YouTube Ads Told Us to Buy This: Redux Gaming PC Review

speaking of the gtx 1650 that's included in here is woefully inadequate compared to one the cpu and to the price of the computer is this just taped in place that kind of sucks yeah that's not great oh that's really loose take a look at that [Music] adding to our growing massive playlist of pre-built gaming pc reviews is now reduxed this pc has been advertised very heavily on youtube and media online and so we wanted to buy it especially after requests from our audience in the youtube community page when we last asked hey what should we review next in the pre-built line so this is a redux good pc they have a couple different tiers good is one of them it's one of the cheapest ones and this was just under 1300 when you ordered it the uh components are not particularly impressive for the price 10 400 f and a gtx 1650 so that that's going to be a little rough but we're also looking for if they built the machine competently and that might be where redox has an edge over some of its competition in the pre-built market if you've seen some of the other things we've reviewed let's get started before that this video is brought to you by us and store.gamersnexus.net after months of production our next round of gn teardown toolkits now has an arrival date and is on backorder on the store these toolkits have been in extremely high demand since we started making them a few years ago so if you want to guarantee that you get one from the next run while also helping us soak the cost on evaluating even more pre-built gaming vcs back order one of them from the store today the toolkits include 10 high quality tools with matched rod and handle lengths at 100 millimeters each excellent for good balance and use and for providing good torque while remaining portable the tools include custom ground down hex heads that are flattened for small gpu screws and they're also ground down externally to give more clearance against small components we also include common allen torx and phillips drivers and a convenient roll bag for transportation visit store.gamersnexus.net to backorder your set of long lasting tools today so first we'll put the specs list on the screen this was a 10 400 f and 1650 build the 1650 at the time was listed by redux as 309. the msrp as a reminder is 149. however the retail time when we checked this is about a month ago was 365 dollars closer to when we ordered it so given that it does appear like redux is sticking closer to the truth than not when it advertises that it doesn't charge extra for components it just charges a build fee which it claims is 75 it is still massively overpriced but if it's at least not a lie then it's more of market conditions as opposed to just bs marketing which it's more market conditions more tenable between the two so on the specs table what we've done is gone through and collects the retail price for as close comparison components as we could find and it does come out pretty favorable for redux where it's not you're not spending that much more now yes you can pick things that make more sense one of the things in that list you'll see or in the computer you'll see is a liquid cooler and it's something like six fans i think it's like six fans in here we'll go over that but that's just it's the wrong place to spend money obviously for a system that has a 1650 in it so we disagree with the part selection but it doesn't look like you're spending much more viewer to build this exact system which we're not to be clear we're not recommending that if you built this exact system it'd be pretty close in price so again our biggest reason for looking at this was the feedback from the youtube community page you've all certainly seen it in ads at this point the reason redux has popped up out of nowhere and has been able to throw the massive amounts of money it has been able to at advertising is because it's not just a startup no name brand it is in fact a spin-off of some kind of digital storm which has been around a very long time at this point well-established system integrator and pre-built pc builder and so it's not redux didn't just spawn out of nothing and start spending i don't even know maybe potentially millions but at least hundreds of thousands on advertising it does in fact have a larger company behind it so a couple things as we get into this the support and the turnaround time those are very important factors uh most the pcs we've reviewed thus far in the pre-built list have been pretty quick to get in they haven't taken a long time except for the alienware system and the hp system was a bit problematic this one did however take a long time to ship uh when we ordered it and just before we ordered it there was a statement that said your pre-built pc will ship within 10 to 14 days of us getting it built so it looks like it'll get there or ship sooner than it actually does technically they're not inaccurate it's just it's worded in a way where you might think it arrives sooner we ordered this august 16th it is currently october 18th when we're filming this and we received it last week so it took a couple months to get here it was very expensive we had basically no feedback from redux up until the point we emailed them and said where is it at which point they actually were extremely prompt and were very helpful uh provided links helped us out with figuring out when it would arrive so actually redox did a great job once we reached out and asked for an update and for that they do get good marks because support's important and if you ever have an order even if it's for our store for example you should always email first to ask for help because the companies that are actually trying to get you the product will respond redux did that so that was a good start okay we're going to get started on the teardown and the benchmarking uh to be very clear redox has never run an ad against our channel normally we don't have to say a negative we don't have to say this company hasn't run an ad on our channel but just because redux has been so spend heavy on advertising we did want to point that