Worst So Far: iBUYPOWER Pre-Built Gaming PC Slate MR1004 Review

oh that sounds good wow that's crazy what is it assembled from tested components complete system not tested no no you don't say so that hole that's supposed to have a screw in it the motherboard's not even in hdmi completely obstructed usb is unusable here [Music] a couple weeks ago we set forth on a quest to find a pre-built gaming pc that can actually be used out of box by anybody and that provides overall good value but more importantly is built well and runs as it should out of box thus far we haven't found one and now i buy power is here to change all of that by getting a super f there's there's no greater f that can be received in grading than what i weigh power has managed to get here before that this video is brought to you by squarespace we use squarespace for our own gn store and juggle complex multi-piece orders all the time with it squarespace makes it fast for us to roll out new products with detailed pages full of galleries videos and descriptors it's also useful for your own resume sites for photographer or project portfolios or for starting your new small business idea there's never been a better time to try and start your new business than right now and we can vouch that squarespace makes it easy visit squarespace.com gamersnexus to get 10 off your first purchase with squarespace so this is the iwy power slate mr1004 we bought it from a retailer along with the other two systems that we've already reviewed at this point those videos are on the channel and they're linked below if you'd like to check them out uh and we have some more coming in this one was 680 the cyber power one was 1050 del was 900 and the next two systems that are coming in we've got one that actually three we have one that was eighteen hundred dollars one that was two thousand and another one that was about a thousand dollars so this will set the the floor and the 680 mark is a good mark to hit that's the price point where you can still play games on a computer it's not too low end and it's something that's much more affordable than say the two thousand dollar boxes that we've got coming in as well and by the way a quick huge thank you to all of you who've bought stuff from us on store.gamersnexus.net like our mouse pads including these two new ones that are in stock and shipping now and of course our mod mats mouse mats shirts and everything else we sell in the store because it's those sales that make it a lot easier for us to buy this kind of stuff and well the two thousand dollar ones especially and just commit to reviewing them and putting out a good review for you so this thing uh has a promising price point and the components at the price point are not too bad they're certainly not as out of line with value as the cyber power one which was this is a bit rough for 1050 but it's still it's a gtx 1650 it's got an i3 10 105 and one stick of ram at eight gigabytes so that's about the floor in terms of an entry point to pc gaming as we've said a few times now we are genuinely really trying to find a good pre-built to recommend for a number of reasons one is because it's easier to get a pre-built right now than components individually in some cases another one is that like many of you probably are we are at gn pretty much everyone here is the personal i.t for their friends and family and so if you're watching this you know how to build computers you've done it before cool hopefully this series is helpful to you when you need to recommend a pre-built so that you don't have to become the dedicated it for a computer you maybe have built for someone so that's why we're trying to find recommendations for our own purposes as well and the next systems we have coming in we have specifically searched for and we asked our community for recommendations so we could try and get something in that clears the hurdles but this one is not going to do it today we have a huge list of issues both software and hardware with the ibuypower slate mr we'll start with the teardown and with the hardware it's um it's bad it's just not good let's get started so this one has arrived with some shipping problems and we'll tell you why and it's like it's really obvious but from exterior we instantly have concerns of thermals uh there's there's no airflow here you will not find any there is one tiny hole here so maybe that's it i would power for whatever reason has decided to put not not just two but or not even three but four 120 millimeter fans on this 680ish dollar computer with an i3 uh and a gpu that we'll look at in a second and perhaps they've chosen four fans for this because the front is entirely glass there's there's no way for air to get in here there's just not a lot of depth there and there's a whole lot of plastic and then there's a filter behind it and there's a filter in front of this is insane what are you doing all right check this out so there's a lot of plastic for the grill right that shoes at some of the air potential full potential and then there's a filter here metal filter and then we have the fans with a filter we've got double filters which is always bad for airflow and a bunch of glass with tiny hole and the best part is that they've done this filter because they have this hole because this wouldn't be filtered by the side in the very least they should have just committed and closed off this entire thing uh at least i could then respect their commitment to suffocating it here's some rolling screws wow is something going to fall on my head is it all screwed down so instantly i see where the the noise of loose screws is from at least one part of it so if you look up here so that hole that's supposed to have a screw in it the motherboard's not even in there