Worse Than Walmart: Dell G5 5000 PC’s Garbage Parts & Hidden Charges

no why there's so much weird stuff going on that i'm noticing i'm trying to stay focused on like on one thing at a time this looks very similar to the systems i built in 2004. look at how lonely these memory modules are they have no friends one of us is going to survive this is is it just me or do this motherboard be looking a little sus [Music] reviewing this computer is quite the adventure this is the dell g5 5000 we bought it for about 900 and it is genuinely worse than the walmart computer that we bought and reviewed a few years ago and for a lot of really low hanging fruit reasons all the way up to more secretive and sneaky reasons so this thing is riddled with problems in fact it's been such a challenge to review specifically because of that because we've had trouble trying to condense down all the issues into one tightly packed video and what we're doing is running two videos we have this one for the tear down and the discussion of many billing and support issues from dell so these are the two factors that if you are uh not too informed on computers and you're just buying a pre-built because you don't want to deal with the hardware level information these are the things that matter most for you and separately if you are a person who does know about computers and you just want to buy a gpu basically in a box because it's hard to get one independently right now well we have other issues to pass along to you but let's get into the review of the dell g55000 before that this video is brought to you by us and store.gamersnexus.net because how else could we afford to subject ourselves to the horror that is reviewing a computer like this your support on the gn store is how we can afford to buy pre-built like this one for in-depth review free of influence from the manufacturer our brand new red and black charge mouse pad is now on the store with a gpu layout design custom red rubber underside and red stitching it's a high quality mouse pad that's joined by our also brand new component mouse pad in blue and black resembling a mini itx motherboard in block diagram layout if you want something wider our desk sized wireframe mouse mats with detailed high quality 3d design are available on backorder and we'll be shipping out in about a month we've had insane demand for these and if you want to guarantee that you get one in the next round back ordering is the best way to do that while still supporting our research visit store.camerasnexus.net to grab one of our mouse pads mod bats bar runners or other items this thing is dismal it's been really tough to review because uh again is there so many things wrong with it that it's like trying to stay focused long enough on any one thing to write about it is a challenge so really quick list of issues before we get into it again this one is going to be the tear down so we're going to be looking at the assembly quality the component quality uh the type of parts used like this absolutely bizarre power supply it's not even an atx 12vo it's something special and we'll also be going through the uh support and the billing we'll go through benchmarks in a separate video we do have them though not super promising but we do have the benchmarks and we'll be going through the bloatware in a separate video so as we ramp into this coverage one thing we want to make really clear is this is not intended to be diy do it yourself build your own computer elitism we think there are a lot of valid reasons to buy a pre-built and they're good pre-built out there in theory we're working on finding them for you but the thing is we'd like to see people buying pre-built that actually makes sense to buy and in this instance as you'll find out it makes a lot less sense than the competitors so that's really the problem it's not about build it yourself versus don't it's completely valid to not build your own computer i don't cook my own food or do the oil changes on my own car that's because i want to do other stuff so i pay someone who's good at it to do those things and the same goes for computers you don't have to build your own to get something good but you should get something good and that might be provided instead by a competitor and we'll look at those as well but this thing is a 900 computer it has an i5 10 400 f and it has a gtx 1660 super this is actually not a completely abysmal deal right now in terms of pricing and what you get if you buy it from dell.com it's about 850 to 900 we bought a system from dell.com that's coming in from the alienware family and have a lot of commentary on that buying process that we'll include in this video but either way you're 850 to 900 bucks and given the current gpu market sadly it's not too bad if you can use the system for something and not just one part problems most of these parts are proprietary that limits their usefulness in other cases limits your ability to resell it limit your ability to pull stuff and use it for your own system and if you are a pre-built buyer because you don't want to ever open the computer and use it the bad news there is you're going to have a very difficult time keeping this thing in service and alive as parts eventually start to age and fail another problem is the bloatware it's absolutely insane how much garbage is on this system 30 gpu utilization in some instances and we'll talk about that in part two the uh benchmarks are not particularly stunning for any metric and then the support in the billing aspect where dell snuck charges into our invoice when we purchased fromdahl.com for the alienware system and also uh not knowing who we were when we requested support on the billing for that dell then used my personal cell phone number to try to access our account information without notifying me so i got a one-time passcode and immediately had several hours of my day ruined because i was trying to make sure we weren't under some sort of targeted attack on our account not that there's anything valuable from our dell.com account because well i mean you know for the rest of the specs there's a single stick of eight gigabytes of memory there's four dim slots here one stick and it's 26 66 megahertz this is at this point an intel limitation there is a very small m.2 ssd it's a 256 gigabyte drive and there's a hard drive in there as well but that's about that's about it for components and the video card is a non-branded uh dell v bios loaded card for 1660 super with one of the absolute worst cooling assemblies we've ever seen on a video card let's get into the teardown and then we'll talk about the other myriad issues with the dell purchasing experience the back of the box is clearly custom built for the