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When companies don't think there's any problem letting go of all your experienced staff, this leads to questions like, "is a 100°C CPU a problem?" That's like a heart surgeon asking, "it's stopped pumping, is that a problem?" 🤦♂😂
I might have a contender for you. You should see if you can convince MilwaukeePC to ship you one. This isn't something they normally offer. They're a local company, but fairly big, and have been around a long time. Their website will show out of stock on everything, but they make almost all of their machines to order and really only pre-assemble finished units for display in their stores. They're not like a lot of other builders in that they'll slap whatever you want in a build as long as they can get their hands on it.
Imagine going back in time and telling people that in 10 years, high end consumer graphics cards would be selling on eBay for $2,500 and SI’s would be selling $5,000 PC’s outfitted with a $100 air cooler.
@Rexer 711 you're talking 2014 for the gtx 970 4GB DDR5 card was a good deal at $325 and you think that cards are costing too much these days? let's look even back further to a 1998 3dfx voodoo 2 12MB (yes a whole 12 megabytes of memory), that was released at $299 RRP and i owned 1. the "old days" weren't always as cheap as you think.
Years ago, I was a stereo radio freak. Use to buy old stereo radios and components. Cheap, modify, combination systems. Then one day somebody label me an audiophile. So one day I quit. It became way too expensive to keep a hobby like that. Now computers are going that route. It's costing too much money to purchase a graphics card, motherboard and CPU. Remember when a brand new i7 cpu was $230? A cool motherboard was $150. And an Nvidia GTX 970 was $325?
@Creed 6621 yep is was more expensive back in the old days, the rarer the product the more premium the price. nowedays any computer part is easy to find new and with online auctions 2nd hand parts are easy to find as well, hell even on the other side of the world you can buy it. there was no online market back in the day, and computers were not mainly used for gaming like today.
Systems were really expensive at the dawn of PC's - late 70s and early 80s . That's a bit before everyone retaliated against IBM and sought IBM-Compatible computers . I am that old ... LoL !!
I have this case and it is a truly outstanding one for airflow and cooling, all temps below 60c, which brings home how truly abominably this pc was built to be hitting 100c on CPU!
I previously bought the skytech shiva (rtx 2060, ryzen 5 2600) it was advertised to come with a 750w psu and only came with a 500w, the cpu cooler was broken, everything was hot glued and a couple pins on the motherboard were bent.
I had a similar issue but didn't catch it during the return period. I was a pc movie at the time. Got my first last year and they advertised an atx msi b550 motherboard. My pc shipped with a Biostar micro atx b450....
@Xen Orac at least try asking your friends if they can help first, there's more chance a friend will actually care about your stuff unlike some "pros" in a company
5000 for that trash? This makes me almost hopeful to start my own PC building mini business. This isnt that hard. I dont know if its volume or just underpaying your workers but this is unacceptable. There just isnt that much that goes into stuff like this that should result in such half ass products.
@David Berger because they paid 5 thousand dollars for that pc. There is an egregious amount of errors in that pc, the most telling being that the cpu coolers. They tested it, the problem was literally in their face and they still didn't know what was wrong. I've only built one pc so far and I saw that immediately. That's beyond shocking. Do they hire competent people at that company?
@Razor ツ well mistakes happen in multi-billion dollar businesses, let alone with 5k products - that's just real life. In reality, you'd return a faulty product and it would hopefully get corrected. Furthermore, I don't see any evidence in this video whether this was a single event mistake, or a whole line was faulty - one computer with a wrongly installed fan is shown, and then tests were run against that. To which I have to posit a question - why? What's the point of 25+ minutes of video of tests for something that clearly had an error in it? Why not either return the product as faulty, or fix the obvious mistake manually, and then test? I guess that wouldn't have made a good video :shrugs:
perhaps it is not their norm, but I was sitting here throughout the video thinking "just fix the (obvious) mistake and compare." I get that people who have disposable income but are not computer building savvy will fall victim to any sort of mistake like this and it's shameful that a company tested this system and thought "solid!", but how many times have we heard of people building their own computer and only realizing after 2 years that they plugged in their monitor into the motherboard instead of GPU? Mistakes happen; at least they seem to have a great tech support policy.