out we haven't taken any money from them uh we have however given them money and that's for this computer okay time to take apart the redux pc it's about thirteen hundred dollars good timing because our tool kits have just arrived back on back order so if you wanna get one they've been out of stock for a while the case is a td 500 we'll talk about this a lot during the review i won't spend too much time talking about it now but this is a case we've reviewed and we reviewed it positively okay so internally it's a computer and that's a good thing not because we weren't expecting a computer but because it's using standard parts uh or at least from what we can see thus far we've got a standard form factor motherboard that's micro atx we have a standard but completely overkill and unnecessary in a way that's not helpful actually liquid cooler and the reason it's completely overkill or unhelpful is just because you're spending a lot for something that this can be handled with a stock cooler especially because of the four fans that are included in the case as redox ships that i think the original td500 might be three fans we'll talk about that a little more later but they're putting four fans in here and then you got to push pull setup on the radiator which it's just not beneficial for a 65 watt heat load you will barely see an impact from push pull like this on a 200 watt heat load or 250 watt heat load let alone 65 where stock cooler with an open panel with one fan would be sufficient so way overkill here and in a way that is contributing to cost where all of this money should probably be spent on this and then they wouldn't be in as bad of a spot as they will be later when we show you but in terms of the rest of it kill management's okay i can see that some of these front i o headers and we'll get a closer up shot of this in a moment are actually not fully seated so that's not great that could be qc it could maybe be shipping uh but either way that's that's not something we want to see two sticks of ram that is great to see sadly very rare with pre-built for some reason so let's take these out see what they've put in here so there's the ram it is this patriot patriot viper ram uh and it's gonna be a 3200 megahertz kit but it's not running at that speed we'll talk about that later as well because they technically spec this as a b460 board but what i'm seeing here this is a b560m pro e so it is actually a better board than it was technically specified and um that's just stock availability b560 is unlocked for memory for the uh the non-k sku so this memory could run at 3200 but they're not doing that so that's very unfortunate waste of potential there heat spreaders aren't necessary but it is a mark of quality at least uh typically is is uh associated with higher quality memory not always it's not not because the heat spreader just because they're spending more on it speaking of the gtx 1650 that's included in here is woefully inadequate compared to one the cpu and to the price of the computer standard video card here you can see it's a cheap it's a 1650 it doesn't need a lot of cooling but i'm not seeing any copper in there there's definitely no copper heat pipes that is just an aluminum fin stack now as far as patching and i are concerned we would like to see this with the tubes mounted down as long as there's slack for it this is okay the pump is not at the top so you've got the radiator tank a little bit above the pump it's not the highest point in the loop so it's not going to run too dry and die but this will over time affect minimally the acoustics you'll get some more bubbling or pump wine noises occasionally as stuff moves around and ideally it should be tubes down but it's not as bad as the pumping of the top of the loop still not how how we would like to see it built though especially for like high volume where you're worried about every bit of longevity mattering but look at this has digital storm been watching gamers nexus look at the orientation of this all-in-one cooler motherboard quality no vrm heatsink on this pretty simple board for a 10400f you might not ever really need it uh we'd have to do a separate board analysis we cared about that but there's so much cooling in here with four fans two more up here for the push pull setup open air up at the top where there's no fans but air can move freely based on the pressure created by these fans there's so much air movement around here with a 10 400 f at 65 watts the vrm is going to be fine it's only really going to struggle if they keep using this board for a higher end cpu so if they're using this board for like a 10 900k or 11 then that's a problem so here's a fan header we're going to talk about this in more detail later patrick had a lot of thoughts on how this was set up you see sata running up here to the fan header uh we've got standard pwm [Music] fan connections we have argb connections is this just taped in place that kind of sucks this is kind of stupid so i like how they've got holes where they've filled them or they never punched them out that are four screws but uh instead of using those and securing it with screws somewhere they'd have to not really retool but they would have to modify the chassis and presumably they're ordering enough volume from cooler master here where they could get a modification made but anyway yeah they just instead of using the screws here they just went with tape i guess it reduces risk if there's a maybe we should check it for a potential short it certainly reduces risk of a screw scraping the pcb and causing a short if there's 12 volt plane that's exposed but that shouldn't be happening then again talk to i guess fractal and txt about that um so anyway it's not particularly strong this feels like it's going to come off with age as well just like this would so i'd like to see something else for that kill management looks pretty good this is all standard stuff zip ties everywhere and excessive amounts of zip ties but very well cable managed pc let's get the board out okay that was definitely on there how's the paste paste application is not great i don't