Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Cooler Master Makes Gaming PCs Now?”.
Brands reach out asking for reviews every day, but if they send the product to us directly, how do we know that they haven’t sent us a special hand-picked unit? Well, believe it or not with most product categories? This isn’t a major concern. You see it costs millions of dollars to develop and validate a CPU, for example, which makes it pretty impractical to send out special or different ones from the mass production units. However, we’ve always been a little wary of pre-built PCS. You see so much of what sets one apart from the next is the care and attention that goes into the build, so when Cooler Master offered us their half-5 Pro gaming PC, it raised a lot of questions like since, when is Cooler Master a system integrator and Would they hand pick a unit to send us to find out? We did accept their offer, but unbeknownst to them. We also purchased a second unit for ourselves off of Amazon.
Let’S see, then how these systems stack up, both the one they met to send us and the one they didn’t mean to send us and let’s see how this segue Stacks up to our sponsor motiongray, their sit, excellent Comfort at an affordable price. So you can crunch numbers and not your spine check them out at the link down below and use code Linus for 10 off your purchase. Before our machine arrived, we poured over the Amazon listing, comparing it to cooler Master’s Communication in an attempt to figure out exactly what to expect and between the description and some CSI style zooming and enhancing. We were able to put together a list of expected Parts, we’re going to have them all linked down below to our surprise and Delight. Actually, when we totaled up the prices on PC part picker, it was almost bang on cooler Masters 1099 list price which, at the time of recording, has actually dropped to 8.99. Making this a pretty good deal at the moment as long as they didn’t bung anything up. Both systems ultimately arrived in one piece, and we started with a quick non-invasive once over we’re going to keep the unit from Cooler Master on your left side throughout the video and the one from Amazon is going to hang out on the right. Now we didn’t want to pull off any of the coolers or move any cables around since that could affect our Labs team’s results.
But we were able to confirm at this stage that most of the components were as expected and that both systems were identical, save for the angle of the adjustable fan right here or so. We thought we weren’t at all prepared for what we found when we opened up the back panels. No, no, not the different, colored zip ties. This. The unit sent To Us by Cooler Master had a loose screw rolling around a screw that should have been holding the motherboard in place. That is exactly the kind of thing you might expect on a retail unit, but that you would not expect on a cherry-picked review sample, so good job Cooler Master, not trying to oversell your quality control.
I guess anyway, that screw wasn’t actually going to impact the testing that we had planned. So we put it back where it belonged, boxed the units back up and dragged them over to the lab. I should make it clear that, up until this point, we didn’t make any adjustments to components or even plug the systems in. We wanted to be sure that our Labs team got them in a fresh out of the box state or not so fresh. The unit from Amazon actually wouldn’t even post right out of the box after some troubleshooting, the labs team discovered that the problem was one of the two RAM sticks. Neither of our systems would boot with that. Stick installed, curiously, that stick did work in an entirely different motherboard, so it could be that it’s borderline functional, I mean. Maybe it worked when Cooler Master tried it, but overall not a great experience, though I have to give credit to Amazon for their handling of the situation. They offered to send a technician out to fix it free of charge for us and time permitting. We could have gone through that process and gotten a new stick that way, but we had spare RAM on hand anyway, so we said: hey thanks, uh, but no thanks and moved on to testing our systems side by side.
We could deal with the warranty service later with both units booted. We could finally confirm the I5 12400f CPU and have a little poke around in the Bios. Both of them came with the very first version of the bios for this motherboard from way back in October. Of 2022, that’s bad, but XMP was enabled out of the box and we didn’t have any stability issues. That’S good, resizable bar was not enabled which will hurt gaming performance. So that’s bad and Labs reported that both systems were a little temperamental about using DisplayPort until they enabled CSM, which is also bad particularly troubling in all of this, is that there is a bios update for this board from March of 2023. That specifically fixes problems with the RTX 3060 gpus that are pre-installed in these systems, so it’s disappointing that they weren’t updated, but given how manufacturing lead times, some shipping work, it’s likely that both of these systems were boxed up before the March revision. We can’t confirm this.
We didn’t find any packing dates on the boxes, but we did later find that the installed NVIDIA drivers were dated February of 2023, which is as close to confirmation as we’re going to get the labs updated. Both motherboards in hopes that CSM could be turned back off. But found that things still worked better with CSM enabled, even on the latest bios for this board.
We were all set to start installing and testing games. Then, when we hit our next snag again on the Amazon system, instead of the out of the box new computer experience that we expected, we saw the Windows system preparation tool, that’s supposed to be run by the technician when they’re about to pack up the new system. For delivery seems like whoever was setting this machine up forgot to finish the job. Luckily, our lab detects aren’t easily deterred and both systems were quickly up and running, and not only that, but they were refreshingly bloat free. They didn’t even preload any game launchers.
On these things, that is so unusual these days, wow sorry, I was just – I was logging into steam here and I couldn’t help noticing. This is a spectacularly awful keyboard. It was this included with the system Devastator three, I’m the one who got devastated how’s the mouse. Oh good, it’s a Devastator, 3 Mouse um, I mean it feels less awful. Is that both of them? You know what I’m sorry, I’m going to take off our label just to just to check? No, it’s not our label. It hurts the value argument a little bit. Just because it’s the right price, according to PC part picker, doesn’t mean that it’s worth whatever we paid for it or that we would have chosen it okay. Well, let’s play cyberpunk anyway, once we finally got to benchmarking, we found pretty much exactly what we expected for the hardware in these systems.