An interesting video idea would be to build what you guys think a $5 000 prebuilt *should* be. Going through the part selection, the build process, and finally the software loading. I'd watch that.
@J.M. Rivera Yes someone that knows how to build a computer can do that, but remember not everyone is knowledgeable enough to build a computer and they’re more likely to buy one pre assembled. A company is going to tack on extra charges to make a profit and to pay staff.
@J.M. Rivera Wrong. And two? What are you talking about dude. The two components you listed (4090 and 13900k) are a combined $2000. In order to have a legitimate, functional, stable, and Hardware-Protected high end rig latest generation with those components you listed would require an investment of roughly $4,000. Typically people will opt towards $5,000 like myself just to get it done properly. It's easy to fuck up your build by cheaping out. You need the proper cooler, the proper fans, the proper ram, the proper motherboard, the proper case, the proper storage device(s) and other additional components in order to protect as well as compliment your entire investment. My 3090 Ti, i912900k build cost a total of roughly $5,000. I see people casually talking about things they have no experience with all of the time and it makes me wonder exactly why. Why? These are strangers on the internet. You don't need to create the illusion that you're knowledgeable on this topic or that topic. It's as easy as saying to yourself - "Hey, I have no experience with this topic of high end PC builds. I should probably keep my mouth shut". Just an observation. Disinformation, no matter the degree, is always dangerous and can lead to cascading consequences. Both for the audience, and sometimes dumb fucks like you. Bless up.
This feels a lot like they put a trainee to build this. The design itself doesn't seem that bad, the build of it does. Sooo. I'm taking this video as a warning on what to be careful about, i'm a novice at building too. Not novice enough to put the fan backwards hopefully though.
@Ken Huffman the CTO being clueless actually sounds quite normal You should expect any executive level employee to ever know anything important, ever. That includes CEOs, visionary whatevers, it doesn't matter. They don't know what the people on the ground doing the work know. They can't. It's not possible. The builders need to know, their direct supervisor should know. Normally they do. It makes me wonder how they hire, what they pay, etc etc. If they paid decent and had decent standards this wouldn't be an issue. If they push people to work too fast, for too long, for too little money... That's another story.
@Ken HuffmanYep. A lot of unforgiveable mistakes. It's possible that the quality control is either completely missing or done by the same person that does the build. They really need to fix a lot of things
I agree that it was probably built by a novice, but that doesn't explain the packing that caused the damage to the cooler or the fact that QA tested it as good then the Chief Technology Officer not understanding the problem with 100c temps on the CPU. This seems more to me as a company wide issue.
I would not pe surprised if they already fixed the fan thing, hopefully the packaging for shipping too. These videos are powerful at both telling companies that no this will not do, and telling the customers about things. Points fot the customer support though, sending the whole PC for repair of the front panel, and being ready to take it without the customer needing to prove whatever, that's a good sign. Incompetence, but not malice. A good sign.
It bothers me that these weren't posted. It was a small mistake. It happens. I DOUBT they build them all that way. This one has sensationalization written all over it.
@Degenerate Pervert not sad .. .why do they need to do your role, when you are there to do your role. Its sad that you do not understand corporate structure.
I wanted more information before drawing a hard conclusion. The guy may have had the context of that shipping damage sitting in his mind when fielding the question. There's probably an addtional two or more layers of lower people who also had the opportunity (and probably that context), injecting their own opinions in some internal email chain. I need the full communications that escalated from support to CTO.
basically a custom cpu cooler order had a fan install incorrectly. Yes that does suck and a normal user person wouldn't know the problem. But the company also offered and would offer to completely take the pc back at cost to them to fix the issue.