know if this is being pre-applied by cooler master redux is ultimately responsible for everything where you're kind of treating them as a hub that bottom corner's got no coverage and you can see that here zero coverage there look it's not a big deal it's 65 watts it's cooling just fine this is massive overkill for the cpu so i'm not really complaining about this particular setup because it's okay but you really want to contact the whole ihs for cooling just always general rule so that's all fine way overkill on the cooling not necessarily bad but a system like this money should be spent elsewhere it's not going to be competitive with high cooling and nothing to cool that's of value fairly standard just a it's an off-the-shelf motherboard this is a good thing they haven't done some weird proprietary stuff so standard board we've got a by 16 pcie slot you see by wiring and a screw that's just stuck in there dislodge that later so it's 80 plus gold 700 watt we've got a whole piece on 80 plus if you want to learn more about it a lot of people think it means more than it does in terms of power capability is maximum power 700 watts obviously you can get all this is good i like to see this 12 volts right there 12 volts you can get all 700 on 12 volts that's great andrew has informed me that the case needs to be turned around because in his words the case's butt is facing the camera and that might get us demonetized so that's the redox teardown we've seen enough at this point it is not incompetent in fact it is built fairly competently uh not many major mistakes most of them were things that could be potentially ascribed the shipping damage so better than we've seen in a lot of instances for pre-built there's value there unfortunately the price is so high that the value diminishes once we get into benchmarks which is what we're gonna do right now time to get into the gaming benchmarks for this as always the silicon parts are made by other parties that be intel and nvidia in the case of the redox pc performance derived from these parts is pretty hard for an oem or an si to screw up but it is possible the bigger thing that we look for is the component selection and the combination or how well the cpu and gpu work together ram sometimes comes into play as well we'll start our gaming tests with cyberpunk at 1080p the redox pc ends up being actually worse value than the dell g55000 an average fps which is an impressive feat although the extra stick of ram and the redox means that it held better frame time consistency that's worth something but it's not worth 370 dollars we don't recommend it but even buying the dell g5 and installing 70 dollars of ram would be a far better deal the 1 000 abs challenger blows away the redux outperforming it by an absolutely staggering 61 percent while the redux costs 27 more money and abs isn't an outlier here cyber powers 3200 bsd had similar performance improvements at about the same price reduction the only real problem with the cyber power pc was its cpu cooler but that can be easily dealt with even if you bought the bst and paid someone to replace the cooler for you or just took the panel off it'd be better value and cheaper than the redox while performing better so this is a horrible start for the redux regardless of how competently it's built this doesn't really make any sense from a money perspective with red dead redemption 2 a heavily gpu bound test in our suite the redox ended up about the same as a eye by power system with a gtx 1650 and a 10 105 app the cpu is worse than the ibuypower box and that'll matter in cpu bound tasks like maybe 7-zip or something but the performance is so bound on the gpu that redox's advantage becomes irrelevant for some games like this one we're close to run to run variance or error here with a one fps gap and the difference in specific gpu also has an effect from minor changes to frequency redox has thoroughly at this point embarrassed itself in this testing performing actually worse or about the same at best as a 680 computer that arrived with the video card ripped out of the pcie slot that's not to speak of the 1 000 challenger or the 1 000 cyber power 3200 bst both of which outdid the redux by 50 and cost less and so again we're not wishing for things that are impossible here we're not being unreasonable with our price expectations because two computers on this chart exist that have far better performance and cost less and the higher power build that's on this one we don't recommend it there are a lot of reasons we didn't like it but half the price if given these two options it would make more sense to buy that and then upgrade from there rainbow six siege drives another nail into the coffin the redux only ran at 132fps average actually worse than the 680 highway power box once again that's because despite having a 10400f the value of a good cpu is limited by the performance of the included gpu sticking a 1650 into anything and expecting high performance is a fool's errand and this is clearly the limiting factor lows are a little bit better and that's likely thanks to the cpu but not in any way which is noticeable to a human nor important for the price so although this is more than playable obviously it isn't good value the challenger the bst once again landed about 50 ahead in average fps cyberpower technically had worse lows and that's thanks to the memory configuration so redox outdid them there however another stick of ram is cheap and the abs box already had it and to the credit of other companies dell eyebuy power hp lenovo they do all have boxes in the 1200 range that if you buy right without do the redux here as well for thirteen hundred dollars you'd expect 1440p would be a reasonable request that's fine for rainbow six at least where the game isn't too demanding overall the redux ends up worse than everyone else once again allowing the 1000 computers to establish a 59 advantage and allowing really is the right word here redux chose to bottleneck itself on this component selection thermals are up next this is the best cooled pre-built we've tested and that's because the intel i5 