Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I Bought a Gaming PC at Best Buy… Am I Dumb?”.
Stop wait, everyone knows you shouldn’t buy a pre-built gaming PC from a big box store, don’t be a sucker, except that twice now we’ve sent secret shoppers to Best Buy, and after a bit of run around both times, they came back with a pre-built gaming rig that Ended up being a better value than we expected, but everyone strikes out eventually, and it looks like it’s Best Buy’s day without spoiling too much. The 4 minute extended warranty sales pitch was far from the worst thing that special agent Maria had to endure. Imagine being told to buy an overpriced machine today in hopes that the price will come down in time for you to come back to the store and apply for price protection. What now imagine that I’m gon na tell you all those things after this message from our sponsor origin, PC? They have all the amazing things to offer this holiday season, including nvidia’s 40 series gpus and Intel’s 13th gen CPUs, learn more at the link down below Maria’s mission was simple, buy whatever gaming PC the sales rep ends up, recommend ending within a few guidelines, one. It has to be under a thousand US dollars. Two, it must include a graphics card. We have almost been burned by that one before and three it has to be available to just grab off the shelf and buy like a regular person would expect the greeter at the door directed Maria to the computer department.
But it then took 10 minutes and multiple requests for assistance before the fourth employee finally offered to help that’s better than getting swarmed by commissioned salespeople like the bad old days. But maybe there’s a happy medium to be found. He started by asking what sorts of games she plays. That’S good, but then he went off the rails completely, suggesting that she could spend significantly more than her Budget on a machine today because it had been recently on sale and then she could come back to the store within the exchange window and hope that it would Go on promo again to get a partial refund truthfully.
He may know something that we don’t. That might have been a good strategy, but rightfully Maria was pretty sketched out by it. His next record Foundation then, was to back order. A machine. Maria then reminded him that she needed the PC right away, and things took a turn for the kind of even weirder, rather than sell her one of the RTX 3060 Acer machines. That was right there on the Shelf.
The Reps suggested going to a couple of competing stores, one of which doesn’t even seem to sell, desktop computers anymore and then, when she insisted on buying something from him agreed to go. Look in the back for something she could take today. He returned with this. The Asus G10 ce-bb1560 TI Maria paid the man 825 US Dollars and took relief.
Nothing about this thing, screams gamer, there’s no window, but there is an RGB zigzag. Slash down the front. That Asus warns can impact the performance of its Core i5 11400f CPU. So we’re off to a good start here.
The front panel connectors are on the top with two USB 3 5 gigabit ports and a single combo audio jack, and on the back of the motherboard, along with the usual mid-level, i o we’ve got dual display ports and an HDMI port, even though the CPU in Our configuration doesn’t have integrated Graphics. Finally, we’ve got the two display ports and two HDMI ports that we can actually use on the back of our GTX 1660 TI GPU opening up the case. The cable management is I’d, say pretty. Okay, the only thing that isn’t well secured is this bundle of extra SATA power cables in front of the 600 watt 80 plus Gold light on power supply.
They just kind of flop around there there’s not much in the way in cooling, either basic CPU Cooler, though that’s probably fine for a core i5 and then there’s a 90 millimeter fan in the back. And if you wanted to upgrade the graphics down the line, you could mount a 120 millimeter intake in the front, but you’d have to contribute your own speed holes. If you wanted it to get any fresh air, we’ve actually got a video that covers how to do that, though, if you like to laugh the motherboard reports that it’s, oh, let’s go ahead and fire it up now. Oh, the motherboard reports that it’s a g10ce and the bio seems to be fairly Republic of gamery and overclocking friendly until you start start to dig further into the options.
It appears that what Asus means by G10 CE is pro b560m-ct CSM, with a coat of black paint and an Rog theme on what is otherwise a pretty bog standard. Bios CSM stands for corporate stable model and basically means that it’s unlikely to have much in the way a thousand whistles, but Replacements should be readily available for some time, which I guess is neat. It’S reasonably featureful.