g5 we'll find out once i get in there but this to me looks like the case is actually stamped for the motherboard there's a little bit of ventilation here where it looks like there's an 80mm fan for some reason this is this is what we're using and the 80mm fan is held in with these rubber uh just tabs that will pull through as opposed to fan screws and that is i mean they could argue it's for noise but most likely it's for ease and maybe cheap now look at the case the first thing i notice is that the the right side it comes up it's got two screws as normal but it comes up here and it wraps over the top of the chassis frame so that's a little non-standard but then you go over this side and it's actually riveted in it looks like so i'm not sure there's probably just no cable management room actually if you look at where the motherboard's aligned that looks like it is going to be in fact the case where i don't think there's going to be anything between the motherboard tray and this side panel hence riveting it in which is very unfortunate but it's a small box i guess that's what you get when you have a small box the power supply is clearly not a tx the front of the case actually looks pretty good from a pure look standpoint dell has done a good job of making a case that looks a lot more expensive than it is which isn't meant to be an insult that's what most case manufacturers do unfortunately once you really look at it it is a lot more restricted on the airflow then it appears first of all these are very thick pieces of plastic so the actual air space the gaps between all this plastic is not nearly as much as it looks and also once you look behind it i can see a solid steel wall in at least the top a couple inches there of the panel and that means that this obviously is all just for looks in that area there's no actual airflow through there okay enough exterior to take the side panel off screws captive or not captive screws are captive that's good for 900 i would hope we could at least do that much oh there's even uh instructions on the side let's see what that is by the way if you want one of the mod mats that i'm working on you can go to store.gearsexes.net and grab one of our anti-static work mats to protect your table while working on computers so here's the instructions as soon as you pull it off i'm curious why dell would need removal instructions so readily accessible for video cards cynical about this type of thing in a pre-built this to me doesn't bode well but maybe they're just being really really nice so here's the panel it is acrylic and kind of an older construction style definitely unique to this build because the way it's all bolted in and uh and overly complicated for holding the panel is is not really standard these days now before we look at the inside of the system and illustrate a point i made earlier so i'm going to shine a light a hand light through and wherever you don't see it shining through it is blocked off so this is obviously completely blocked off especially up here there's steel paneling so hard drive here so there's no air coming through that area and eventually we get some light shining through in this region this has been thermally tested already i have not taken this thing apart this is my first time looking at it uh we did thermals though before any disassembly so because i assume once we rebuild it we're going to rebuild it better than it was built and we wanted to test it out a box it is largely obstructed even down there and there's no intake fan so the only fan you get is an 80mm in the back and then there is a cpu downdraft cooler that is embarrassingly cheap on this 10400 this poor 10400 this isn't even a standard intel cooler this is a special there's a dell special cooler so that's already been thermally tested we'll look at those numbers later uh and then internally i see a lot of things that are really interesting to me so let's start with the power just looking at this thing first thing i noticed there's no 24 pin and uh there is an eps 12 volt a little bit scared to hold on to this oh this is an led bar plastic plastic bar for leds that is screwed into the hard drive cage at least they screwed it into the steel part that's good and then the front of the case what is this pull oh okay so that's that there's no screws holding the video card in uh but i guess that's what that's supposed to do eps 12 volt we have two four pins here we have a completely uncovered vrm which as long as it's powerful enough for the cpu if that's in there that's fine we'll test that for thermals as well but no no no heatsink on the mosfets and the 24 pin is missing but we do have down here a six pin now the atx 12vo spec that's eventually replacing atx in theory is supposed to be a 10 pin to replace the 24 not six so this isn't quite atx 12vo it's a little bit different it's unique and we'll have to we'll have to look at it maybe probe the pin out to see what's going on uh there's purple gray blue black these are not standard colors that that uh i'm aware of and it's not a standard pin out for a motherboard so we all are already in territory of having a proprietary motherboard the form factor is also i don't believe a standard that i know of it's it's not atx it's not a micro atx it's not many itx it's not e atx not ssi eb it's not ssi ceb puts us in proprietary component territory or at least adjacent to it bordering proprietary parts because if you ever have a power supply failure you will have to get an extremely specific power supply to replace this one uh and likewise if you have a motherboard failure you'll have to get a new power supply to work with the motherboard that you end up buying if it's not this specific board component choice we have one stick of ram it is at least in the correct slot and oh god that is that is such a sad sad stick of ram look at how lonely these memory modules are they have no friends and this is an eight gigabyte stick it is pc4 3200 so we're 3200 megahertz it does not run at 3200 megahertz but dell has notated this and it's manual and it in fact runs at 2666 for the cpu but it'll run at 29.33 for other ones because this is not a z series chipset take the gpu out this is interesting too this is not a branded video card using a standard six pin at least so it's a pcie six pin that's kind of a start some kind of standardization so there's the video card nvidia does not make this uh product as like a thing that you can buy but they do still enforce their branding this shows up in gpu-z as a dell video card which means it's a dell v bios on here so it's dell firmware someone else is making the board for sure and the i mean the gpu is obviously made by nvidia we might want to take this card apart