10400f is a locked 65 watt tdp cpu and redox has some reason slapped a 240 millimeter clc on top of it which is something you're paying for on top of all that the case has a total of six fans for this we don't have a fan curve to complicate matters here and more on that later so we can see that after an extended full system torture test with 100 cpu and gpu loads the cpu is settled at 56 degrees celsius in 21c ambient for contacts the dell g55000 got up to almost 90 degrees using the exact same cpu in its test we tried increasing the pump speed past its default setting but this had no significant effect on thermals for this one and so we're not bothering to show the line here the gpu stayed fairly cool as well with the single fan gtx 1650 hitting steady state at 69 degrees with hot spot temperatures of 80 degrees the combination of extremely low power parts with unnecessarily powerful cooling means that thermals are not a concern for this system so at least that's done well here because of the unnecessarily large liquid cooler that wastes budget the redox system is extremely quiet and because of the static system fan speed it doesn't get much louder under full load running the noise test using our standard methodology the system ramped from a near silent noise reading that's close to our noise floor to just under 35 dba as the gpu hit its maximum speed that's still extremely quiet for a system under full load with this level of cooling performance so redox does well for this one also if only due to overspending on cooling that was for the fan configuration there are two fan headers on the motherboard both of which are used the three pin dc pump plug is connected directly to the sysfan one board and the header and it's set to 7.2 volts maximum 12. meanwhile the cpu fan 1 header is connected via a 4 pin pwm cable to a fan hub so this fan hub controls all four argb case fans as well as the two clc vents take redox's claim of free 4cm master fans 72 value with a mountain of salt because the normal retail td 500 rgb already comes with three argb fans however the fan controls are absolutely awful it's not explained anywhere but the fan hub has three speed settings low medium and external control out of the box the fan hub was set to medium which meant that for our stock testing it ignored all pwm input and ran the case fans between 600 700 rpm constantly at least it made testing simpler but the only way to cycle between fan speeds is with the cheap battery-powered rgb remote which you should immediately duct tape to the side of the case to avoid losing there's no visual feedback at all for which speed setting is currently selected and also if the cpu is idling for example the external control speed might be slower than the static medium speed so hitting the fan plus button can actually make the fan spin slower if the cv cooler weren't such overkill for 10400f even at low speeds this mess could have caused some serious problems by invisibly limiting the fan speed rather than just being an annoyance finally a quick power test just to show you where it lands the gpu loaded in gaming has full system power draw ranging around 140 watts that's less than anything else on our chart containing a discrete gpu but as we've seen the drop in power here correlates with the drop in gaming performance time to talk about some of the setup potential for bloatware and the installation assistance redux has printed a short quick start guide on the inner flap of the box including a valuable reminder to connect your keyboard and mouse to the p that sounds painful but we're willing to try anything once a slightly more comprehensive quick start guide is included in the accessory kit and it's one of the better guides we've seen with the pre-built the illustrations in the guide are of the cooler master td 500 the case that was actually sent with our system and there are specific instructions about removing its side panel that may be because the td500 is the only case that redux uses right now but it's still nice the illustrations are simple and to the point and more detailed and genuinely helpful explanations are relegated to the footnotes the rest of the accessory kit is mainly spare hardware from the various components used in the system built this includes alternate mounting hardware and paste for the 240ml clc and the antenna for the wireless card the exception is a live windows 10 flash drive 32 gigabytes which redux includes with the 110 windows 10 home item on the bill this is intended to be used as a diy recovery tool flash drives are cheap so not a lot of credit there and windows 10 live media creation is free but this is an extremely useful tool and including it displays a level of trust in the consumer's basic mental faculties that we doubt we'll ever see from big companies like hp or dell the level of convenience offered here is of significant value for end users the case and the cooler rgb patterns aren't synced and the cooler rgb isn't affected by the remote control in the accessory kit and there's a constant quiet ticking sound from one of the front fans but otherwise the pc powered on without issue after we tested its setup instructions we didn't notice any big mistakes in the bios settings and it's likely that they were left unaltered from the factory default bios is a couple versions old dating from april 2021 so we'd like to see a newer version installed subsequent updates have notes about improved cpu and gpu compatibility as well as windows 11 support as of september 15th the board itself is an msi b560m pro e which is technically an upgrade from the unnamed quote b460 chipset motherboard on our invoice the cpu ssd and gpu are all pcie gen 3 hardware so the upgrade doesn't help us here but it's still a good thing xmp was not applied again but in this instance it's difficult for us to blame redux too much the configurator page for redux build states that with a 10400 f memory speed will be 2666 megahertz which it was out of the box the page doesn't allow selecting a specific motherboard so the implication is that a 10400f the cpu included in our good tier preset