- This is absolutely obscenely lightweight.
Were there only three screws on this?
- [Cameraman] Well, yeah.
(Austin laughing)
- [Cameraman] Oh, already?
(Austin laughing)
Austin Evans making terrible consumer decisions.
(dramatic music)
- This video is sponsored by Visible.
Today, I am going to purchase
the cheapest gaming PC on Amazon.
So I saw a great video by Dawid Does Tech Stuff recently,
where he found a ridiculous scam
of a gaming computer on Amazon,
but that was over a year ago.
A lot's changed, like graphics cards
are now four times as expensive.
So let's see what we can find
$600 for a Ryzen 3, and a 550.
Okay, that's closer,
but I think we can go less than 600.
$500 for an Alarco Core i5, eight gigs of RAM,
oh, one terabyte hard drive, and a GTX650!
It's a Core i5-2400.
- [Cameraman] That CPU is almost as old
as some of the people watching the channel.
(Austin laughing)
- Okay, this is weird.
A CHUWI CoreNox Pro Desktop Mini PC, $400.
I'm just gonna say, we're obviously not gonna get this
for the system, but this is probably gonna do better
than a lot of systems at $400,
if I'm gonna be real with you.
Uh-oh, we found one.
This is the one that Dawid did, $380.
Oh, you know what?
It's got two star review.
What'd you do to get a two star review?
Simon says freeze.
As nice as this computer looks,
it continues to freeze, forcing me to have to reboot
over and over again.
- [Cameraman] Simon says freeze
is probably the best headline for a review
I've ever heard in my life.
- Uh-oh, I found a 4K gaming computer.
You ready for your 4K gaming computer?
- [Cameraman] Am I?
Am I?
What is it?
- Great for casual mid-end gaming,
Nvidia GeForce 4K certified video card, GT710.
I don't think this'll run at 4K.
If it does, it's gonna be like 30 FPS or something.
Oh, I found a Dell gaming computer for $400,
and with that you get a Quad Core i5,
16 gigs of RAM,
128 gigabyte SSD, and a GT1030.
That's like a lot more performance
than the other one for a hundred dollars more.
Okay, hang on.
Now, this is actually a system that I would actually build.
For 450 bucks, we're getting a 240 gig SSD,
perfectly reasonable, eight gigs of RAM,
the bare minimum, and an Athlon 3000G,
which is barely enough to be okay,
it is not good, but if you lower your expectations
that we're buying the cheapest gaming PC on Amazon,
this isn't crazy.
I think we should get the Athlon system for $450,
and we should get the Dell system for $400,
and see which one's better,
because I think the Dell's gonna have an advantage
in some ways, but it's also gonna be really old.
So let's see which of the cheapest gaming PCs on Amazon
is actually worth it.
Spoiler alert.
No.
All right, we have now received our
supposedly cheapest Amazon gaming PCs.
So let's see what we've got, shall we?
So to start out with, let's take a look
at our full custom $450 gaming PC build.
I've never heard of Allied Gamers one,
I guess is the company who makes this.
- [Cameraman] It's actually a really nice looking box.
- Wow, this thing is tiny.
- [Cameraman] Well, that's actually kind of adorable.
- Wow. - Dude, I mean, okay.
- This is like absolutely obscenely lightweight.
Were there only three screws on this?
- [Cameraman] Well, yeah, yeah, yeah,
no, I don't think you missed anything.
- Do you think this is staticky?
Maybe?
- [Cameraman] Yeah.
- Wow, that's so empty.
Wow!
Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on.
There's nothing in here.
Oh, man, okay, well this took a turn.
First of all, this is a Biostar A320MH motherboard.
We have a single DIMM of memory, not great,
and it is eight gigs of 2666.
- [Cameraman] Yikes.
- Okay, now here's the part
where I'm really scared of,
550 watt Allied branded power splice.
This is their own power supply,
but we look on the 12 volt rail, that's 360 Watts.
This is a cheapo power supply, no doubt.
Well, it's neat.
(Austin laughing)
- [Cameraman] Wow, that's about as neat as we'd do it.
- I found our screw.
It's here.
So this is the fourth screw for the side panel.
It was literally wedged in right here.