For the money spent, It should have never left their facility in that state. They offered to return the system. Excellent. But the problem still remains... This computer was completely untested, even the generic BIOS settings is proof of that. Skytech Gaming really needs to see this video if they hope to correct their QC department.
I'm definitely not as experienced building as most of you guys but I know a overpriced pc when I see it I built a pc part picker build better for less I understand why some buy pre built but I feel snobby saying if a person is spending this insane money on a gaming pc I'd assume they would build it themselves lol. That's a lot of money but I guess 3080 ti or 3090s go for an insane 2000 dollars witch is way to high but you could talk yourself into that with a hole in your pocket. Awesome video guys love these videos keeps the suppliers on there toes
In theory this should have been better than Dell considering the components they used, but they really had some major quality control issues that messed it up.
@Baulzzz Zzzz The Shiva II is also a beast, the only reason I went for the Prism II was that there was a good sale on one at my local Best Buy that I could not pass up. I was planning on making my own slightly weaker build with a 3070, but the price difference was so little I decided it would be worth it to get the Prism II with the 3080. The only complaint I have is that the i7 is 11th gen and the motherboard only supports up to 11th gen, so I would have to upgrade the whole motherboard to update to the latest. However, I don't plan on doing that until the Nvidia 50 series comes out.
I’m using a shiva II and it’s a monster, couldn’t afford a prism II so I went with the Shiva II and it stays cool and it fucking never stops it’s a beast
Did you reassemble it and test it's real potential? I would really like to see that all the mistakes presented were indeed their fault, if you fixed it all and it still had issues then it could have been someting else e.g faulty CPU or MOBO.
Lol bro, they don't make any of the products they are selling, their entire service IS assembly. Why would you be interested in the performance of intel or nvidia?
@oliknow that's a fact. At $5000 this is unacceptable. I bought a prebuilt off of Newegg for far less and the QC was better than this. If I received this computer with these issues I'm charging that shit back.
it is absolutely their fault alone to actually ship the system like that, no matter who is at fault for the mistakes in the system. QC is a thing costumers also pay for. No need to reassemble and test since the performance of all components is known beforehand. not landing in the spot for expected performance is a fail no matter how you put it.
I've seen motherboard reporting double value of the CPU temp on gigabyte mothererboard. I hope it's noit the same here. It doesent matter with so many issues but still ... with vents off it shouldn't go so fast to 100. I think there is no contact with CPU. It is still funny ofc! 🙂
I'm suspecting that too... looks like the tempsense pin is saturating, indicating a bad contact? I would probably use a thermal probe to verify, because the computer BIOS itself cannot detect true temps... only what the chip is telling it
Is it possible to start up a company for creating custom builds but not hold any parts and instead order on demand? While charging small business/building fee?
Imagine some clueless people who don’t know about pc and spend 5k on this overpriced piece of garbage. It funny how at 5k they can’t even throw in a liquid cooler for the pc and some rgb fans lol. What a rip-off.
I bought an ASUS ROG prebuild a couple years ago from best buy just to get the RTX 3080 (unavailable elsewhere at the time) and they did the same thing. The CPU fan blew opposite the rear exhaust and it literally overheated and shut down before I could set up windows. I think it was just an installation mistake, but the case was small and those were the only 2 fans so either way it was ridiculously inadequate cooling. it's unbelievable how such incredible technology is implemented in such a moronic way.
@Rex Yoshimoto It baffles me as well, it was unbelievable how poor this prebuild was. Extremely loud 92 mm exhaust fan in the back and a cheap CPU cooler that caused the PC to overheat and shut down even when blowing the correct direction. The PC filled with dust due to negative pressure of only have an exhaust fan. I didn't want to void my warranty in case anything else was catastrophically wrong, but Best Buy wanted to charge me parts and labor to make it functional so I just did an entire case swap myself and installed an AIO along with 10 more fans. Works great now. Overall considering the time I purchased this it was a reasonable deal to get an RTX 3080 along with some other decent enough components I am still using.