though and look at the memory cooling uh but actually you know what not even necessary so you can kind of see a gap in there where there's no thermal pad contact in the memory modules i'm not going to take this apart yet this looks very similar to the systems i built in 2004. uh reminds me of the pentium 4 era the slots are the right color motherboard's the right color and weirdness the vrm has nothing the chipset heatsink is comical uh plus the fact that it's not even secured with screws they've secured it with this contraption so i might be left over stock from pentium 4. there's so much weird stuff going on that i'm noticing i'm trying to stay focused on like on one thing at a time let's look at the power supply i'm assuming these screws will free our power supply okay well that's simple enough the shroud i give them credit like it's a small box it's a custom box for an oem system for whatever reason i have absolutely no idea they've decided to put a window on this thing because look at that it's beautiful there's um well don't look that hard but it deserved a window for some reason and to give dell credit since it has a window they have actually done a decent job with cable management there's not a lot of cables to manage but uh there is a shroud it's doing a lot right let's see it says it is rated for max 500 watts but it also says it's limited to 18 amps on 12 volts so it actually can only do 216 watts on 12 volts which is not a lot this just in so the power supply is 80 plus white label this power supply is um as with walmart's is probably less of a joke than the oem branding would make you think but we may test that separately on our power supply tester yeah that's okay all right front panel is attached to the case by wire it's a bit of an old style as opposed to having this even four leds look no why so i mean this should probably just be attached to the chassis instead of the molded panel but to their credit you can disconnect it they get credit here too so the i o is attached to the chassis frame that's good this is not a new thing that's been happening for about a decade now but oems have always been really far behind here so credit to dell for attaching it here instead of to this panel because then when you pull it out all the wires would be stuck to it and that just sucks so good job there the sata power is coming from the motherboard which is similar to atx 12vo style in that atx12vo says you literally only have 12 volts only out of a power supply uh this is this 12v only look this is only 12 volts it's not let's say 12bo spec but it is only 12 volts in the power supply so what's happening is the power supply is feeding the board with six pin and the board is then doing the conversion to uh five because a sata drive is gonna take five volts so board's doing conversion to five that is probably what this vrm is down here in the corner got a vrm down here and that connects so your sata never goes to the power supply goes to the board and that's a glimpse at the future for you for 12vo style the board ends up handling it instead of power supply for the the voltage and then sata cable is as always where it just plugs straight in all right so it's a custom lighting board it's just a controller they've labeled it properly so this is actually called lighting clear door so not bad though let's get the board out that is a bizarre oh wow that's different this is a super non-standard motherboard all right so everything i said earlier about this being a weird form factor not knowing quite what it is there is in fact a good reason for that the board uh extends all the way here this is insane why dell what the actual are you doing never actually seen anyone do this before maybe 20 years ago why would you do with that why why would you do any of this okay time to take the motherboard out that's not into the no no come on you didn't do that did you oh they're insane wow literally insane they screwed the cooler into the case not into the motherboard the cooler screwed into the case so the cooler then uh is part of the security to hold the board in place which means the cooler has to come out if the board comes out why would you make a load-bearing cpu cooler i bet i bet it's this one i wonder if that's going all the way down to the mother or the tray i mean you okay oh my god well that was kind of glued into the thing okay there's the motherboard yep so that was just the system to make all this very clear again we ran all the benchmarks before the tear down but going up in the next video because we thought this was probably convincing enough to make our point with this computer there are many other pre-built systems out there that are better than this one the biggest problem with this thing is even at 900 even if you're like this is actually kind of a good deal right now because of the stupid pricing on video cards uh to get an i5 10 400 f and get a 1660 super and then you figure out the rest of the parts on your own even in that scenario you're better off buying something like one of cyberpower's computers for about the same price and even if we don't particularly like one of those and we did get one in by the way we haven't looked at it yet but even if we don't like those as reviewers the difference is with something like a cyber power and iowa power whatever main gear with one of those systems if you get something that sucks it's a very easily correctable issue because most likely it's going to be something like the case maybe the bios configuration maybe there's a physical defect you can exchange with them but the in the very least all of the parts are standard they have form factors you can move them into another computer and still make use of it this thing as soon as it's done becomes e-waste it goes to the landfill and it gets thrown out and you from an economic standpoint are left holding the bag of well i guess should be the components that are left so you'd be left with a socketable cpu and an absolutely terrible rendition of a gtx 1660 super the cooler doesn't even contact the memory and the cooler is not good either by the way maybe more content for a separate video the cpu cooler isn't even usable how insane is that it's made it's metal and a fan and you can't use it in other places because it's a stupid proprietary more or less cooling solution that mounts to the case so you can't move it to your other systems even the case which is a metal box is proprietary because the front i o and by the way the rear uh i o shield area both of those are molded for the dell specific system if you don't know a lot about computers you just you're like you know i don't all this stuff this guy's saying i don't really care but if you just want to buy a