Also a couple of minor things, not that it's a big deal;
this plate wasn't really screwed all the way down,
which is fine,
but if you actually look on top here, you can see
that this USB port was actually not installed correctly,
specifically the IO shield, right?
There's no way you can actually plug that in.
You actually have to pull these and get them out of the way.
It's a little bit odd is that they left
the power supply switch off by default.
So if I plug this thing in,
and hit the power button, nothing happens.
I actually have to come around here and flip that on.
What else do we have in the box?
January 15th, 2020, dear Amazon customer,
thanks for purchasing an Allied product.
So I guess it's been sitting in a box for a year.
Got it, okay, cool.
That explains a lot.
Okay, now, why don't we take a look to see
what we've got on the Dell side of things?
It's probably gonna be both better and worse.
Before we check out the Dell,
let's see if we got our money's worth
out of the $450 Allied gaming PC.
So I'm going to jump onto Amazon and see if I can find
as close to the same spec as possible,
which normally would mean that,
of course, this is a terrible deal,
but considering just how hard it is
to actually get your hands on PC parts in 2021,
it might not be that simple.
Oh, I found our actual motherboard.
Okay, cool.
So here's the actual board that we're using in the system,
so $60.
Okay, $32 for RAM, very reasonable.
I'm gonna look up the worst power supply I can find,
technically it's 550 Watt,
but I don't think we're gonna get a good one.
$30 power supply.
So this is broadly applicable
to the supply that's in that system.
So a $30 Rosewill FBM-X2,
which actually I think is what we used
in our $300 build that we did a couple of years ago.
Okay, so even in today's climate of PC components,
this Allied computer is a straight rip off.
This is a $288 system, essentially two thirds of the price,
and we spent 450 bucks on it.
Now, let's take a look to see what's under the hood
of the Dell PC.
Oh boy.
That is significantly heavier.
- [Cameraman] Wow, this looks familiar.
- Because it's been in every doctor's office
and office building in the entire face of the planet?
- [Cameraman] No, because this has definitely been
in the office before a few times.
- I'm not entirely sure what happened here.
So this is like a little tray for you to put your phone
or your keys, or whatever.
They covered up like the surface tag,
but it's almost like re-painted this or resurfaced it,
and you see like these like lines here;
I wonder if this was like damaged a little bit,
and they just tried to like, see like,
yeah, like this just comes up.
- [Cameraman] Whoa.
- Look at that, they refinished the top of the system.
So we have captive screws, which is nice,
and a side panel,
which thankfully comes right off
to reveal, oh, I shouldn't have bent it like that,
to reveal a very, very basic looking Dell.
I'll certainly say the cable management is not super clean,
but that's fine.
I mean, there's no window, so you can't really tell.
So the power supply, like I had expected, is much nicer.
So with an 80 Plus Gold unit,
which means that this, even though, on paper,
it's only 290 Watts, I guarantee you this power supply
is gonna last years longer than the super cheap unit
in the other system, so that's cool.
So the GT1030, looks hilariously small.
I am pretty sure that's a two gig version.
It is.
So that's the cheapest version of the GT1030,
but for the most part,
what we're getting here is some slightly older components,
but these older components are still very capable
even in 2021 with an upgrade like an SSD
and with like a graphics card.
I'm not sure if this is totally worth the $400,
but at first glance, I like what I'm seeing here
more than I did on the other system,
especially considering that this was $50 cheaper.
This portion of the video is sponsored by Visible.
With Visible, you get unlimited data, calls, and texts,
even to some other countries, including Canada and Mexico.
And you're able to do it all with the power of Verizon's
nationwide 5G network.
Better yet, you can get all this
for as little as $25 a month using party pay.
The way it works is once you sign up for Visible,
you can start a party, and then you can invite your friends,
family members, coworkers, whatever, to join the party,
and for each person that joins, up to four, you get $5 off,
which means that if you have four people in your party,
you're only paying $25 a month.
And better yet, while you're sharing the savings,
you're not sharing the actual bill.
Everyone still has to pay their own stuff,
which means that all you really get here
is that super fast 5G coverage
without actually having to pay an arm and a leg for it.
You can also get up and running on Visible
in literal minutes.
And, of course, if you want to buy a new phone,
or you just need a SIM card,
Visible will overnight that to you really quickly.