is a way to prevent this it's you can't just write it off as shipping damage and call it a day there's they could have done better here perhaps if they had taken some of the cost for their completely utterly useless fans that are obstructed by glass anyway they could have packed it better you can see that it's obstructed hdmi completely obstructed usb is unusable here that one is unusable you're gonna have a hard time getting rj45 in and out of there so this whole thing is already instant failing grade highway power has failed before it's even been turned on and if the reason this is completely preventable and they're being cheap they could have shipped this thing with one of these but they didn't this is from cyberpower cyberpower used this in the 1050 system we bought from them uh all these again bought through a retailer but packed by highway power cyber and so forth and if i had packed this thing so that the gpu wasn't wow that's not even in the slot is it wasn't just uh going to leverage the system into i mean first of all screws shouldn't really be able to come out that easily but the gp is clearly leveraging it all out of place this is why i said we're gonna have to fix it up a bit before powering it on so again this this will come off after testing okay so there's the problem we're having trouble getting a great shot of it but you can see that the pins for the video card pcie slot are not actually in the slot on the motherboard it's been ripped out it's just hanging here so this is one there's a risk that with a little more shipping damage it could have torqued the hell out of the pcie slot on the card and broken it but too if a user tries to turn this on it will not boot and they'd be lucky if it doesn't short something in the system with screws floating around with the device halfway plugged in there's a risk that there's a direct short at some point and you you lose a component as a result of that and then the whole thing would just be a break where do i even start with this wow holy look at that thing not this look below it wow that's crazy something good that did huh this pcie slot reinforcement there you go hard at work this thing incurred some insane damage props to whomever was handling this thing when shipping it considering they hulk threw it across the truck when they loaded it but that's still not an excuse for highway power because there's a lot of ways around this number one is better packaging inside the system the video card could have been removed and there could have been a three-step instruction booklet for the user for how to get that back in there it's not much different than their other instructions that say to flip the psu switch and set it to 115 volts or whatever for based on where you live so that one would have prevented this it's not a hard thing for the user to fix not ideal because then they can't use it out of box but i mean you can't use this out of box either i've i've actually never seen that before the clips the clips that grab the foot for the pcie slot they're all gone is that what's shaking around let's find the loose parts well other than the you know the video card oh there's one that that look familiar all right well we'll maybe find a screw at some point but for now we've got that which belongs here and there's actually all the other ones are missing i don't know i've mended it so how how that is so in there how does that happen there's a a lack of care lack of attention to detail and and somebody put so little thought into packing this thing that it's causing this is significant damage for them if a customer had this one apart could die two you could have uh just an rma where it's going back and then coming back to the user so you're express shipping it two ways that doesn't seem economical but anyway let's look at the cabling so 24 pin is cable routed credit there i guess in the same way you'd give credit to a car for its base metal value the usb cable is it glued in no wow i'm proud of you highway power so if you want to grab one of our mod mats that we're using to protect our table from all of these pcs as we work on them you can go to store.gamersnexus.net and grab one of the work surfaces okay well i was gonna go get the last screw out but it's already been pre-removed for me one thing i didn't mention this cable uh was like this so it's hanging loose right in front of the fan and this uh ivory power this needs to be secured somewhere it doesn't matter if it's just a simple zip tie or you route it or whatever but hold it down because there's a good chance it's going to end up getting sucked into the fan and just dragging or causing the fan to stop at some point depending on how the user moves it around when they're deploying the system oh wow we have problems in the back too but let's look at the motherboard first the usb slot is actually a little bit damaged it would need to be it would it wouldn't be difficult you'd have to push it back into place pull that that is in the correct slot that's the most we can ask for the memory is uh 3 000 megahertz 16 18 18 38. oh take a look at that pcie slot that's that's insane oh the plastics actually really chewed up too i'm actually starting to wonder if this was partly a an installation issue and not just a shipping issue and the reason is the way the metal and the plastic is bent and damaged around the slot looks like someone really violently pushed this thing down i'm wondering if maybe that caused some damage that was pushed over the limit with shipping does this move a little bit of wiggle but not too much not as much as cyber power i think i keep coming back to the same problem that i had with dell which is i wish these sis would just have a little bit of pride wow that's not even in oh come