pre-built system to game on you should still care about this stuff because all of these problems mean that long term you are going to end up buying another computer when you might have an issue that is very easy to resolve even if you don't want to fix it yourself even you're going to bring it to a shop and have them fix it now as for the billing we have a whole lot of other problems with this so for the alienware system we bought from dell.com there were a few problems one of them we talked about already a lot in two different videos now where dell had an auto opt-in for that system ten dollar a month charge that they were saying this is a promotion it's free for the first month for support but there's a free one-year warranty and free and air quotes that we're gonna get back to that so there's a free one-year warranty you could choose instead and then there was the 10 a month charge for this system it might be like five or something but it was a charge that didn't start occurring until after the first month you've had the system so you're a lot less likely to see that charge because there's going to be a 10 tick on your credit card a month after you buy the thing and depending on how carefully you look at your statements you might not notice that and also it's just a pain in the ass even if you do notice it and it's extremely unethical but credit to dell in the same way you'd give credit for attendance uh it did change that policy back after all of our complaints they emailed us by the way to talk about this back to the free option instead of the sneaky monthly charge option so that's a good change we haven't vetted their entire website but it looks like it was changed for at least a few of the systems that we looked at problem is that free warranty isn't actually free and this is something we noticed when one of our viewers emailed us thank you you know who you are and told us that they had purchased the system from dell and they had a roughly 67 charge on their invoice that they were not made abundantly aware of when purchasing the system we went and compared we have the same 67 charge that charge listed for on-site warranty support and it's not something you can opt out of it is forcefully included in the price and it's included in the free warranty service it's not free if it costs 67 that doesn't even seem legal i'm not a lawyer but i don't know it seems questionable and dell by the way agreed on the phone when they called us not knowing who we were i explained it immediately i said uh just so you know we're a media outlet and we're reporting on this and she went okay and then continue to talk to us so the problem is that this charge uh dell told us that they are looking for a resolution for this 67 charge that is listed under a line item for the warranty that was listed as free on the website for the alienware system we bought not for this one we bought this from best buy and when our viewer tried to talk to dell and get the charge removed they disconnected from the chat with our viewer we went through the chat process we said we didn't want to pay for this 67 i apologize i don't know if i didn't notice it or if it wasn't made clear or if it's a hidden charge but i don't want it uh the system hasn't shipped yet please remove the charge and the support fought me over it and again it's not like we were like do you know who i am we were just talking to them as a customer and they fought me over it and eventually i started making angrier and angrier statements as a customer started making some threats about returns and things like that and they offered us a credit for the charge so it was possible to get it back if you're willing to be kind of a jerk about it to use a word that i can say on youtube not that it matters at this point but it's the whole thing's problematic it's extremely scummy and slimy and at the end of the day if you are buying this for parts you don't get many parts you can use it's a problem number one there if you're buying this to use it as a system be very careful about your billing and you might have to be a little bit aggressive with them to get some things refunded but they they did eventually do it and if you are buying it to use and you're okay with those charges uh more power to you i guess but just be aware that the system is not good value and you can buy any number of other brand systems and have something that is much easier to carry forward as it ages and probably has better parts this video card again not good cooler not good we have benchmarks on this thing it's horrible and also the noise isn't particularly impressive either bios is terrible so there are better options on the market for similar price as for that 67 charge what did dell say to us well they said we're trying to find a way to basically still charge you for it uh without making it visible so their solution they asked me for a screenshot of our invoice and they said they wanted to see where that charge was appearing in the invoice because it's not supposed to show up it's supposed to be included absorbed into the cost of the system a line item above it and i said so there's free warranty right says yes i was like and and the free warranty has a 67 charge associated it with it that accidentally was made visible to me as the customer she's like right yes and so then you guys want to absorb this cost into another line item to hide it from the customers for the free warranty right and she agreed with me so just watch out they're trying to i told them my advice is to get the word free out of there and say it's included in the cost of the system we'll give you on-site support for one year that's not a bad selling point but you have to make it clear and you can't tell them it's free and lie about it so that's it for this review don't buy this thing genuinely worse than the walmart purchasing experience at least that thing was a bucket of parts that you could use somewhere else and at least in that one after they sent us the correct system we had no extra recurring billing costs or other hidden in there like we're going to have or we would have had with the alienware system if we didn't get into a big fight with dell over it so this one we bought from best buy that is the safest way to buy this computer because then dell doesn't have your credit card information a retailer does but it doesn't fix the problem that the parts are not good so that's it for this one thanks for watching subscribe for more you can go to store.camerasaccess.net if you'd like to support us directly we'll have more reviews of pre-builds we're genuinely trying to find good ones we haven't so far but subscribe for more i'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 1,506,042

