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iBUYPOWER vs. Walmart System Build Review

2019-01-24
in a post Lynam TI world it's likely that a lot of you look at system integrators a little differently or more likely exactly the same after we began our Walmart system review we put in a last-minute rush order for an iWeb power rdy or ready system with a significantly better parts than what we could get in the Walmart built this was before Linus had begun his series too and so all we knew was that the parts listing included a 9700 K instead of Walmart's 8700 clearly an improvement and an RT X 2080 instead of a 1080 TI while being a lower price the question was whether or not the assembly was any good and if any other mistakes were made along the way before that this video is brought to you by mass drop in the PC 37 X gaming headset with professional-grade Sennheiser noise cancelling microphone the PC 37 X headsets are what we use in the office for phone interviews where audio and mic quality are critical making it very convenient high performance solution for gaming or professional work the headphones come with a detachable ten-foot cable for safe storage during travel a standard 3.5 millimeter plug and soft foam 4 firm but comfortable fit over the ears learn more at the link in the description below before starting on this one quick trip down memory lane we had originally ordered the Walmart system in November around Black Friday and that was supposed to be a 2000 plus dollar build with taxes about 2200 I think that was an 80 709 k it was supposed to be a 1080i we didn't get that we end up with a $1,500 build but before we got the Walmart system in what we did was also placed an order with i/o power for one of their ready systems so this is something that was actually going to go to a customer it was on the floor it was a pre-built system with ask you specific SKU so it wasn't a customized one and I'm a power pulled it off the line and sent it to us and it was the same experience you'd get as a customer which is evidenced by the fact that the same mistakes existed in here as a customer would receive and we'll talk about those more in a moment and this is all before the I think before Linus released some of his series but also before we released our Walmart video so this is we were like just completely blind to what we were getting into at this point what we ended up with with the Walmart system what in 87 100 GTX 1070 is about a $1,500 SKU the prices on those skis have dropped by several hundred dollars for each one since then and our system also had an h3 10 motherboard just probably the the most egregious fault out of the part selection and so that's got slower DMI it has one dimbo channel and the case also was pretty bad it had literally three to four millimeters of space between the glass and the front and this one is just in an NZXT case it's been rebuilt a bit significantly more space here even though it looks closed off it actually does have a lot more space than the Walmart one did so we thought you know even though it's it's still pretty closed off it can at least get some air so maybe it'll be better and that's part of what we're testing today and then finally the Walmart system use glue hot glue to hold the USB 3 cable and now I rip our in there past has used glue as well but they don't anymore so this is this is a glue free system though horses were used to make this system but in the past I hope our did use hot glue it's just they've moved on and progressed whereas Walmart was just now figuring that out that it's unnecessary so for this one what we got was a 9700 K RT X 2080 and it was the correct system delivered so check that box did that properly there were mistakes in the build and they were pretty significant ones but we got what we ordered and the parts are there and all the mistakes are correctable is just you shouldn't have to correct them as a customer which has been obviously now a big point of discussion with the lionesses series I do want to give line of some credit here because in speaking with the S eyes they were all like like on the edge of their seats of what's going to happen next so in that series so we know that IB power specifically made internal changes to fix a lot of the things that line is talked about which is great job well done to Linus media group and job well done to I hope our another sis for listening this system is one of the last ones that did not have the the perspective of Linus's series to improve from but it had other issues that Linus didn't encounter there's special ones that that we found and we reported back to our power they should be improved as well we still wanted to go through them there so let's let's start with a part selection quick monologue before we get into this people always like to posting comments whenever anyone does a build media outlet doesn't build Pawlik I'll do a build sis do a build people always love to post why didn't you use X part and there are good reasons for that so let me just point a few of those out for you s eyes do not typically work with things like for example noctua coolers you'll notice here this is the NZXT m22 rebranded so that I'm 22 is our least favorite liquid cooler that we've reviewed and we think is a waste of money for the consumer to buy it now that doesn't mean I buy power spending that same money on it doesn't mean that you're spending the same money on it you would retail when you buy through an SI the reason for that is pretty simple they get discount rates they get either distribution pricing or in the case of IR power it's literally in the same building as NZXT this case is in NZXT case that coolers in NZXT cooler they come from next door there is no logistical cost involved beyond having someone push a box to the warehouse adjacent to the NZXT one so that reduces cost on these things significantly and that's why you see stuff like these partnerships where NZXT case NZXT cooler now there other there could be a in some instances MDF or marketing Development Fund money changing hands like Intel and the Nvidia typically will run MDF for things like include our chipset logo on your box or include GeForce or the game bundle or whatever in your system that's typically accompanied by money in order to to help sort of offset the cost to the manufacturer to the SI when they sell it to the consumer a lot of the time that money's passed on to you so part selection is all over the place and sometimes you might just be like why is only thousand watt power supply available for this system that doesn't need it well they probably had a lot of them and got a good deal on it so somebody keep in mind but let's go through the parts choices and see how they price it out and then we'll start talking about our our testing results and some of the issues we had when we first requested this machine