We tested cyberpunk 2077 Hitman 3 and Total War Warhammer 3 at 1440p, with everything cranked up and our systems cranked out virtually identical performance. I mean I’m talking one frame per second difference at most, which is within the margin of error of our runs. We also took a quick look at CS go and this is to compare against cooler. Master’S claimed performance of 293 FPS, and I don’t really know what to say other than we have no idea how they got that number good news is. We ended up blowing it out of the water with an average FPS of 432, meaning that if you pick up one of these systems, all you need to do next is pull on a hoodie from the new pcmr collection on lttstore.com, and you are ready to start Annoying all of your console playing friends now the labs team doesn’t quite have their thermal testing suite formalized for desktop systems.
But I can say that we didn’t run into any thermal throttling at room temperature, actually a little above room temperature it’s summer and our AC is not in yet don’t worry about it. The point is we’re not really surprised, given the amount of air being moved by the ample case, fans in here and Cooler Master, it seems, has lived up to their name now. The script calls for lightning round Linus inspection.
So I guess this is the part where I get to see if I can find any differences between our two systems: no big complaints about Cable Management, though personally I would bring the 24 pin in from up here and then I would bring my USB in from Right next to it minor thing: okay, there’s a random zip tie in the one directly from Cooler Master hold on. I can get this how’s the front panel come off this case. Oh you have to release the clips haha. What is going on with this twist tie your jewelry, oh, he said no, I guess.
If I’m pulling panels off, I might as well do the same to the back. This is also a perfect opportunity to plug the upcoming knock to addition. Ltt screwdriver sign up for a notification of stock on lttstore.com, not bad. I do have to wonder um. Are they really saving that much on the natural plastic? Color zip ties on the back such that anywhere that the zip tie is not visible. They use those instead of the black ones.
This is hilarious. Look at this all black zip ties on this side everywhere, all ugly yellowish zip ties on the back. This seems to be the same on both systems, but the reset switch goes into the RGB controller, which oh interesting. That is not that intuitive and kind of random when they could have just plugged this into the motherboard for RGB control, wait! No! No! They couldn’t have what the devil’s going on here is this it yeah. This is what the why’d they do, that Cooler Master, that’s not intuitive.
I would think the reset switch would reset the computer not adjust my RGB lighting and also the lead for this is right here. All you had to do was plug it in there now it’s controlled by the motherboard with that said, we praised them for their bloatware free installation and installing RGB software is whoa, depending who you ask. It is nice that they’re all the same, though now it matches the ram you know like it should.
What happens if I press the reset switch now um. Oh it disables that oh that’s a good way for that controller to function, cool yeah. All I could think is just like it’s dead, simple, that way yeah, but, like you, lose the reset functionality, which is not good. I’D, be pretty frustrated. If I needed to hard reset my computer and it didn’t hard reset yeah, it just kept changing the RGB foreign. Are you mocking me, sir, to cooler Master’s credit, though the experience, however, flawed, is consistent on the one that we ordered from Amazon seems like they? Oh not quite consistent, they’ve routed the USB cables slightly differently. Overall, though, if I had a system integrator and my production team churned out systems that were this similar. I would praise the consistency, even if I wouldn’t be happy about the fact that you know they don’t and on from the customer.
That’S consistent, yeah! You can have the screen any color. You want as long as it’s black Henry Ford approved. The truth is cooler. Master’S been playing the game long enough that we didn’t really expect to find any significant differences between the systems. It’S extra work to cherry pick, review units and, if you take the chance and try to hand build something special for a reviewer, that’s outside of your normal manufacturing process. You’Ve got a greater chance of embarrassing yourself if a customer posts something significantly different on Reddit.
So it’s good that Cooler Master isn’t engaging in this practice. However, the bad RAM and the flawed out of box experience in the retail unit, not to mention that loose screw in the direct shift tower, are indications that Cooler Master has some work to do on quality control if they want to be a serious player in the Pre-Built game, given that their most memorable previous attempt at this had a chicken warming chamber, I guess these hiccups aren’t entirely unexpected, but I’d like to see them do better. As far as specs are concerned, it would have been nice to see a 13th gen CPU, but with the planning and Lead times that are typically involved in PC system building, not to mention the attractive pricing of 12th gen chips right now.
This is a decent deal at the list price I mean you’d pay the same to build it with the exact same Parts yourself and at the time of recording it’s available at a 200 discount. If that becomes a regular occurrence, I’d say it gets a recommendation, even if I can only recommend it for folks who have a bit of experience. Troubleshooting, PCS, the you know what else I have experience with telling you about our sponsor snooze. Did you know that? Because your brain keeps processing sounds when you’re sleeping any unnatural noise could be potentially affecting your Sleep Quality without you, even knowing snooze aims to solve that problem. With their line of white noise, machines with a fan built in snooze delivers the consistent natural soothing sound of moving air without actually producing any airflow.
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