But on the other side, if you have a newer iPhone,
and some Android phones coming soon,
you can take advantage of eSIM,
which means that right inside the app,
you can sign up, get the SIM card,
and have your service up and running in literal minutes.
So if that sounds cool to you,
and you want to get some of that
sweet nationwide Verizon 5G network action,
definitely be sure to go check out Visible
at the link in the description, and huge shout to Visible
for sponsoring this portion of the video.
Let's fire up and see what happens.
(upbeat music)
Wow, that's RGB.
Oh boy.
(upbeat music)
Well, it looks good for a thumbnail.
(upbeat music)
It's a little dark on the inside though,
but at least we can now see our handiwork,
well, our handiwork, someone's handiwork.
I will say this is certainly not fast at turning on.
Okay, we'll just give it a minute.
Oh.
(Austin laughing)
- [Cameraman] Oh, already?
(Austin laughing)
- Inaccessible boot device.
What do you mean inaccessible boot device?
What?
Is the SSD unplugged or something?
Oh, this is clearly not ending well.
Well, I have an RGB button to make me feel better.
Woo.
So cool.
Okay, trying to load into Windows.
It's trying.
Nope, inaccessible boot device.
(Austin groaning)
- [Cameraman] What?
Austin Evans, making terrible consumer decisions?
- I couldn't even scan it.
I couldn't even scan it.
Let me see if I can get in the BIOS
and see if I have any sense for what's going on.
Okay, all right.
We're in.
So, all right.
What do we have here?
So, it shows our 240 gig Patriot SSD, so that's fine.
It's clearly showing up correctly.
Let's see if we can reset it.
See if it works.
- [Cameraman] Now imagine this as the end user.
- Yeah.
- [Cameraman] Like an end user that doesn't know any better.
- Yeah. - That's rough.
- All right, so we're gonna just go
safe mode with networking.
Ah, oh, okay.
We have some success.
So now we just have to figure out what driver it is
that's keeping my system from even seeing the SSD.
Yeah.
Woo.
What I love to see is
stuff that doesn't work out of the box.
All right, so after a BIOS update,
and swapping out a couple of the drivers,
magically, the system works.
All right.
Let's see if the Dell fares any better at first boot.
The nice thing about this Dell,
it did come with the mouse and keyboard.
So, certainly not nothing.
Why the devil do they need to be sealed?
That seems a little excessive.
- [Cameraman] Wait, just one?
- Just a single-
(cameraman laughing)
- [Cameraman] Really? (upbeat music)
- Okay, well I hear, oh, look at that.
Instantly, instantly shows up.
That's what I like to see.
All right.
I mean, that's what I like to see.
- [Cameraman] Immediately.
The first thing I noticed-
- Yeah.
- [Cameraman] Is you didn't have to
re-install or update the BIOS.
(Austin laughing)
- It's funny.
When you plug in a computer and you don't immediately
have to install a new BIOS to keep it from blue screening.
It's a pretty cool feature.
Okay, the Dell system is alive.
First question, what do we have under the hood?
A Core i5 4570, so it is Haswell.
That is a very good sign.
So I thought this may have been third gen,
which was Ivy Bridge,
which would have been totally all right,
but Haswell was actually
a pretty reasonable step up in performance.
This CPU is capable of actually a fair bit,
even today in 2021.
All right, so I'm much, much happier
with the spec of this Dell.
But especially considering that this was less expensive,
and better in every way really,
besides maybe some single threaded performance.
- And aesthetics. - And aesthetics.
But besides that, I think we're in good shape here.
I'm gonna get some stuff updating.
So now let's see exactly how close
our cheapest Amazon systems are in performance,
starting out with some Cinebench.
Now, don't mind the fact that one has a TV
and one has a monitor.
Should make no difference to the actual performance.
We're gonna start out by running a single core benchmark.
So, even though this has quad cores versus dual cores,
even though this should, on paper,
perform better in most scenarios,
this will be the test to show if our Athlon processor
can keep up.
It's kinda like watching paint dry though
if you wait for the render, but it'll finish,
just give it five to seven minutes each.
868 points, so that is the number
that the Core i5 has to beat.
801 points.
