clear so this seems mostly designed to prevent the graphics card from moving around like clearly they don't think the radiators gonna come off or anything like that so our config in here is an interesting one we've got the best cooling for the CPU out of any of our systems here we've got an overclockable CPU so that's a rising 520 600 X we've got 16 gigs of ram non-expandable unfortunately but then we've got a dt x 1060 intel SSD and then we've also got a Seagate Barracuda 1 terabyte drive for our games down in the bottom I'm expecting the system to perform decently but any points that main gear gained during the ordering process they are probably going to end up losing in gaming performance nothing against AMD but this CPU is not going to perform as well as our Intel based machines in that particular application and our GTX 1060 well let's just say we probably would have been better off spending our dual radiator money on a 1070 and putting a stock cooler on it maybe the benchmarks will tell the whole story so that's it then ordering process and initial impressions complete let us know in the comments below who you think is going to be coming out ahead and our secret shopper showdown next up is going to be customer support how do they handle it if the system doesn't work a hundred percent right out of the box affordable and stylish the NuForce be live to check these categories off while still offering a comfortable listening experience it's Bluetooth wireless keeps you Wire free as you might expect and the magnets at the end of the year buds clasp together while not in use to keep these babies on your neck they offer 10 hours of continuous listening on-the-go and can be fully charged within one and a half hours their IP x5 rated making them weather and sweat resistant and the inline microphone is compatible with both the Google assist and Siri allowing you to pick up calls skip and pause tracks check out the link below to learn more and get a pair for yourself or for someone else tis the season so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like the one that I'm wearing under this and our community forum which you should totally join

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 3,327,541

Rating: 4.9479222 out of 5

Keywords: silent shopper, undercover, investigation, maingear, alienware, origin pc, hp omen, ibuypower

Id: yGoCMDrzCq0

Length: 28min 53sec (1733 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Qui_Gon_Gin]

This is some of Linus' best content

[u/snowlovesnow]

After the first video, I investigated all the SIs with a configuration I would build today. I found that every SI in the video except Origin has a markup of $600 with a system that you could build yourself for ~$2200. Origin however, was outrageous with a $1200 markup.

If pigs could fly, I would get a prebuilt from Maingear, no question. Boutique quality with mainstreet markup.

Sidenote: Dell is bullshit with their pricing tiers having exclusive parts.

[u/zyck_titan]

TL;DW Lots of little details will be missing unless you actually go watch the video. But a few points that stood out to me;

Alienware and HP use proprietary hardware that will be hard to find off the shelf replacements for, but have overall good build quality. And they are packaged well enough that they should arrive to your door in shape.

iBuypower has a mix of good and bad on the packaging, they use off the shelf parts. Nothing really terrible here, but nothing awesome either.

Origin is the only small form factor system in the lineup, and uses a custom chassis but other off the shelf parts. The GPU was not well retained though, which is unfortunate.

Maingear had the best overall packaging, but delivered a lower end Ryzen CPU that won't necessarily outperform the competing 8th and 9th gen Core i5s delivered with the other systems.

[u/siraolo]

I wish they include in another episode NZXT, Digital Storm, and maybe even Puget ( although they are a bit on the high side)

[u/[deleted]]

On floatplane.com there's the third episode about technical support... and out of three rounds, Maingear is very good.

[u/MlNDB0MB]

For me personally, I'd feel most comfortable with the ibuypower or maingear just because changing components would be easiest.

But I think for the target audience of gaming prebuilts, they were all pretty much fine except for the origin, which had a 120gb ssd, a gpu that wasn't mounted securely, and a low spec gpu at that (1050 ti). But the case was pretty nice looking.

[u/yokuyuki]

Anyone have the link for part 1?

[u/golli123]

My opinion so far, outside of the fact that going the route of letting a vendor choose the system being the literally worst option.

---

Alienware: Average hardware (in relative terms to the rest). Inside it's a proprietary mess, but i guess for people who never upgrade or open it up it wouldn't matter

Omen: Average hardware again. Otherwise seems mostly ok, but stuff like the 92mm fan in the back is just nickel and diming. Actually quite solid with a 1070, Type C front ports, SD card reader and optical drive. Still small back fan and stock cpu cooler are a bit unnecessary

Ibuypower: Really good specs, standard parts and some nice touches like the sticker to use the GPU rather than mobo hdmi port.

Origin: A straight up insult imo. Terrible hardware considering the price. The only thing they got right was the exterior stuff with form factor and packaging. I guess that's what you catch uninformed customers with?

Maingear: Average hardware, but plus points for standard parts and the customer service in the first part. I am a bit annoyed by the 240mm rad for a Ryzen 5 2600x even though the standard AMD stock cooler are quite nice, but i guess liquid cooling is good for marketing. Still clashes a bit with the otherwise relatively honest approach.

[u/MyReddit_Profile]

Honest to god this guys videos are always top notch. Nice that someone this insane amounts of knowledge is the top guy.