on guys what the are you doing i wanna put these two back the way they were so check this out i haven't done anything to this one yet what i'm gonna do is turn the screwdriver to the right and tighten it it shouldn't spin but oh man can it spin without his that was quite a bit of movement for something out of the assembly line like that's that's not enough pressure how's this one this one's all the way down so what that means is we're going to have fully torqued corners everywhere except here and if we were to do a pressure map and exactly that installation like we did with the cyber power system then what you would see is lack of coverage up here you can see a real serious lack and mounting pressure over on the sides but particularly on this left side where we had screws that weren't all the way in so that's how you know there's a problem look at that i buy power uh is just there maybe there needs to be more training or more quality control or something but we're you know we're loose on these screws over here it's not a consistent problem that's that's my problem with this it's inconsistent and that means that whoever's managing the production of this can't predict what the problems are going to be when they're doing qc so they just have to look at everything and there's not enough time for that this screw screw's loose right that screw is kind of loose these are tighter uh all the way down you've got a missing screw up here when it was shipped to us which means probably wasn't tight all the way and then you've got this one over here that they torqued the hell out of because you can see the screw ripped off the paint on the pcb and we've got exposed copper it's not going to short anything because it's just a screwed into a ground plated through hole but like total inconsistency here that's so light there's like nothing in there all right we've got a good one good one today we have a raid max rx 400 xt caution hazardous area oh yes so i would say so which this whole computer was a hazard so check this out so basically we just noticed this but when you connect the power cable into the power supply there's a lot of flex in there from this really thin stance steel here's where bad gets worse so after all of that after reassembling the thin we really had to work to fix this computer it we first of all we deserve a partial refund for doing the assembly work on behalf of either power we didn't know that they would ship us a box of parts where the box of parts was literally the case box with the parts in it floating around but here it is uh so we reached out to iowa power as an anonymous customer remember we bought this retail they don't know who we are and so we reached out sent an email and it's now been the better part of a week and we've had zero response and our email was very simple we basically said my computer is not turning on i just bought a computer from the insert retail store here and it's not turning on uh i don't know a lot about computers but here's some symptoms please help thank you and we left the obviously important contact information no response zero that's even worse than the nzxt undercover bld support test that we put them through about a year or two ago at least nzxt responded incompetently but they responded our power is not even that far so this thing doesn't even deserve the benchmarks we're going to give to it but we're going to do them anyway because we recognize that we probably just got extraordinarily lucky and ira power got extraordinarily unlucky or this is a major problem but either way it's the computer is capable of running software if it boots and so we fixed it to run the software and see if it provides any value when it is fixed so after fixing the pcie slot prying metal out of the usb ports and pulling loose screws out of the case by the way we found the missing one it was in the dust filter once we finally got it booted iowa power's warning about the system not being tested as assembled became even more obvious bios had the memory set to 2133 megahertz this is actually even worse than just not enabling xmp because intel's official spec for the i3 10 105 would allow for 26.66 megahertz they don't even go that far 2133 out of box is just bad that's like the speed from when ddr4 had just launched in about 2014. the board and the cpu combo allow for xmp and for manually increasing the memory frequency so it's even more disappointing that this was skipped over like the other pre-built there's one stick of ram in this that's not as offensive as one stick of ram in a 1050 system from cyberpower but we'd obviously prefer to get use out of the cpu's dual channel imc with two sticks at least in this instance though the computer is cheap enough to where we can kind of overlook that issue as for other problems we had one cold boot where the case fans didn't spin up at all this is a little bit scary because although the system turns on without the fans moving there's a decent chance that an uninformed user who doesn't notice this could run the computer hotter than intentional upon further inspection we believe it has to do with the fan hub on the backside or the connection quality a reboot eventually fixed this but it's a problem that they need a hard solution for cyberpower had a great hard copy manual and digital manual with very clearly spelled out instructions for purchasers who don't know much about computers this is an important step for a pre-built they need to have that handholding step to make sure everything's done properly it reduces rmas reduces support requests and gets everyone running smoothly ioi power did not include a hard copy quick start guide it didn't even include a qr code to a digital guide and it didn't include a url for a digital guide for setup