You could beat me with a stick all day long and I still wouldn't know how they measured out that kind of incompetence. I worked at a small computer/repair shop for 7 yrs. and it wasn't hard building a customer computer. I often envied the customer(s) who bought it.
This has to be a meme. "Let's get that Beve Sturke guy to buy our PC, that we will sabotage, for free advertising on Gamer's Nexus channel, ahyuck!" I mean you got to lovee their motto, of throwing the PC across a room with a cement floor after building it, It's a bold strategy, let's see if it works out for them
The damages aside, the cabling is considered, ok? Really? That's some low effort less than 5 minutes work. The auxiliary 4+4 power cable could go via the right side of the casing. I generally manage cables into 3 groups. Casing's cable, fan cables, and power cables. Tie them up neatly so that it is easier for user to clean the dust off, and you don't have to touch other groups of cable if you just want to replace a fan.
This was possibly one technician who wasn't paying attention or didn't care as well as the quality check team which let it pass. Noticing the fan's direction isn't rocket science. Very strange, especially if they didn't know why the thermals were so high.
in shipping would it be more safer if u were to take the gpu out and then put it in its original box then ship with the pc or does it not really matter if u have enough of the protective foam or whatever they put in the pc case?
@Impact009 i mean yeah but its just one item not a whole pc which is why i said it not saying they have too but if it were me id have it shipped with it in its box for more safety of the items and it would only take lie 5 mins to put it in and if they dont know how to put it in they can search on youtube which would take like 3 mins to find out how to and for me even if i didnt know how to put something in id still want more safety precautions then for a gpu to be broken due to shipping
@DivineRainsWe just got through a period of PCIe power connectors melting because tech savvy people couldn't plug them in properly. If you have to open up a case and stick parts in, then you might as well buy the parts and build it yourself.
@Waffle Boi Animations I mean I guess but if they are wanting a working one with a better chance of nothing breaking then 5 mins ain't gonna mean anything to them, but I do get what you mean but if it were me I would want the gpu out of the case for the most protection but yeah if they are wanting to just get stuff done as fast as it comes then yeah it might be abit of a hassle
It would be way safer, but the whole point of a prebuilt is for the customer to do the least assembly as possible, removing the side panel, slotting in the gpu and plugging in the psu cables isn't difficult for a tech savvy person, but if someone who just wanted an out of the box working unit might be annoyed
Yeah. It looks like two different sets of spacers. If they did that, they just didn't care. We can sit there and look at, assess and configure it ourselves. We're better that that! I'm critical! Because $5000, is $5000. Money like that these days isn't easy pocket change. What could they be thinking?
I’m surprised you didn’t include a section where you flipped the fan in the correct orientation to show how such a basic oversight can amount to a huge difference. Skytech definitely needs to address their qc procedures and strive for consistency throughout the company.
@Plekto's Gaming What you say about the cooling capacity makes sense, but that's not inherently linked to watercooling. It's that link you draw that causes me and others to respond. Case airflow does increase (or, in rare cases, decrease) the effective cooling capacity of a cooling solution. It seems a safe bet that the case fans and layout of this case can very comfortably deal with the extra 20W of heat in this case. You can (and do) argue that at $5000, there shouldn't be perfectly adequate but rather excessive cooling. Your focus on watercooling in the original comment distracted from that point, but the way you stated it now I don't disagree.
@Peter The cooler is rated for only a bit over 200W while most water coolers due to their design are rated for significantly more capacity. The issue here is that the TDP of the CPU when all cores is running is more than the rating of the cooler. Since it is the largest air cooler on the market as far as I can tell, that means to get more capacity, you must move to water cooling. Or more than one exhaust fan for sure. Then there's also the $5K price tag. You would expect a water cooling solution at that price.