build you would get a motherboard from redux's stock that doesn't support cpu or memory overclocking the board we received does support memory overclocking and the 3200 megahertz xmp on the memory received can and should be enabled but that's not technically what we paid for we just happened to luck out and get a combination of hardware that supports xmp b560 added this over b460 and marked a significant change for intel the pre-installed nvidia driver was version 471.41 from july of this year which is fairly recent as far as pre-built are concerned one pci device driver was missing on first boot in device manager but the system functioned normally and the driver successfully updated when connected to the internet this still should have been installed and it is a miss for redux that the other companies haven't really missed in our testing yet as for bloatware there's only the standard windows 10 junk there aren't any obvious custom helpful additions from redox like we've seen elsewhere and to be clear those additions aren't actually helpful so redux has done well here there's zero zero business whatsoever to be using the cooler master 240 uh liquid cooler in here the 240 ml clc because it's just it's not only wholly unnecessary for a cpu that's like 65 watts under full load uh it is pulling money it's siphoning money away from other components that could use it more so the video card is a fantastic example an extra 75 bucks is enough to bump it up a little bit uh right now the good tier from redox as of uh october includes a 1660 instead it's priced at 1420 it's not even better value uh because a lot of the systems we were looking at on those charts earlier they're 1660 supers and many of them were cheaper still now prices fluctuate a little bit based on availability so when you check their website it may be cheaper it may be different components so that's standard but overall we're not seeing good value here and even though the support was pretty good for what we had to use we haven't tested everything of it but for what we had to use it for is pretty good it's just that's that's a massive up charge you're paying for basically the privilege of being able to quickly ask where your computer is and you know if it hasn't shipped from most other companies even massive oems like dollar hp you can still cancel it online pretty easily so it's just it that doesn't seem worth it to us to get something that's this far down the stack in performance for thirteen hundred dollars because again you've got it doesn't it's not even better than dell in this one in terms of the overall average performance it is however far better than dell in terms of the serviceability uh and the fact that you can upgrade it the fact that it's standard components the fact that it is built competently by someone who has built more than one computer in their life so those are all good things it's just there's not enough to justify the expense so what we would like to see in terms of tangible changes that we think makes sense the case is overkill this case actually we reviewed very positively when it came out but its prices crept up over time 120 130 too much for something like this and there's far better options out there now redux appears to be bulk buying the td500 because it's the only thing it sells and it custom badges it so we understand that they can't just easily swap in another case it's not that simple when you're running a business with supply chain and volume so we understand that but there's wasted money on the case versus the rest of components for a build of this tier there's absolutely wasted money in the cooler a stock cooler would be completely adequate if they're still using this case this is so many fans it's all of the fans in fact and the cooler being a stock cooler at 65 watts that's fine it'll save something like 75 bucks according to redux's own pricing table that could be allocated elsewhere or it could be cheaper as a computer which would improve the value so those are both options the power supply is tough to comment on it's a digital storm power supply i don't think it's sold retail or at least not commonly so difficult to know exactly what the value of that is uh technically they could step it down a little bit and be fine but it does appear that digital storm wants its own thing to be in there so either way you don't have to do that if you were to build your own but at the end of the day if you're buying a pre-built hopefully at this point it's not for the video card because if you just want the video card you can go get ripped off on ebay and you'll still be spending less money than on one of these things and you'll be less ripped off than one of these things not just redux but basically any of them there was a period where it made sense to buy people for a video card now it's not that much better off than if you especially if it's got a proprietary parts in it you're better off just buying it on ebay getting scalped there if you actually want a pre-built computer and you're not going to just rip it apart and build your own thing with the parts that came in it then buying from someone else seems maybe the better option from a value perspective so to wrap things up very succinctly the build was competent they knew what they were doing they assembled it properly we didn't really have any massive issues with the way it was assembled the component selection was mismatched in a way that was poor for value and uh it performed poorly compared to other pre-built in terms of the price to performance ratio as it were but it's not garbage so uh that's good it's not e-waste i guess that's a good thing at this point that's what we're shooting for so uh not competitive but not offensive either for the most part a little bit offensive on the price that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more you can go to store.cameratexas.net if you'd like to help us out directly and get something quality in return or you can go to patreon.comgamersexes for behind the scenes videos thank you for watching we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 1,074,057