so you're just shoved into the deep end except the deep end is shark infested and there's corpses of video cards and pcie slots that have sunk into the bottom and finally before we get into the testing data we also noticed some problems with the peripherals namely the the mouse doesn't left click it's the squishiest click we've ever experienced take a listen to it yourself the left mouse button even occasionally has to be manually dislodged from the switch cavity in order to use it again we've seen the first mouse ever made in the computer history museum the one made out of a block of wood and with the red button on it and that thing still works better than this one patrick and i can both commit that this is impressively the worst mouse that either of us has ever used all right time for the benchmarks we'll cut over to the benchmarks now starting with our pressure testing we used chemical paper and our pressure analysis tools to produce this pseudo color image which shows the mounting pressure gradient for the cooler as delivered the pressure was somewhat lacking in the top as expected and the results was weaker in contact with ihs however overall this cooler actually does have better pressure than most cheap coolers the trouble of course is that it's not all about the pressure and the contact of the ihs because the cooler still lacks on a copper and meaningful surface area so although the pressure is surprisingly good the cooler remains minimally effective it's good that this is just an i3 though that's sort of the saving grace here because it's just not that much power consumption in the cpu for the cooler to need to deal with we'll look at thermals after the gaming performance for gaming performance as always we'll remind you that all these numbers are predicated mostly on the gpu and the cpu and to some extent the ram but not the oem or the si the oem the si decisions impact performance but they don't make the silicon level parts anything from thermals to bloatware can hurt operation if you just want to know the performance of the cpu or the gpu on its own in a vacuum or a standardized bench check out our reviews of the individual parts for the unrestricted performance without the other decisions affecting that starting with cyberpunk 2077 and using our standardized 1080p medium settings the ibuypower system ran at about 39 fps average with the stock configuration improving by a somewhat large 4.4 percent with xmp enabled manually that's a lot of performance to leave on the table the system allows dell a lead of 38 when compared to the clean 54 fps average although this is reduced with bloatware and all the other stuff running the cyber power system is the most salvageable from these two competitors from a parts perspective and it increases the frame rate by 62 percent in exchange for 54 more money that's not a bad deal considering the overall uplift but the cyber power system does need a new cooler so that puts us closer to a less exciting one dollar for roughly one percentage point improvement either power slate mr could play this game but settings would need a hard reduction here combat further will hinder the frame time consistency so this is one where you'll struggle a little bit more than some of the other games hitman 3 shows the insane difference that memory can make we ran and re-ran these tests for verification and we ended up with the same results so here's how they break down first dell's system lags behind as a result of two things the primary is the memory module being used is one module like the rest of these except not only is it a single dimm but it's a single dimm that's running with just four memory chips and it's at low speeds with loose timings secondly the mcafee services seem to really hate hitman 3 including the background services that stay in place even in our reduced bloatware testing the iowa power system is able to lead dow with thanks to its lack of bloatware and its use of better memory at least one stick of it dell could improve a lot though if it got rid of the background services that persist even when bloatware is killed as seen by our limited 37fps average maximum range highway power also has a lot of room to improve we saw an uplift in this game of twenty percent that's not the first time we've seen so much uplift from a memory change but it's not as common as the smaller five to ten percent improvements from enabling xmp either power really hurt its performance here by leaving xmp disabled in this specific game and that's especially disappointing because it's just a simple bios toggle dell however looks even worse here than previously so there's some perspective for you in red the two which is mostly gpu bound the iowa power system falls back to where it makes more sense at the bottom of the stack since it's the cheapest and that's thanks to its 1650. the card isn't able to support this game at the same frame rates as the two with the 1660 super unsurprisingly and so you'd probably have to drop the graphic settings to compensate cyberpower holds a 43 advantage in this one so it doesn't look as advantaged as in cyberpunk rainbow six siege has comically high frame rates so all these systems are objectively good performers here just some are relatively higher in this instance cyber powers one thousand fifty dollar computer holds about a 41 advantage over iowa power's 680 system dell is all over the place between an 11 and a 26 uplift these systems could also handle rainbow six siege at ultra settings at 1440p so there's a bit of a gateway here to higher resolution gaming but you're not going to be able to do this on all the games noise testing is up now in this testing and measured at 20 inches distance from the front of the system either power instantly