@Plekto's Gaming You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how coolers work. The water part of watercoolers doesn't cool, it moves the heat. Which still has to be cooled, with an air cooler. Water coolers don't inherently cool better, they cool somewhere else, which allows for designs that CAN and often do cool better under some circumstances. With this combination of case and cooler, the airflow through the case goes straight through the air cooler (or it would, had the fans been installed correctly), so there is absolutely no need for a watercooler to move the heat somewhere else. The airflow of the case is what allows the cooler to perform above it's rating. If you actually look at this design, you'll notice that it completely copies the design philosophy of a water cooler. The 2 cooling elements are removed from the cooling plate and are being fed heat through what seems to be 8 visible heat pipes (something you seem the be unaware of, otherwise you wouldn't have made the very wrong comment about the 2 cooling elements having to be connected), so in philosophy it's exactly the same as a watercooler. Only more compact and reliable in execution, with less moving parts.
If that is what you get for 5k. You might want to just learn and purchase the parts and assemble it yourself for 5k. Using glue in plugs is just stupid.
Skytech Gaming would like to thank you for the constructive criticism. While painful, we've earned it. This will only further motivate us to improve and better serve our community going forward. While we have not been thorough enough in our training and QC on custom builds, we have taken this feedback to heart, and are diligently working to address these issues. We welcome further feedback and advice as we strive to hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Yes mistakes happen sometimes but when people pay a hefty price like you charged, the basics shouldn't be done wrong like this. How do you build something this expensive and not even put a simple 2 fans the right way around? Makes me wonder what else has been overlooked thats not so easy to spot in your other builds. Hope you can regain your consumer trust because it will be a tough job after this. Well done for being upfront and not passing the buck. I do wonder if thats just because of the reach this YT channel has though?
The Asus 'bloatware' shouldn't be an issue in my eyes. And it should especially not be named as a bad thing for Skytech. If you have an issue with the software, blame Asus. Other points are very valid.
This just shows without discriminating, that buying prebuilts is all around a bad idea due to mistakes.Just build your own and take your time. Its fun and itll be done right with minimal issues
I am honestly shocked. Not just cause of the high marks Skytech previously received from prior reviews of their systems from you guys. But also that I personally own two of their pre-builts and have never had an issue from a QC to performance issues, aside from a minor one (which was the XMP memory was not default in the BIOS). Way to let the ball drop Skytech and love the straight to the point no sugar coated review from GN
I appreciate the breakdowns, tear downs, and everything in between. I actually can build computers, but just felt a little lazy and wanted to get a pre-built. Going off of some of the past video's I came to the conclusion that Skytech would be the least suckiest. Got the mini Chronos.i3 500gb ssd. Long story short, boot it up, monitor has no signal. thinking bad graphics, plug it into the motherboard slot. Still nothing. Pulled everything and reseated, nothing. Went to see if cables were properly attached to hard drive. Alas I found the problem...shipped with no hard drive.
@PAcifisti I don't think the owners would accept a PC leaving with that many issues, because it's guaranteed to come back at their own expense when the customer discovers the problems. I think it was just incompetence in this instance. It's no secret that system builders will give you the cheapest components they can, though.
@James Collins It's not the company getting screwed by the employees, it's the other way around. The owners decided what was acceptable and the employees have to go with it. The company isn't there for the workers and customers, it's there to make money and cut as many corners as the owners deem possible.
Gotta love the total numb brains response. Like, they don't see 100C temps as even being a problem lol. Imagine bringing your car to the dealer after you just bought it because there's smoke coming out of the engine compartment due to a coolant issue and they say "is there anything wrong with the car? It seems to drive fine."
I really appreciate your rigor in holding companies accountable. It's basically you're saying to them "Your failure is our content", and everyone ultimately benefits in the end.
$4941 USD? what a ripoff. These are the people with confidence to sell PCs. This is proof, intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
One of the things that consistently baffles me when it comes to shops that sell pre-built machines is why none of them have bothered to make their *own* tear-down video(s) which they could then link to customers as a 1st line of support since it's pretty easy to annotate a youtube video by what part is being removed since the installation is literally just the inverse of that tear-down (barring any kind of thermal paste reapplication or whatnot) and could serve as a part of the "welcome to using X product" material that customers sometimes get sent with whatever device was bought.
