- "Paid so much for this PC,
and it crashed one week after the return window closed.
My son is heartbroken.
We are unable to fix it. Not sure what to do.
Removed by Amazon.
"Twice now this company has sold me a damaged computer.
First one, the graphics wouldn't register in the computer,
and now my computer won't register to the monitor."
Crossed out.
"I'm super irritated
that my wife can't use the gaming PC for gaming
because they sent her a defective PC."
Removed.
What?
It is 2023.
And you've seen me get scammed purposely on many occasions.
But this, this, my friends, goes beyond a mere scam.
This is fraud.
(echoes) This is fraud. (stamp thunders)
I, last year, did a video
building the cheapest Amazon gaming PC I could
that was remotely okay.
It's like 300 bucks.
Fun video, performed well, yada yada yada.
So it's 2023, I figure, "Hey, let's do an updated version.
See what parts are out there."
And so I went on Amazon,
typed in gaming PC and started scrolling
and kept scrolling
until I started finding some results
that seemed a little odd.
Behold, my friends.
This holy...
- [Matt] Where's the rest of ya?
- Where's the rest? (laughs)
This is a system that I paid $500 for.
It is advertised gaming PC, gaming PC, gaming PC.
And look what you get with your gaming PC.
Okay?
So you get yourself an RGB strip.
You get yourself a tiny little graphics card,
which is a GTX 7, wait 750?
Wait, that's not even what they told me it was.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on.
- The listing does say that it comes with a GTX 650.
- [Matt] You defrauded them!
(Austin laughs)
- "Please don't move this label.
These video ports are disabled.
Use video ports of your video card below."
It's just like the crappiest sticker.
Like Cool.
Matt, no, we B roll this.
Oh, okay.
- [Matt] This thing was $500!
- Desktop computer, Intel i5, 3.1 gigahertz.
Okay, now I'm gonna stop you right there.
Intel i5, sounds reasonable,
"But what kind of i5?" you might ask.
Well, if you scroll down, and you scroll down,
it's an i5 2400, 10 generations behind.
I'm telling you, these components are basically e-waste.
Oh!
Aha, they didn't give us the parts at all.
It literally immediately pops up.
It's an i7 2600, which is a reasonable step up
from the i5 that they were promising.
Did we get lucky and get a better system this time?
Yeah, I'll take an i7
and a slightly newer GPU, theoretically,
but you could probably just as easily get a worse one.
This stuff is all worth literally nothing.
So they don't care which one they even send you.
Let me actually show you what I'm talking about.
"Cause it's one thing to like talk about it.
I'ma open up amazon.com.
Gaming PC search on Amazon, okay?
Ignore the top two sponsor listings.
We've got this.
Number two is the system that I purchased.
This is the Alarco. This is exactly it.
This has 2,700 ratings!
I didn't see.
- Okay, I just wanna make sure you rebooted there.
- Hold on, I'm gonna conservatively say
that one out of what?
Maybe 10 people will review something on Amazon.
So they're selling tens of thousands of these.
And here's another one in another different case
for the same price.
Here's the one that I supposedly purchased.
Another one that I supposedly purchased.
You know what I think is going on right now,
is that there are a couple of companies like Alarco,
who clearly are the most successful
from, you know, first glance,
who've gamed the SEO on Amazon,
have owned the gaming PC search.
- [Matt] You think for someone who doesn't know PCs,
they're gonna look at this $1,500 one, and they go,
"Oh my god, that's too expensive."
And they go, "Oh, a $500 one, it's a little slow.
But is it a thousand dollars slower? I don't know."
- It is clear to me there are shenanigans afoot.
Skullduggery abounds.
Let me take a minute.
Let me build a system for you.
Let me show you what $450 should actually get you
if you have a little bit of time
to actually build a system yourself,
and what a modern system should contain.
So it's one thing to talk about the performance
or the lack of performance of the system,
but it's another thing to actually show you
what you're really getting with this.
So the first thing I wanna do
is get a closer look at the CPU.
The advantage of having a large case
with nothing inside is it is very easy to work on.
The downside is that there's basically no reason
to ever do this because, while this is old,
there's actually no real upgrades you could do to this.
Not really.
This, my friends, is our Intel Core i7 2600.
This processor was released 12 years ago, 2011.
- [Kinsley] I think I used that
for the first gaming PC I ever built in high school.
- [Matt] That, that's made me feel old.
Mine was a Pentium III.
- You're old.