So that's actually not wildly off,
especially considering that this CPU is six years older
than the one inside the Athlon.
So for single thread CPU performance, it is a clear win,
not a massive win, but it is a clear win for Amazon special.
Now let's fire up multi-core.
This is, I think, a spot where I expect the Core i5
to do better, because while they both have technically
four cores, realistically this is just a dual core processor
with hyper-threading, where this has four actual proper
CPU cores.
So even though each core might be slightly slower,
having more of them is gonna be helpful.
Yeah, not even close.
So the Core i5 here inside the Dell
pretty much gave us almost perfect scaling.
So it's quad core, which means it went 3.9 times faster
with four cores running.
So the reason why this is relevant
is not only for gaming performance,
having that quad core CPU really is what you want
for any kind of modern title.
But also if you want to throw stuff like video editing
at it, not that either of these systems
are gonna be video editing champs,
but not only are you gonna have a lot more
CPU horsepower on this,
but also remember you've got 16 gigs of RAM
versus essentially 6 gigs on the Athlon.
And the Athlon scores 2253.
Yeah, that's not even close.
So now we're going to be running some graphics tests.
Now the Athlon processor inside this
does have relatively modern specs.
The only problem, even though it is a Vega GPU,
it is very small, it's like a Vega 3 or something.
This is not gonna go well, right?
This is really where you're gonna wanna upgrade this
with something a little bit more powerful
on the graphics card side.
This is clearly a demanding benchmark, right?
But that is not what I would consider
to be acceptable performance.
Now, we'll see when we actually get into games,
this is gonna probably do okay when you run the games
on like low settings and stuff, but not good.
Oh, 1,071.
Ugh, okay, all right.
This is definitely the weakest part of this system.
Let's see what the Dell can do.
'Cause I will be shocked if it cannot do better
than that 1,071.
(Austin laughing)
3,235.
So yeah, it's safe to say that the Dell has,
essentially, triple the graphics performance
of the more expensive Athlon base system.
Now is this the be all and end all?
No, of course not.
You could take a graphics card and install it in here,
but at that point you were so above budget,
it's gonna be tough.
So I think a good way to test
the real world gaming performance here is Fortnite.
Yes, yes.
I know we play Fortnite all the time,
but it is a very popular game,
and Epic does a good job of making sure
that Fortnite is technically very demanding on the high end,
but also capable of running on low end systems like this.
Case in point, the new alpha performance mode.
Now this is actually the first time I've tried it,
but essentially the performance mode
is all about trying to lower the system requirements
as much as possible to make Fortnite playable
on even very low end systems.
Oh wow.
That looks, holy.
What is going on here?
Woo.
That is some potato mode right there.
You know what this looks like?
It looks like Fortnite running on an older
or less powerful phone.
Eh, a little stuttery as I'm dropping.
It bounces back and forth,
and right now I'm bouncing between
19 and 40 frames per second.
Those textures are super low as well.
Like, look at those stairs, look at those stairs
like technically this playable,
I'm getting 60 FPS right now,
but this just does not look good in any way.
Well, I mean, at least the draw distances are pretty far.
So at least you should be relatively competitive,
but I mean, it looks straight up like a PS2 game.
On the Dell, it looks like we're going to be running
it 1080p medium.
So we're running a little bit closer to,
I believe 720p or so, with the actual 3D scale resolution.
But I mean, I can immediately tell, not only does the game
look far better, we're getting 70, 80 frames per second
on the bus, which means that even when we drop,
we shouldn't be too far down.
I mean, this is not even close, right?
We're getting a hundred frames per second right now.
I mean, it might not be the prettiest,
and honestly, I might want to turn up the resolution
just a touch.
Yeah, I mean, it is super, super clear to me
that the Dell is a much better gaming PC.
With the battle settled between these two Amazon gaming PCs,
my next task is going to be an even more challenging one.
Can I build a better gaming PC from,
of all places, Best Buy?
Make sure to subscribe
and ring-a-ling that ding-a-ling bell,
so you don't miss the next episode of this saga.
We'll call it a saga.
And of course, big shout out to Visible
for sponsoring this video.
If you want to pay as little as $25 a month
for unlimited talk, text, and data,
check out the link below,
and get started with Visible in literal minutes.
(soft music)