Overall, though, four ddr4 dim slots, two m.2 slots, three PCI slots, total onboard Bluetooth and Wi-Fi through an add-on card and SATA ports for up to six additional storage devices. You’Ll have to get a little creative, finding places to stick your drives with double-sided tape, because it doesn’t actually contain that many Drive mounts overall. It’S a significant improvement over the non-standard motherboard that we got in the Dell machine back in 2020, but the configuration still has some odd choices like the mere 12 gigs of SK hynix ddr4 3200 memory, that’s one: eight gig stick and one 4G gig stick now Savvy Viewers may remember that, thanks to asynchronous dual channel that size mismatch isn’t the end of the world for performance, but almost anyone these days could benefit from another 4 gigs of RAM, and our budget should have easily allowed for that. The same goes for our storage, and this is where the sales rep’s biggest error becomes very apparent. In the last two years, SSD prices have fallen precipitously, but all we got was a 512 gig wdsn 530..
I mean it’s nvme at least, but there’s no dram cache and 512 gigs. The one terabyte version of this drive is only 30 dollars more. Ah, that’s because this model is from 2021 according to the box. That would also explain the 11th gen CPU and the ancient GPU I mean the G4 1660 TI, isn’t a bad card, or rather it wasn’t, but whether it’s a training issue or the sales rep’s personal biases affecting him. It is a much worse First Choice than the 3060 based Acer machines that were sitting right there and were within our budget, and I suspect it’s going to be a lot worse than what we can cook up ourselves to evaluate the value of this system.
We configured two comparables first, one with parts available from Amazon and Newegg with the intention of building something that was as identical as possible. Like last time, we assumed the purchaser didn’t have one of our beautiful LTT screwdrivers available on ltdstore.com, and we tacked on a 100 US dollar build fee, which was the typical fee quoted by the PC builders that we investigated. This gave us a total of 1047 US Dollars.
Wow that’s more than 200 higher than what we paid for the Asus at Best Buy Asus is clearly taking advantage, then of the fact that they manufacture many of the core system components themselves. Looking like a pretty good value so far so far, but what if we took our thousand US dollar budget and put together our own PC in this case, we can make assumptions like that we already have a decent keyboard and mouse kicking around because of course, we Do and we built the machine ourselves, saving us the build fee. We also didn’t go out of our way to include Wi-Fi, because you really should be using a wire for gaming. We ended up with this for a grand total of one thousand dollars: 26 Cents.
Don’T worry, we’ll take the extra quarter out of Dennis’s paycheck. He won’t notice starting our tasks with Tiny Tina’s wonderlands on the high preset at 1080p, our Asus pre-built actually handled the game nicely with a respectable 70 FPS average. Its only problem is that our custom build doubled that at, if you remember only about two hundred dollars more in f122, we took some rainy laps of the Vancouver track on the high preset at 1080P and again, our off-the-shelf PC managed to handle the game. Fine, just fine, though it did get outperformed by our custom, build by about 28 CS go is where the story changes somewhat rsu’s pre-built managed an average of 349 FPS, while our custom built managed only 267.. Why? You might ask? Well, as it turns out, we forgot to follow amd’s advice and enable Smart access memory in our bios, an easy enough mistake to make once we did that we re-round the benchmarks and got an average of 495 FPS, a 42 percent increase over this guy. This might seem like a minor note. Oh well, you guys made a configuration error and you fixed it, but that’s exactly the sort of error that a first-time Builder could make and they might not have any way of knowing that anything is wrong. So it really highlights why buying a pre-built can be an appealing option for people who don’t want to figure out all the ins and outs of PC Building.
As for non-gaming performance, we tried 7-zips Benchmark where our custom build blew our pre-built out of the water and in Benchmark. It was pretty much the same story, though at least the margins were a little bit closer. So where does that? Leave us once again? Best Buy? Has shown that the Shut Up And Take My Money approach to buying a PC can actually work out? Okay for the customer, it took a little time for a sales rep to help Maria and it seems like he was hesitant to take advantage of her full budget for the machine. Maybe he hoped to leave some spare budget for the warranty upsell either way. Armed with just a couple of basic rules, she ended up with a perfectly adequate gaming rig, with decent name brand components and for a lower price than she would have paid if she bought the same components and paid someone to put them together. Of course, by selecting smarter components, we were still able to build a significantly better machine at our stated budget. So I guess you’d have to say that the Best Buy wasn’t at the Best Buy I’ll stop groaning because you can get the Best Buy with our sponsor MSI. If you somehow left Christmas shopping until the last second again.
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