You are understating how dumb customers can be. People buying pre-builts are the kinds of people that call customer service saying their computer doesn't turn on when the monitor is unplugged. Directing customers to videos telling them how to tear down their PC would result likely in the customer damaging the components. And then what do you do? It probably ends up costing more money than just sending the PC back.
Because that would cost time and money and they're a company so why would they do that. Better to make a 30 second video with lots of RGB flashing and random stats and cyber-y animations that lure in people because wow pretty colors.
@Black Hat my "no, it wasnt" was referring to Watchful Fox(your alt?) comment about "To be fair it did work out of the box to the specs listed". quite contrary, its was a crippled system from the start. messed up bios settings, bend (and possibly even cracked) radiator and cpu trying to double as a firefighter is not a sign of a "working out of the box" build.
@Watchful Fox no it wasnt. 100 deg means the cpu will cut power and throttle, physically there will be not much difference, besides reduced component life, but performance will suffer, especially when temps were going up to max almost instantly. my guess its either radiator was damaged and cracked somewhere due to improper shipping (bend is visible but there might be an actual crack somewhere) or even incorrectly installed, or the overall airflow of the case was poor. reversed fan wont, by itself ,cause that high temp spike. it could also be a faulty cpu, but those happen rarely.
To be fair it did work out of the box to the specs listed. The fix to exceed those specs and supposedly lowering the temp (we don't know if the fan direction did lower the temps or not, it wasn't shown) took all of 15 seconds.
Same. I built my first PC about 2 months ago (Im typing this comment on it rn :)) and I was about to buy a prebuilt because honestly, the thought of building my own scared me. I thought for sure I would break something and waste a ton of money. But after looking around and not being able to decide what prebuilt to get, I saw all the people saying how its better to build your own and how its not hard, so, despite my fears, I decided to do some research and give it a shot. And oh boy Im SO GLAD I did. Not only is it way cheaper for the same or better performance, but the satisfaction of booting it up for the first time and seeing it all work perfectly is unmatched. Seeing something that YOU built actually working as intended is super cool, and it feels way more earned than just buying a prebuilt. And they were right, its not hard. Once you start doing research, you start to notice how all the components fit together in a very specific way, and that you basically cant install something the wrong way. If youre reading this and thinking of buying a prebuilt, I STRONGLY urge you to think about building your own. I know it may seem scary, but trust me, its a lot simpler than it seems and its very much worth it.
I reckon the bent cooler was from the impact the front of the case took. It might have applied enough pressure through the expanding foam packing to bend it.
Because of this I went and looked at my skytech tower (when I get a prebuilt I check for obvious signs of incompetence as in fans being backwards, pins for graphics cards not being connected ect.) But sure enough that motherboard connector at the bottom had glue on it and the small connector for power at the bottom of the motherboard was bent and falling out
@Klaytoncalix Maybe two people worked on it. One who couldn't do jack 5h!t and didn't care to do better, the another who loved the job, going the extra mile.
@David yeah, a 120mm radiator and a cheap 120mm air cooler don't really differ much in real world performance for normal gaming loads, so it really is down to a e s t h e t i c s lately.
@HeyItsJonny also air cooling has longer life expectancy and the only thing that fails are its fans, which are 10-20$ replacements, liquid cooling just gives a better aesthetic most of the times
This doesnt surprise me at all. Bought a Skytech few months ago and QC was so bad. The person who built must have known bc they didnt even include the QC checklist. When I talked to them they tried to play it off like the paperwork wasn't important. I still havent gotten my QC checklist from them yet. So sad
Skytech impresses in look but fails in performance. Loved my PC until i started looking deeper into issues that i would have later in the years. Same front fan as in this episode was not activating due to wrong wiring, ssd not connecting, and other random issues down the line. While i do like the company and like their products, I DO think most of the problem comes down to QC and hope that the proper training is put in place because i don't think it was in any way malicious but just a lack of competence.
