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Should YOU buy a Junk Computer to get the GPU? - YouTube
Channel: unknown
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- [Linus] You can keep hoping the market
[2]
will magically change and
[4]
GPU's will begin appearing on the shelves,
[6]
or you can do something
about it. That's right.
[10]
There is a way come closer.
Don't be shy a little closer.
[15]
Don't tell anyone,
[18]
but graphics cards are
still on the shelves.
[22]
They're just hiding in much bigger boxes,
[25]
ones that look like this.
[29]
And today we're going to find
out if getting the RTX 3070
[34]
in that PC is worth all the
extra money you might end up
[38]
blowing on the sub-standard
parts included with it.
[41]
We're also going to see if
there's a cheap way to turn a
[44]
prebuilt like this one into
an enthusiast grade machine.
[48]
Like say by putting a proper
power supply in it from
[51]
our sponsor, Seasonic.
[53]
Seaonic makes great power
supplies for brand new machines
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and for fixing up older ones.
[58]
And we're going to have
them linked down below.
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♪ (Supernova by Laszlo) ♪
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Prebuilt gaming PCs can be cheaper
[73]
than building one yourself,
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but it's an open secret that
[76]
you kind of get what you pay for.
[78]
In no particular order,
here are some of the tricks
[80]
that big manufacturers use
to save a buck on production.
[83]
Installing only a single
memory module rather than two,
[87]
cheaping out on unsexy components,
[90]
like the motherboard,
cooling and power supply.
[92]
All of which can affect
performance, upgradability
[95]
and long-term reliability.
[97]
And signing deals to include bloatware
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on your PC for an upfront payout.
[101]
Basically,
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if it doesn't fit on the
price tag out of Best Buy,
[105]
they probably went for the bare minimum.
[107]
I mean, who needs a DRAM
cache on your SSD anyway.
[110]
Now one area where they
don't tend to cheap out,
[112]
as hard is the GPU.
[115]
I mean, sure.
[116]
You can find gaming PCs on the shelf
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that have onboard graphics.
[120]
You can't cheap out much harder than that,
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but when they've got a GPU in them,
[124]
it tends to be built to a
similar standard as the one that
[127]
you would buy standalone,
keyword being "would buy".
[131]
Because the reality is it's
been so hard for gamers to find
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GPU's on a shelf that they've
resorted to buying entire
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computers like this one.
[141]
Just to extract their
precious graphics cards.
[144]
To find out if this is
actually a good idea,
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I sent Plouffe to our local Best Buy.
[149]
His mission to buy a pre-built gaming PC
[151]
with an enthusiast tier
graphics card inside.
[154]
Now the Asus ROG Strix G15DK,
[156]
wasn't strictly speaking on the shelf,
[158]
but it was available in store.
[160]
And once the sales rep came
back with his big brown box,
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Plouffe paid the 2,800 Canadian pesos,
[166]
with the company credit card.
[167]
Strapped that machine to
the back of his snowmobile
[170]
and made a beeline for the Mexican border.
[173]
Thankfully, Mexico doesn't have snow.
[176]
So we caught up with him pretty quickly.
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Let's take a look at it here then.
[180]
It's an Asus, so it should
be more like a custom rig
[184]
than your typical Dell.
[186]
Starting off strong,
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we've got an Asus dual fan RTX 3070
[189]
and a Ryzen 5800X cooled by ooh.,
[193]
a random tiny 80 millimeter
fan tower cooler.
[198]
There's just a single 16 gig
stick of SK Hynix memory.
[201]
Although at least it is
3,200 megahertz I guess.
[205]
There's a 512 gig Western
Digital SN530 for our boot drive.
[209]
This appears to be an OEM
only skew with no DRAM cache.
[213]
And they used a 7,200 RPM two
terabyte Toshiba hard drive,
[217]
for extra storage, which is fine.
[220]
And all of that is sitting on an,
[222]
Asus Prime B550M-K micro-atx board,
[225]
or so we thought, our
bios lists it as a G15DK.
[230]
And the rig is powered by
[231]
a Great Wall C700 80
plus bronze power supply.
[234]
Now this video is sponsored by Seasonic.
[236]
So we're not going to create
an obvious conflict of interest
[239]
by evaluating this beauty in any way.