This, my friends, is an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G,
and for the low price of $178
purchased directly from amazon.com,
this has a massive amount of performance
compared to what you're getting with the Core i7.
So we're gonna go from four cores on this
to eight cores on the Ryzen chip.
They're also far newer.
They support hyper threading, and importantly,
this also has totally reasonable integrated graphics.
You'll be able to game way better
than this dedicated graphics card,
which is almost 10 years old.
Well, how much would I actually be spending on this?
- So on eBay, what's actually really funny is that like,
it's actually kind of hard to find those specific parts.
Like all the i7 2600s I got were the K version,
which will overclock, 30 bucks on eBay,
and then the GTX 750Ti, which is also better,
56 on eBay.
- Something else I don't understand
is they're using a one terabyte hard drive,
which is just stupid.
Like I get that you're getting capacity,
but like so for my system,
I'm using a 500 gigabyte Crucial P3.
Not only is this going to be like legitimately
30 times faster than the hard drive,
but this also wasn't even that expensive.
50 bucks?
- So for the SSD, that was actually 35.
- [Austin] Wha, no!
- Which fun fact, that is exactly how much
we found the same HDD for on eBay.
- Now I understand that because the system is so old,
I actually couldn't install this.
I'd have to get a SATA SSD,
but even then, it's still the same price.
It's gonna be so much faster.
Like the fact that they put that in there,
I'm gonna just guess
that they just had a pile of old hard drives,
and they also just stuffed it in here.
But I really do wanna tell you,
what do you think they're actually doing?
They're probably taking these old systems which are e-waste.
They're meant to be recycled.
They're salvaging the components that they can out of them,
which to be fair is not, there's nothing wrong with that.
I mean, beats it going in a landfill,
but they're not spending $150 on components for this.
No, no, no, no, no.
Companies are probably paying them to take these components.
I mean, this stuff is a decade old.
Looking at the rest of this, I mean, it looks like
they just straight ripped it out of a Dell.
So we've got a very generic cheap board,
which especially for a system this old,
you can get for pennies on the dollar.
GHT 2022.
Wait, they.
Wait, I'm just realizing,
they watermarked this RAM.
Says, "GHT 2022."
So I'm assuming when they get these things in,
and they're recycling from the Dells,
they probably do a quick little test
to see if the RAM still works.
They put a little stamp on it,
and they put it in their pile of components.
- [Kinsley] $18 on Amazon, that's almost $1 per gigabyte.
- Now I'm actually going to be using
pretty much the exact same amount of RAM.
So I'm gonna also be going with 16 gigs of RAM
for my system.
The big difference is this is going to be
running far, far faster, which is important,
because this is going to be feeding,
not only my CPU, but also my GPU.
We've got a good idea of how bad this system is,
but let me actually build my system,
which, again, cost the same amount of money,
is gonna be a lot more powerful.
Let me build this, we're gonna put them side by side,
and let's just see what kind of performance you're getting
out of the Scamazon PC
compared to what you could do if you did it yourself.
'Cause feeling pretty confident
my system's gonna be a little bit better.
By a little bit, I mean like a lot.
Alright, so my $450 build is ready to go.
Now at first glance, it looks very similar
to the Scamazon special over here.
Now while in hindsight, I probably should have picked a case
that didn't have a white interior
to make my cable management look a little bit better.
But other than that, this is actually really similar.
We've got ourselves four RGB fans,
as opposed to three on this system.
I would say my RGB is maybe not quite as bright as that,
but honestly, the cases are very similar.
To illustrate the difference
between my system and the Alarco,
I've got Cinebench.
Now this is a CPU benchmark.
It's generally a good sort of idea for the responsiveness
and the processing power of each system.
So the Alarco scored 681 on single core, 3342 on multi core,
and I will say it took a very long time to run. (coughs)
When you come over to my system,
I've got almost triple the single core, 1504,
and like four or five times the multi core,
13686 compared to 3342.
All this to say that for the same money,
my system has a massively higher level of performance,
but it's one thing to see CPU and responsiveness,
and I've got an SSD which means
it doesn't take me five minutes to load "Fortnite,"
but let's actually do some gaming.
They promised that this is great for "Fortnite."
So let's take 'em up on it.
Let's actually load up a game of "Fortnite" on each
and see how they compare.
If I lose, I'm gonna be really sad.
So I will say, as we were setting up this,
we couldn't exactly match the settings from the leaflet.
Mostly because "Fortnite" has been updated
and some things have changed, but we've got it pretty close.