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, prebuilt gaming pc reviews, best prebuilt gaming pcs, pre built gaming pc worth it, redux gaming pc worth it, redux good tier pc, redux gaming pc review, redux pc review, redux gaming pc benchmarks, reduc gaming pc vs cyberpower, redux gaming pc vs ibuypower, top gaming pcs 2021

Id: P8Y4UywrDtw

Length: 29min 49sec (1789 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/JayRaccoonBro]

Wow, those benchmarks are terrible for the cost! For less money you can walk into a Best Buy right now and get a 1660 Super system at minimum. The ones near here look to have prebuilts with RTX 2060's or RX 6600 XT's for less. With better CPUs too, wild.

Also fucking crazy note: in looking that up, I found this bizarre system that iBUYPOWER is selling. It's a i5-11400F w/ 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, which is all well and good, but it has a Radeon RX 570 8GB. That GPU is over 4 years old! It's a decent bit better than a 1650 but for a brand new $1k system, having a GPU that is four and a half years old is insanity.

[u/RandomCollection]

The brutal reality is that companies like Digital Storm and its spin-off Redux are taking advantage of the current market situation.

With the pandemic, foks are desperate to get a PC, especially in light of the ongoing restrictions and GPU shortages.

Although more competently built, this PC offers a very poor value in terms of price to performance. I guess they have to make back their advertising budget somehow.