establishes a higher idle noise level than its two competitors that we tested in our 26 db noise floor environment dell starts at around 32 decibels with cyber power and ira power both at 36 when idle where either power breaks away is under load the system ramps the fans pretty hard here climbing to 44 decibels it's loud this could run a lot quieter if the cpu and the gpu ran cooler but that'd require more expensive parts or a more open case or a mix of both here's a quick power consumption benchmark we normally run tests at the eps 12 volts or pcie cables for components but we only care about system power draw for this one because they are pre-built computers the highway power system is unsurprisingly among the lowest for power consumption and that's because it's just an i3 with a 1650. dell is next with post tower numbers showing a bit of a drop in blender as a result of the boosting limits and bios and then cyberpower consumes the most power but it of course offers the most performance thermals are up now tested in a controlled environment we ran only two sequences of tests for this one one with the front panel and one without both running a combined cpu and gpu workload the cpu ran at 84 degrees celsius stock or 77 without the front panel 84 is fine in the sense that it's not close to thermal throttling so that's good but it's a poor result for something that is as low power as an intel i3 in the very least though running a stock cooler is actually acceptable in this instance so we can let highway power get away with this one you just have to make sure that you as the user clean out any dust every couple months just to make sure there's no performance degradation because you don't have a lot of thermal headroom here to clog it up with dust gpu thermals were also fine despite the constrictive front panel all of these components are low enough power that they're not any real risk of running too hot the box doesn't heat up that much there is one aspect that changed here leaving the gpu fan curve to auto for this test was one of our uncontrolled elements and that's because again system ships this way so we wanted to see how it would do the gpu fan speed did drop a little bit by about 160 rpm so it would actually run cooler if we lock to the fan speeds but what this tells us is that there's room to bring the noise levels down because the fan rpm comes down even if it's on an auto curve so this shows us that there's the reduction we need in noise levels if either power opened up the case with a better design so that's it for the review the biggest problems other than the hardware were again support if you skip through to the end here go watch the section about support because the the key takeaway there is that even if we're giving highway power a pass for some of these problems there needs to be support there that's what you're paying for the whole point of our pre-bill is someone else builds it which that has not worked out and someone else handles support and we're still waiting again better part of a week on that for a response and you want a pre-built for the consolidation of warranties where now you have one point of contact for everything and just there's there's nothing here that gives us any indication of a sign of intelligence on whatever planet io power lives on so you know overpower you you had a chance here it's it's really not a bad price given the market compared to some of the other prices we've seen where people are selling systems there's one we were looking at the other day it was sixteen hundred dollars and i had a gtx 1660 in it that's utterly insane and it's shocking that people are willing to pay that much for it but in this case it's a 1650 it's an i3 yes it's a bit expensive still and a lot of the cost is wasted on things like all this glass that's actually just worse than not having it and four rgb fans that are completely unnecessary but look the thermals are okay because it's an i3 and it's a 1650. the power consumption is very low the heat output's very low so even with a poor design like this one they're all right and that seems to be the biggest thing that all these oems and sizes we've tested so far get stuck on i got past that part that's good and it's 680 that's also relatively not a bad starting point compared to some of the others so they had all the ingredients to make a good product but it just all got fumbled somewhere in multiple ways and we can't forgive it because even if we forgive one aspect of it there's too many other hard failing grades where you there's drivers that are missing there's no support it's shipped in pieces not by design and they can't even set bios to a higher to the intel spec for memory not even xmp so that's it for this one unfortunately we have yet to find a good pre-built but we spent a lot of money just recently desperately trying to find a good one because we don't want the whole series to be negative so we're trying hard hopefully one of the next ones will not disappoint us they look promising but for now even if you weren't going to buy this system and you bought one of the more expensive iowa power ones our biggest concern is that you won't have support because they didn't answer us and they don't even know how much money we spent on it we didn't tell them which specific model we got just that it doesn't turn on and we bought it so this isn't like uh oh they spent too little they don't clear the support to your thing it's just getting ignored and that's unacceptable so that's it for this one thanks for watching as always that you can subscribe for more go to store.camerasnexus.net or patreon.com gamersnexus helps out directly and help fund our next pre-builds and we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 666,624