background early December late November it would have cost about twenty to thirty one so two thousand two hundred thirty one dollars u.s. that included the RT acts 9700 k all the other components in the system and the assembly of course and the warranty identical or similar parts we're identical ones were unavailable could be purchased for about 1986 dollars and that's if you bought it yourself without any of the SIS so strictly like for like ignoring that you can yes get cheaper parts with different names comparing the cost of the same parts versus iBUYPOWER for DIY this is really not a bad deal it's about $200 overhead to build the system which we think is fair you aren't being overcharged to the components and if you were to instead pick parts that run a bit cheaper but produce the same quality build you could definitely reduce the price you get it done for about $1,800 somewhere around there so that's if you're willing to do things like get a cheaper GPU this this video card was about $90 more expensive than go in with a different r-tx 2080 you could also reduce $20 on the cooler you could use like an aqua and hu 14s instead of a crack and I'm 22 I hope our doesn't necessarily have that privilege and that you got a $30 change and RAM drop in case price and stuff like that so we did not factor when there's 10 in here since it's basically free now that would be another $100 value potentially if you do consider that as a value add the difference is that IRA power gets a lot of its chosen parts for cheaper than we could so you end up having to just use different parts in order to drop the price and it can be significant it's just at some point you do pay for someone to assemble it for you that's where we need to talk about the assembly quality and the the build itself because if you're paying the premium maybe 200 bucks which we think is pretty fair if you're paying $200 or $400 in some cases more for an SI to build your system it better be good like everything has to be right and it wasn't and before we get into the the things that are very wrong on this I'll note that I will power is correcting these they start working on several of the issues we found after Linus the series we found a few more they're working on those too so problems should be resolved but let's go through them anyway the target customer for this system will plug their peripherals and hit the power button and install steam without ever needing to know what a BIOS is so that's essentially what we did for the first round of tests for thermals we ran our standard case testing suite we'll look at those results momentarily and for general performance we ran our CPU testing suite the results from these tests are absolutely not comparable to our previously published CPU in case benchmarks because different parts are use we just use these because well it's pretty standard testing so despite this we couldn't resist making a sanity check comparison between our previous 9700 KS CPU testing results and the iBUYPOWER system we can show some of those results on the screen it just flashed through them now you really only need to see a versus B here in the process of doing a 9700 K standardized test with our very controlled by us versus the iBUYPOWER one we noticed something odd the IRA power system was underperforming in a way that reached beyond the expected differences due to using a different GPU motherboard or memory K so the difference is far greater than what we should have seen and treated BIOS revealed one obvious cause all settings had been set to default values so no XMP was enabled and our thirty-two hundred megahertz Khitan quotes there was running at 20 666 - tech tips noted the same mistake in their recent coverage of an IE by power system but our problems extended further than that and that's thanks to an old friend multi-core enhancement the board use in our system was different than minuses hours used in asus prime z 390 p with the oldest publicly available bios installed in this bios version setting MCE to auto affects the CB of frequency this in itself isn't bad we're not trying to do a baseline cv benchmark here and if i power wants to soft overclock their systems then that's their prerogative the problem is that for whatever reason this old version of MCE actually under clocks the 9700 k locking it's a 3.8 gigahertz on all cores under sustained load rather than 4.1 to 4.2 when MCE is manually disabled that's a big difference in frequency and impact performance significantly as you saw in some of our our charts we flashed through there were multiple ways for iva power to avoid this problem selecting XMP 2 and the asus bios brings up a prompt that asks whether the user would like to enable or disable MCE so the XMP and MCE problems could both be solved by toggling a single menu option something that i've a power managed to somehow overlooked also updating the BIOS the most recent version not only fixed MCE so that it behaved as expected 4.7 gigahertz on all cores under sustained load but also disables MCE altogether if Auto is chosen and we checked and newer BIOS versions were available the BIOS provision that was on here was from well before we ordered the system like more than a month so you know it's one thing if you buy the ACC 390 P from Amazon get it in a box and it's got the first revision BIOS on it that's one thing because that's probably been sitting on a shelf since they ordered it this was built by someone booted presumably and then they they still overlooked it so someone went through the process of turning the theta on doing some basic testing and nowhere in that process was it noticed XMP is off ok that's one problem and also the CPU doesn't boost anywhere close to where it's supposed to be so that's the bigger problem here and like I said in fairness to IRI power the company has put checks in place now to try and prevent this in the future my understanding is there's supposed to be some more people on the line or at least more senior people down there who are overseeing things so we can't we can't vouch to this but we've been told that these processes have been now checked so it shouldn't happen again but obviously a very serious issue and one which is so trivially resolved that it is almost offensive so just just something to keep in mind is that MCE was an additional problem that I don't believe ltte ran into so it's a something unique for us on that one for the game results as we sort of flashed by earlier it's pretty obvious when something's wrong here far cry 5 at 1080 P gives clear insight to this problem the 9700 Kay review put the CPU at 149 FPS average with the out-of-the-box high power testing landing us at 122 FPS average enabling XMP and fixing the broken frequency setting got us back up to 147 FPS average on high power illustrating an out-of-box a loss of about 17 percent we saw similar results