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware

Id: 4DMg6hUudHE

Length: 29min 49sec (1789 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mtrx3]

I would kind of understand Dell using the case itself as the mounting base for the CPU cooler IF it was something monstrous like a NH-D15 so they wouldn't need a backplate ... but that tiny lightweight proprietary sorry excuse for a cooler? Yeah, no.

[u/NoAirBanding]

It looks like an Optiplex on the inside

[u/Nandrith]

I'm slowly worried about Steve's blood pressure.

First the AMD-Bike, then the whole NZXT-switcheroo, now this...

Never thought being a hardware enthusiast could be THAT dangerous!

[u/DeliciousIncident]

It somehow has 4.5 stars on BesyBuy (where GN has bought it from).

[u/FarrisAT]

10400 and 1660super with 512gb SSD and 400w PSU. Seems like a good deal for $649. Not for $899.

The GPU alone sells for $500 on eBay.

[u/[deleted]]

these are like the only way to get a GPU though

my friend bought one for 1600$ canadian (i7 32GB) and the GPU in it is worth over 1000$

[u/piitxu]

I'd say as sucky it is a system like this for a private end user, Dell desktops (and probably any serious OEM)are great for enterprise. It takes 5 seconds to get to any part of the PC, you are able to swap/reuse most parts on the same form factor from Pcs built within the same gen (we have sff desktops from i5-6100s to i5-10600 all sharing exact same chassis, and compatible PSU, drives, memory and other accesories) allowing the company to extend the life of a big % of the pcs well beyond warranty period.

This is something that was not possible with HP in the past as computers bought on 3 different years all had different proprietary solutions for PSUs, cases, mobos, to the point that 2 PCs, one from 2013 and one from 2014, with the exact same specs and design had completely different mobo sizes or PSU connections (despite being the exact same PSU model name) making them incompatible with each other, which was a real pain in the ass in a time where cheap PSUs would blow every other day.

Not wanting to back up Dell here, but them, as most of the big oems, are used to sell hot garbage and get paid billions to big companies because the guy that does the shopping has no fucking idea what he's buying, all he knows is what the Dell rep told him. So it's only natural they try to do the same to the average Joe.

[u/ElectricJacob]

About the hidden charges, I'm sure Steve knows this, but he didn't explain it, so maybe not. Sure, a company may advertise something like "Free Warranty" or "Free Technical Support", but internally, those are costs that have to be paid for. When you buy a system from Dell, all of the parts are itemized, and things like warranty and support are also itemized in the parts list. Support is obviously a service, and not a produced product, but Dell needs to budget the money so that the support department knows how much they get for each product sold. So, the itemized "part" has a cost amount, so money can be transferred into the cost center of the support department so that the support engineers and support technicians, and their managers can all get paid. They don't work for free obviously. They advertise it as free, and don't want to tell you how much of your payment has been transferred to the support department's budget, but I guess it snuck in somehow.

[u/imaginary_num6er]

0:22 Found the impostor motherboard formfactor