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware

Id: 9sDRiakWcIM

Length: 29min 46sec (1786 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Harag5]

That damage looks incredibly familiar. My store sees units in this condition when overzealous customs agents open the packaging. They give precisely 0 fucks about damaging the unit.

[u/inaccurateTempedesc]

One day prebuilts will be top notch and it'll be thanks to Steve roasting the fuck out of shitty ones.

[u/bobasaurus]

The state of this computer is really shameful. Makes me sad, my first computer was from ibuypower back in like 2002 (still have my radeon 9800 pro on a shelf displayed proudly). Played so much diablo 2 on that thing.

[u/ariolander]

I don't know how saving $3-5 for those inflatable foam bags is worth this level of shipping damage. Surely the RMA rate must be insane when you handle your machines like this. Also completely untested machines? Having it "just work" out of the box is the entire point of prebuilts. Not even getting an email back from support is the worst part.

[u/Dunkinmydonuts1]

i live for these absolute roast videos from steve

[u/Theswweet]

They didn't use form-fitting foam???

[u/Kougar]

I haven't even watched it yet, but that sticker ....what?

Assembled from Tested Components
(Complete System not Tested)
Assembled and Tested in the USA

Just leaving the sticker off would've been better. What does it even mean. I thought the entire point of SI's was that the system would be tested and configured before shipping.

Any random person can throw hardware together from a youtube vid these days, but making it work, let alone work well is where the boutique/SI expertise supposedly comes into play.

I foresee the need to make popcorn before I watch this.

[u/newhoa]

I bought an iBuyPower PC around 2002. It was really poorly built and packaged. I got blue tube lighting and one of them had broke (cracked glass) and the other two weren't even plugged in. They eventually fell off because they secured them with only weak tape.

I got it without a floppy drive but wasn't informed I couldn't install the Windows I got on that PC since it didn't SATA drives without floppy installed drivers. Customer support was no help. In fact, I don't think they ever responded.

The motherboard failed within a year. I was young and made very little and worked super hard to get that PC and was really let down. I thought for sure they'd not be around for long. But here we are.

After that I learned how to build my own computers.

[u/Hugh_Jundies]

I built an iBUYPOWER prebuilt about a year ago because of a sale that appeared to be better than buying parts individually.

It was a nightmare. The shipping was delayed, I had to call them up 2 days after it was supposed to arrive and it turned out it was sitting at the factory for almost a week until they decided to ship it. They ended up overnighting it for free. Ok, fine.

Then the tech problems came. After playing anything for longer than an hour the computer would shut down and sometimes it wouldn't restart for about 15-20 minutes. I reached out to support and got crickets. Turns out the computer was massively overheating since it was a similar case to this one. Tons of fans with no way to get in airflow. It should also be noted the CPU was liquid cooled and it was still overheating. After about a week of me emailing support every other day, they suggested I reinstall windows. Literally that was it. Even after I sent the temps right before shut down.

Finally I bought a new case, new power supply, and new RAM. I'll never buy from iBUYPOWER or likely any prebuilt ever again. I bought a prebuilt because I wanted to reduce headache, but it honestly would have saved me time to just build it myself. One of the most infuriating purchases I ever made. Luckily after putting in the work it all runs fine, with no thanks to IBUYPOWER.