[242]
But we can say that the model
of our unit is so obscure that
[245]
the only place we found one for sale,
[247]
is a now de listed post on what
appears to be Russian eBay.
[251]
Now the case is an Asus pre-built special,
[254]
that I absolutely hate for many reasons.
[257]
We'll get into those later,
[258]
but let's say it would cost,
I don't know, a 100 bucks.
[262]
So that puts us at around
1750 US dollars so far.
[265]
Throw in a Windows 10 license,
[267]
an RGB strip, assembly, a cheap wifi card.
[269]
And we're getting pretty darn
close to the $2,000 price tag.
[273]
Not bad on the face of it.
[274]
That is as long as we ignore
the fact that the 3070's MSRP,
[278]
was never formally adjusted
by Nvidia from $499 to $870.
[285]
You know what you can still get for MSRP,
[287]
trusty LTT water bottle with the new lid,
[289]
new design and new colors,
get yours today lttstore.com.
[293]
Now to be clear,
[294]
it's not like this
thing's a pile of garbage.
[296]
Our out of the box
performance was pretty solid,
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but our CPU reached as high as
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90 degrees Celsius, in Cinebench.
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And while our GPU maintained
a respectable 69 degrees
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in FurMark, nice, the piddly,
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80 millimeter exhaust fan means means
[311]
that as soon as the going gets tough,
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the fans get going, user
complaints about the noise of this
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machine appear to be
entirely on the money.
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That's strike one crappy case.
[322]
Now let's start with the things we can do
[323]
to improve our situation
without spending any more money.
[327]
We uninstalled all the
bloatware we could find,
[329]
thankfully it wasn't that much.
[331]
Then we installed Ryzen
Master and MSI afterburner,
[334]
to see if our power supply
[335]
and cooling could handle any overclocking.
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The GPU managed some minor improvements
[339]
with our quick and dirty
800 megahertz overclock
[341]
on the Vram.
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Though, major core clock adjustments
[344]
resulted in instability
and as for our CPU.
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Well, if the cooler was
at its limits before,
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overclocking is unlikely
to fix the problem.
[352]
So what can we do?
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Nothing really, at least not
without spending some money.
[357]
Our first idea was to swap it
out with the tried and true
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and cheap Hyper 212, but unfortunately,
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the case isn't deep enough to fit
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a 120 millimeter tower cooler.
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That's strike two.
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Now, there are downdraft
style coolers out there still,
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but high performance
ones aren't cheap enough
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that we're really saving any money.
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So our next thought was to
add some more case fans.
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Unfortunately, Asus made
a couple of small changes
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to the prime beef 550MK,
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including removing the
second case fan header.
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So we ended up needing a splitter.
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We then scavenged a few cheap
fans putting our total cost at
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around 20 bucks for additional cooling,
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then spent about half an hour,
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getting access to the top and front panels
[400]
and jury rigging the mounts for our fans
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because Asus didn't think, hmm,
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if I'm going to put 500 holes in the case,
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maybe a few of them should be sized
[409]
and spaced correctly for fans.
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Strike three.
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Surprisingly better case
airflow didn't actually address
[415]
our CPU thermal issues
under heavy load though.
[417]
So we're at a bit of a crossroads here.
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In gaming, our attempts
with the stock cooler,
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were perfectly reasonable.
[424]
Averaging in the seventies
or even high sixties.
[427]
So maybe the average gamer just
leaves it well enough alone.
[431]
But for anyone looking to do serious
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CPU heavy work with this machine.
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We would strongly recommend
spending the $60 to $80
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on a good downdraft style
cooler, Like one of these.
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An All-in-One would be an option,
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but there's no cooling whatsoever
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on the VRMs of this motherboard.
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So going water cooling means that
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they could end up running really hot,
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not to mention that getting
a radiator into this thing is
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gonna to be tricky to say the least.
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Just like putting
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an Xbox Series S into a computer case
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is going to be a little tricky.
[459]
Get subscribed. So you
guys don't miss that.
[461]
Of course,
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we're not done trying to
put lipstick on this pig.
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Let's increase our budget a little
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and fix the next most obvious problems.
[467]
Starting with the single channel memory.
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In a perfect world we'd like to have
[471]
another stick of exactly the same ram.
[474]
But despite what you may
have heard elsewhere,
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you can mix and match.