As Steve has addressed, you are better off paying a scalper (not that I think you should do that - stay away from the scalpers) than buying this poor value.

[u/cheapcheap1]

The component price list seemed like a cool feature at first, but on second thought it is really just a big bunch of lies. Half of the job of an integrator is purchasing components cheaply through bulk deals. Full price for a windows license? Come on. I get better deals on the consumer market than they pretend to get. That price list is not remotely truthful about anything and it is not increasing transparency, it is making me feel deceived.

[u/lysander478]

That's pretty wild. Looks like they're buying that case + AIO setup in enough bulk to put it in every single build regardless of need. Their cost should be way below retail there even relative to all other components. It also cuts down on training to have the exact same cooler in everything, even versus just putting in a stock cooler.

Definitely hurts the pricing on stuff like this build though where they don't seem to be pricing in that discount. People are likely still buying it all just fine so can't say they're doing bad business or it's a bad decision, same with their obnoxious ad spam, but having a reviewer give them a serious look instead of just running mindless ads (linus, jay, etc.) could force them to reconsider if the market responds.

[u/Khaare]

I was curious what the higher-tiers PCs looked like, since it looked to me like they're basing their config on a decent "base" PC and just tuning the knobs on key components to hit a price point. Plus "hiding" some profit in the components like the wifi card, tray pricing on the CPU and charging for the cooler and windows license. If that's the case higher tier PCs should be able to justify more of the extra costs.

As of right now at least, only the "best" tier PC comes with an AIO, both the "good" and "better" come with a hyper 212. They all come with AMD CPUs (5600X for the two lower tiers, 5800X for the top tier). Overall the configuration looks pretty decent for the higher tiers with a 3060 and a 3080Ti for the top tiers. I could come up with a better DIY config, but I'm not worried about making a profit or appealing to the masses.

The "good" tier still lists a 1650, which is garbage for a $1200 configuration, but there isn't too much waste that I can see and still be happy with the rest PC. Downgrading the CPU to a 11400F for $100 is easy. Maybe dropping the Windows license if you have an old valid license, or want to try Linux gaming. Both of those are options you can choose on their site. If you DIY you get an adequate free cooler with the cheaper CPUs, and you can drop the wifi card for an extra $65 saved. That, plus dropping the build fee, would put the DIY version at just below $1000, which still sucks for a 1650 PC. At least with the $1200 config they give you, the rest of the PC has headroom to justify at least a $2000 price tag with an upgraded GPU. If I was a customer looking for a $1200 PC I would really like it if they spent an extra $100 on the GPU to get a RX6600 for $400 by downgrading the CPU.

[u/Previous_Tennis]

Notice while Steve does not recommend this PC, he rants about it a lot less than he does about the OEM PCs that perform better for the less or similar money because it isn’t “proprietary.”

Honestly, this is a ripoff. HP sells a $600 pc with a 5600g and rx5500 that will out-perform this by quite a bit. It has proprietary case, PSU and mobo but it will stay useful for longer and you can always sell it to replace it.

I can go on eBay and buy a used Dell Precision 3620 with a Xeon 1245v5 for $200 and get a 1650 for $220 from Micro Center and achieve the same performance.

Redux/Digital Storm’s claim of a $75 build fee is anti-consumer BS marketing. They don’t pay anywhere near the price of the parts listed here. A savvy consumer can also find these parts for far less than the prices listed here. Heck, a savvy consumer can buy an ABS pc with a 3060ti for the same money as the cost of this absolute ripoff.

A ripoff with decent “builds quality” is still a ripoff.

[u/Previous_Tennis]

And remember GN rants about RX6600 and 6600xt having MSRP of $330 and $380?

If you get one of those even for $100 above MSRP you can build a far better performing system for less money than this crap.

[u/Sarge2008]

Unpopular opinion: I have a Redux PC and like it quite a bit. I purchased mine in November 2020, and paid significantly less than what they are charging now. I got the “best” quality build, with an RTX 3070 and i7 10700k and it has run flawlessly for me.