What I love about CTOs is none of them have any relationship with the "T" in their title. Actual technical people never get anywhere near CTO in an even vaguely large business. I would never buy a prebuilt PC, but I don't mind the hot glue on ports liable to come unplugged - BUT - they should only be using the absolute minimum needed to do the job, which would be a spot on that connector, and it needs to look tidy, and I'd probably say only on the underside not the top or sides of the connector so it's hidden from view - that is way too much just to hold it in position for shipping etc, and it's sloppily put on.
Wow, that's amazing that they would make such a dumb mistake on a $5k system. You'd expect that on maybe a $700 PC from Walmart or Costco or something. I guess $5k doesn't get you what it used to 🤔
Steve sarcasm and comedic timing have always been absolute S tier. (at least since a few years ago when I found GN) he legit makes me laugh more than any other comedic youtuber
My 1100 dollar prebuilt pc goes at like 100 Fahrenheit (40-50) celsius ish, that was during the summer when it was 95 degrees out, during the winter it’s at a good 30c. Fans aren’t too loud, headphones block em out tho
I wish I had seen this earlier. I just got a refurb Dell system from Amazon, built and shipped by Skytech and I can say it is not without its issues. For the most part, it does work, but the short comings are things like, instead of installing a wireless / USB card, they send you a couple of cheap USB dongles to take care of that activity. I already installed a card that does a much better job that the dongles ever could. Then, the first time I turned the system on, I got the high-speed tick tick tick of a fan obviously hitting something. I mean, if they turned on the system and heard that, wouldn't that be a warning sign that something isn't quite right? Now that I've got things ironed out, I'll use this system for a year or so, but then I'm just going to source my own parts and build my own system. I certainly can't do any worse than this.
i think the issue is, since the economy dived, most qualified employees want more than some of these companies are willing to offer so they have been hiring underqualified employees willing to accept to low pay. been leading to a lot more mistakes and employers are slowly raising pay to attract better people
I'm just shocked that prebuilts are all this bad, I'm so glad I advised my brother to just get parts and I build his PC rather than buying a prebuilt PC.
My husband and I love watching your reviews of pre-built PCs. They are so informative (and hilarious!). Would you consider reviewing Linux machines? We gave up on Windows several years ago after being screwed by it multiple times. We both now use Linux PCs (Ubuntu and Mint). My gaming machine is currently a System76 laptop running Linux Mint. 99% of my Steam game library works fine on Linux with Proton. I'm currently having a blast playing Cyberpunk 2077 with no problems. I would be very interested in a review of, for example, a System76 high powered gaming rig or something similar.
I am planning to eventually build my own gaming PC. (Problem is, I am getting amazing performance from the "most bang for the buck" system I put together.) When I look at prebuilts, I look at the cost of the parts, add a markup, figure in the salary of a tech, add something for overhead- as your friend said, "Where is the $5,000 going?" I'm not any kind of an expert, but I would see 100 C on a test report and go "WTF? That's where plastics start to melt!" The test report reminds me of those used car dealers who advertise a "100 point quality inspection." Doing said inspection in no way implies they actually fixed anything they found.
Holy cow I just saw one of these from Skytech in the wild. A friend's son mistakenly decided to remove Windows from their system. Surprised he wasn't able to reboot. So I fixed it but immediately saw a bunch of problems. I had to check in with them that they didn't drop it or smash it in some way. They said it came out of the box and then went on the desk for the rest of its life. They got it in October. They said the box came fine which means the damage had to be in the workshop. The entire back panel was smashed in as though somebody dropped the entire case from a high height. I cannot foresee this lasting too long because the motherboard back panel is out of shape along with the back panel fan and the PCI plates. This is also causing strain to the graphics card. The glass side panel can't even screw in because of the fact that the points where it's supposed to screw in have been smashed in almost 90° from where they should be. The case paint is all scraped off in those various areas. They thought it was weird but they didn't think much of it. Then there's some cable management for the LEDs from the motherboard and to hide them they just cram them in between the CPU water cooler pump and the RAM. The ram was under so much pressure from the cables being slammed in there that it was actually tilted a good 10° from the pressure caused by the cables. I didn't look too much further because I was just there to reinstall windows. And as a side note the liquid cooler was installed in properly based on the gamers Nexus video regarding AIOs.