[477]
So we found this 3,200
megahertz module from G.Skill
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for 60 bucks on Newegg.
[482]
Bringing our new total
to about 2150 US dollars.
[485]
While we were at it.
[486]
We replaced the Great Wall with
[487]
a Seasonic focus 80 plus gold 750 watt,
[490]
for a bit of extra peace of mind.
[492]
To be clear, 700 Watts was probably fine,
[495]
for a machine like this
[496]
But over specking, a
little bit on power supply
[499]
means that even as the unit ages,
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it'll still be able to keep
up and it's a Seasonic.
[504]
So you know, that's going to contribute
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to quieting down an already
pretty loud machine.
[508]
These changes also netted us some
[510]
minor performance improvements in games
[512]
and a slightly higher Cinebench
score, but that's about it.
[515]
And you can probably sell your
Great Wall for 30 or 40 bucks
[518]
on Facebook marketplace to
recoup some of the Seasonic cost.
[521]
Putting you at around $2,100.
[524]
And without spending
unreasonable amounts of money,
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replacing core components like
the motherboard or storage,
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that's about all we can
do with this sucker.
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So it wasn't all worth
it, well in the past.
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No, it wouldn't have been, but
these days for many people,
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the price that they're comparing against
[542]
is what they would have to pay a scalper,
[544]
in order to get their hands on a GPU.
[546]
So let's run the numbers
here, ignoring the GPU.
[550]
Let's recreate the system as
we originally purchased it,
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but without wasting money on crap
[555]
that we'd have to upgrade later.
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So better CPU cooler, two
eight gig sticks of memory,
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a more robust motherboard and case,
[561]
a Seasonic power supply from the get-go
[563]
and all SSD storage, that puts
us at about 1100 US dollars.
[568]
We're going to have those parts
[569]
in our affiliate links down below.
[571]
Add a $1000, 3070 off eBay.
[573]
And we're getting a
significantly better system,
[575]
actually here for only
a little bit more cost,
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or we could even go back to a hard drive
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and we could match the
cost for our better system.
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So then wait a minute. What happened?
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Okay.
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This technique of shucking the GPU's
[590]
in pre-built gaming systems,
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might've been a good workaround,
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near the beginning of the shortage.
[596]
But as you can see,
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manufacturers have clearly
clued in to the point
[600]
where it's not actually any better
[602]
to buy directly from the
manufacturer in a system,
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than it would be to buy the
stupid thing from a scalper.
[609]
And to be clear, this
has always been a thing.
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I mean, EVGA basically wrote the book,
[615]
on releasing a card at
launch for Nvidia's MSRP.
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Then following it up with a
version with their own MSRP,
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that's 20 bucks more.
[623]
A super clock for another
40, FTW for another 60,
[627]
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[628]
All while quietly discontinuing
[631]
that original MSRP skew and
not shipping any more of them.
[634]
And I don't blame them for it.
[635]
The margins in their business
are notoriously slim,
[638]
but when this process ends with cards
[641]
that are double the
original price, like this.
[645]
Becomes a little harder to swallow.
[647]
Now, this system ended up being just fine.
[650]
There's nothing inherently
wrong with buying a prebuilt
[652]
and using it as a gaming machine.
[654]
Especially if you make a couple of tweaks
[656]
and it'll probably go on to live a long
[658]
and prosperous life is a
workstation for one of my staff.
[661]
But I also wouldn't go out
and buy another one of these
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cause priced as it is.
[666]
It really feels like
even system integrators
[669]
are scalping GPU's at this point.
[671]
Did you ever buy a pre-built?
[672]
Are you happy with it? Unhappy with it?
[674]
Let us know in the
comments and let us know
[676]
if you're happy to see Seasonic
sponsoring pieces like this.
[679]
Where we get to take a closer look at
[681]
what's going on in the market.
[682]
What's a good value.
[683]
What should you upgrade?
[685]
I mean, it's kind of
an obvious one for them
[686]
cause power supplies are
usually pretty high on the list.
[689]
So go check them out in
the video description,
[691]
if you're looking for
a power supply upgrade.
[693]
If you guys enjoyed this video,
[694]
maybe check out the one
where we tested some
[696]
modern streaming services
as an alternative
[698]
to getting a graphics card at all.
[700]
They're really not that bad.
[702]
Well, some of them are not that bad.
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