with GTA 5 at 1080p where the stock result was 170 FPS average with our 20 atti bench mind you and the out of box high-power results was 148 FPS average the updated system did 163 FPS average that's another nine percent decay in performance from a bad configuration the thermal performance of our power system can't be directly compared against any of our previous case reviews since the components are completely different even if they were similar the blower cooler on the GPU and the CLC on the CPU are completely different from our standard case testing and for the Walmart pre-built system we simply swapped out the components so we put our normal case test bench in the Walmart PC case and that made it a valid comparison for this one there was no point in doing that because I buy power is just using a nasty 40 elite that's been modified and we've already reviewed that case the initial CPU torture test at the previously mentioned flawed stock settings obviously e on XMB off etc resulted in a delta T over ambience of 38.2 degrees Celsius which remains effectively the same at 39.1 with the GPU fan lock that 55% our control when the CPU was set to proper clock speeds temperatures rose slightly to 41 point three degrees Celsius over ambience these temperature Delta's results from logged CPU temperatures in the low to mid-60s mind you which is more than reasonable for a system running a sustained prime95 workload the specific CLC design is one that we've reviewed and were unimpressed by but the fact remains that it's a liquid cooler and it's able to overcome any of the issues primarily by brute force GPU temperatures are the most pertinent for this review since the 2080 packed in our system uses a relatively inexpensive single fan blower cooler while even nvidia branded cards have made the move to dual fan coolers at stock settings with the default fan curve the GPU maintained a temperature of 60 degrees Celsius that's over ambient and that's warm it's also determined entirely by the maximum temperature the card is willing to maintain which is about 82 to 83 degrees Celsius the GPU fan leveled out at a constant 42 percent speed to stay at this temperature or roughly 1900 rpm the alterations to XMP and I'm ze predictably had no significant effect on GPU temperature which averaged again forty eight point eight degrees so we won't even bother plotting that one fire strike was the last of the tests that we bothered performing with the default GPU fan curve GPU temperature average 56 point seven degrees Celsius over ambient and it would almost definitely have averaged between 55 and 60 degrees over ambient in any test with a fully loaded GPU since that was the target temperature range so if you're playing games you're gonna see about the same here as you would in any meaningful game that puts load on the GPU with fan speeds locked GPU temperature was about the same as it wasn't the torture test 48 point two degrees Celsius over a means and then 49 point two with XMP MCE changes we measured this system at forty two point eight DBA for noise levels which is definitely a bit loud the GP of fan was locked to fifty five percent for these because that's our standard testing for cases but the system could be much quieter with the fan allowed to spin down the problem is that it gets kind of hot then because it's a blower fan if you want to see the noise as compared to other cases with our standardized testing you can check our case reviews ideally the s340 elite review or you can check the crack and i'm 22 review if you want specific numbers on specific components because otherwise all we're doing right here is just testing the entire system as a whole because that's probably what you're buying clearly a lot can be improved then in the performance aspect just by setting it up properly but part selection build quality a kill management is is fine we had no complaints with it unlike the Walmart system so significant improvement over Walmart there the problem is I hope ours not really competing with Walmart anymore they're competing with cyber power to some extent being here in origin although they are different price class but you get the idea zài tax people like that if you look at this versus Walmart it is a massive improvement despite they didn't still being wrong so like I mean the motherboard is a real motherboard it's not a particularly good one it's the cheapest even be 90 40 you can get but it's not h3 10 so that's a big improvement right there two sticks of memory that don't suck that's another big improvement they weren't at the speed they should be thirty two hundred megahertz but they can get to that speed if you set it up properly and theoretically will be in the future by iWay power so it's it's faster memory it's more competently you can figured and barred selection there's still things we would of course change like I said cooler is not my favorite but I hope our probably gets a pretty big discount on those and we don't know the details so it's really kind of hard to criticize individual part selection because we don't know what the deals are but on the whole it's a significantly better system it's really the takeaway here is Walmart's build we would consider to be incompetent that would be a fair word to use for Walmart's Vil the a310 with a that look like nearly half the DMI or something speed it's it's one dimple channel it's a garbage motherboard vrm is terrible they put in eighty seven hundred nine K in it for the price that was very high single memory stick and previous generation video card and the margins were just completely insane because again the price has fallen about four hundred dollars for some of those Walmart systems so you know they were making way too much money on them this is nothing like that it is more or less than component selections correct it's just the configuration was wrong and well I mean it should be fixed but until we see it is yeah obviously be a bit careful but that's gonna stand at this point for for a lot of these a size they all seem to have problems as we saw in - a series so and that's it for this one the system is unfortunately not quite as excited as we thought we thought when we originally did this godless system the plan was you're getting this Walmart one in we have pretty good an idea of how that quality is let's get an incumbent sis system in it and just show the disparity between these people have done this for decades they know what they're doing and these people are just starting let's show the difference and it just it wasn't quite the the slam dunk that I think IRA power likely suspected because of these mistakes so anyway fixes are in the works and thank you for watching as always you can subscribe for more go to store documents access net to help us out directly I'll see you all next time
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