In what world does a 1000 dollar GPU and a 700 dollar CPU, a 75 dollar CPU cooler, some 250-300 dollars worth of RAM (on the high end), a 120 dollar power supply, in a 130 dollar case equal to 5000 dollars? That would be barely appropriate at half of that. This was uploaded a month ago, not a year ago, when high end GPUs sold for 2K before scalpers got to them and sold them for even more. Sure, as an SI you need to charge for the build, but not $2500... On the high end, you can charge 2-300 for the build, and anyone buying a system with 2-2.5K worth of hardware in it can surely cough up a couple hundred for the build. This is madness.
Regardless of their “We’ll take the L and crack down and do better” response, there is still absolutely ZERO justification selling a build for that price. That is just blatant daylight robbery.
I bought a Skytech for around $4,400 from Amazon about 6 months ago with a 3090. Immediately got 10+ blue screens per day. I spent around 2 hours on the phone with them, and they were very nice, however, 2 hours of having me install programs to test things and then getting off the phone, only to have it bluescreen again. Repeat and rinse several 2 more times. After that I thought to myself do I really want to spend $4,400 that doesn't properly from day 1? I returned it and went with Digital Storm. I love my Digital Storm. It was a couple of hundred extra dollars but the case is much larger, no heat trouble at all, and not a single problem since day 1.
Man this is embarrassing especially with the case being used. I have this exact case and with my components installed correctly it runs super cool, granted I dont have a 3090 TI and 12900K its still a great airflow case.
I built my own about 20 months ago and have been VERY happy with the results. I started building in the early 90's but it's been a long time since I needed anything other than a work computer so there was a long gap in building for me. Decided I was going to game at 1440p so I built a B550 system with a 5800X, 32 GB of Crucial RAM, an EVGA 3070 , a Seasonic 750W supply, 2 Samsung 870 NVMe SSD's (500 GB split for Linux and Windows, 1 TB for working game installs), and a 4 TB WD Black SATA drive for long-term game setup files. Total cost was around $3000 and that was pretty much at peak cost. Now the same system would cost a LOT less. I'm getting great frame rates in Star Citizen at 1440p. The Crucial memory was rated at 3200 MHz with XMP settings but I was able to raise that to 3800 MHz without any problems and I disabled hyperthreading and it cleared up some issues I was having with stuttering in Star Citizen as well as fixing thumbnailing issues in the Nemo file manager (Linux Mint). I've learned a HUGE amount by building my own system again, even with a 25-year IT career and hobby experience all the way back to the late 70's.
The quality of this build, especially for 5K is absolutely egregious... I did not think the video could keep getting worse, but all the way till the end, IT DID. Wow.
A simple step like marking the direction flow on the fan would help a lot (i.e. paint the direction arrows on the fan). As the manufactures only mark them and it is hard to see. Then the installer as well as QC can easily see this issue.
just funny that when I built my first pc one of my biggest concerns when adding fans was making sure they were blowing the right way. it's pretty obvious that it's important
I don’t know much about how to build my own system to avoid the pitfalls mentioned with the fans so I look towards system integrators to fill that knowledge gap. The consistent theme from GN has been that SI companies can’t fill that gap either.
Steve,I hear you, and I feel you. I'm just saying, how do we know for certain all their lab reports don't all show 110deg, for example in some test where they pushed the CPIU to make sure it was still working when pushed beyond regular tests. The conclusion may have been inconclusive. =