So we actually have a pair of matching 1600-by-900 monitors.
They're tiny and not very good looking,
but, again, we're trying to keep it fair.
So my settings here are essentially,
I've got custom, which is mostly just low.
I've got view distance set to epic.
I do actually have temporal super resolution anti-aliasing,
which means that it's running at 66% of 900P,
which is 720-ish or whatever.
But we've got it as close as possible.
But importantly, I'm going to match that on this system,
which I'm sure is gonna tell me like,
"Hey, you can run way faster," but.
Matt, would you care to join me
and see what the actual performance of these systems are?
- Oh, we gonna fight each other?
- Yep.
I'm going to be playing on the Alarco.
Matt is going to be playing on the $450 system,
and let's see what we're actually going to be able to get.
Look, okay, you're in the game already.
How long does it take for me?
(fast forward whining)
- [Matt] I'll get them with my sword!
(fast forward whining)
- [Austin] Bro!
- [Matt] I just took out Tomato Town, so.
- There we go. I'm in, okay.
I will say my system is playable right now.
I'm getting like mid-40s. It's not good.
Yours is consistently over 60 FPS though, right?
- [Matt] My average right now is 71.
- You're clearly getting a lot more performance than I am.
- [Matt] I could definitely push this up higher
for graphic settings, yeah.
- But using, I kind of understand this computer right now.
It's just barely good enough
that if I'm some 12-year-old kid, and I get this,
I'm like, "I'm playing 'Fortnite,'"
'cause it's technically playable.
But you look at it compared to this,
which mind you is not exactly a massively powerful PC,
but is better in every possible way,
and you're getting like what?
50% more frame rate than I am?
- Let's play some "Forza" on it.
- It's one thing to just follow their guideline
and, you know, play the game that they recommend.
But I just wanna try a more modern title,
and see if it's remotely feasible?
Wow, you're not good at donuts, Matt.
- [Matt] Cool, thanks. Really appreciate the.
- There you go, you got it now.
Just get a nice wide, wide slide.
I mean, oh boy, wow, did you see that lag?
Part of my problem,
especially with an open world game like this,
is that it's running on a hard drive,
which means that as you load assets in, it gets choppy.
I think this Alarco is pretty much the bare minimum
to be able to play most games.
Now I'll actually say that the fact
that they sent us the 750 instead of the 650
actually makes a pretty big difference.
This has four gigs of RAM,
which is pretty much the bare minimum
for a lot of newer titles.
That 650 that we had ordered only had one gig of RAM,
which means that most games like "Forza"
probably wouldn't have even run.
So one thing I don't understand with this are the reviews.
Now there are a lot of negative reviews for Alarco on Amazon
of people having very legitimate complaints,
and instead of those complaints being heard,
they're removing the comments.
"They did not give us the license for the Windows.
Now have no way to contact them,
no website or customer service number."
Perfectly reasonable one-star review crossed out!
"This item was fulfilled by Amazon,
and we take responsibility for this fulfillment experience."
"Ordered a gaming PC with an i7 Core processor
as advertised on the listing.
When I received the item and started it up,
it says only it's an i5."
Again, crossed out.
"This item was fulfilled by Amazon."
Like how we ordered the i5 and got the i7.
Someone ordered the i7 and got the i5.
Like they're just shipping these things out.
They don't care.
"I'm a 12-year-old boy who spent lots of money on this PC.
It never functioned as advertised.
And local computer repair guys will not even look at it.
It seems like this is a company
that scams 12-year-olds out their birthday money."
Removed by Amazon!
This is a 12-year-old kid!
He bought this, he even recognizes!
How is it that a 12-year-old can recognize
that this company exists to scam 12-year-olds out of money?
And Amazon, not only is not doing anything about it,
they removed his review!
This is not okay. This is not okay.
I hope, and sincerely,
I hope that someone from Amazon sees this video
and does something about this.
There's nothing against the idea
of selling a computer on Amazon
that has some older components in it.
That's fine.
But you should disclaim that.
Don't just say Core i5 and call it a day
and then bury the actual model number
15 pages deep on the listing.
Tell me what I am buying.
Disclaim that it does have some used components
and charge me a reasonable amount.
200 bucks for this thing, I could buy it.
But $500 and being on the top
of the Amazon gaming PC search, what are you doing?
We look at a lot of silly scams
and goofy things and everything,
but like this is at a different level.
This is a completely different level,
and I really think that someone at Amazon
needs to do something about this.
Because these kids are getting straight up ripped off.