Are Walmart Gaming PCs actually THAT bad?

- Now, Walmart doesn't sell its

gaming

PCs in Canada, but there's no way that's going to stop us from getting our hands on the next generation of Overpowered

gaming

PCs. Now, I've heard through the grapevine that Walmart's gaming desktop PC, as they call it, might not be as good as it seemed. But I've intentionally isolated myself, not seen Gamers Nexus or Bitwit's content on this, so I can experience it for the first time in all its glory for myself. Now, Ivan. You've already taken a look under the hood, right? - Yes sir. - Do not mess it up. - Hey Hey. - And this video brings it to you... haha, no, I'm just kidding.

Be quiet! Silent Base 801. Offers great usability and uses noise-dampening vents to keep your PC quiet. Check it out on Newegg at the link in the video description. (upbeat electronic music) Now, my first impression of Walmart's Overpowered line of gaming PCs was, what? Followed shortly by, damn, those are some pretty good specs for the price. That's very competitive, much better than I expected. Plus, the settings made a lot of sense to me. It was almost like they went out of their way to find someone who knew what the fuck they were doing to set up their systems.

I mean, the i7-8700 processor, okay, it's not a K, you can't overclock it or anything, but that's okay, it's a pre-built. GTX 1070, 16 gigs of RAM, 256 gigs of SSD, seems like the kind of thing I would build for, you know, $1500 or so. Opening the package, we get a quick start guide that doesn't

actually

look terrible, although it certainly looks worse. Plug in the power, plug in HDMI or DisplayPort on the graphics card, they specify which one to use but they don't really have a big diagram of that. Oh boy. That is not right. Connect your PC with an Ethernet cable to connect your device.

Not particularly descriptive. - Spelling mistakes? - Ah, I didn't even realize that. In terms of accessories, I have a decent quality power connector, a piece of velcro, double-sided velcro material, presumably to store it somewhere, and then you can grab it with velcro, I guess. That's your RGB thing. Okay, so, more OP posters to hang in my room, because I'm OP like that. What is this? This is water. - Then you'll be overwhelmed by his OP character and just be like, oh! - Did you just say, overwhelmed by his penis? - OP-ness. OP-ness. OP-ness. OP-ness. - This is a pretty simple vinyl decal, but it's better than absolutely nothing, which is what many system integrators do.

These are more expensive than you think. So, to make our performance test as fair as possible, Ivan sourced an identically configured pre-built system from those guys at HP, so we can get an idea of ​​whether it works as expected out of the box. Let's start with that. However, one thing that makes me think before I get that far is the non-powder coated power supply. It has a simple gray back. I remember asking a power supply manufacturer how much it costs to powder coat a power supply and I think it was a few dozen cents. Therefore, it is usually not a good sign to save tens of cents on an aesthetic coating.

Although, to be fair, it doesn't contribute to performance. We'll have to look at it a little closer once we open it. Actually, this is also strange. I've never seen this before. A USB-C on a small dot board here? And why the hell would they put it so high? Now just to check, is it set up the same? Are there key differences? - No. That's why I specifically chose this system to confront us face to face. And the price difference is about 100 dollars. This is 1400, this is 15. - Okay, here we go. It has RGB. The color changing works as expected, and the rear fan is also RGB.

What can happen sometimes in shipping is, well, I've never seen it like that before. - Me neither. It has latches. - Yes. It seems like they completely forgot to connect it. I'm trying to think about what the workflow is. Wow, that's the cheapest looking motherboard, maybe not the one I've ever seen, but wow, is it ever close? . You know how they say first impressions last a lifetime? This is not a good first impression. Holy (bleep), I just noticed that the only integrated video output is VGA. I mean, not that it matters, we wouldn't use the embedded video, but what year is it?

Oh, the year is here. Date of manufacture, October 2018. No, I didn't go back in time, I just thought so, because there was a VGA connection there. Alright, what game are we going to start with, or should we start with a CPU stress test? - Yes, the synthetic ones. - Okay, put a bench. Well, we're in the home stretch here, and I think this is as close as I could imagine. Okay, yeah. 199 for the Walmart Overpowered PC, 199 for our Omen. Okay, now let's try multiple cores. Interestingly, our Overpowered PC emerged victorious in this case. 1312. You want to punish him.

It's okay, it's okay. I mean, it's fair. IBT is a fair test. So I'll also open Task Manager so we can check that our CPU is 100% charged. So now I'm at 4.28 gigahertz, what are you on? 4.29, okay. - Note that this also has a third monitoring core. - My system took longer to start the test. No, it's being attacked now, it's all loaded into RAM. I'm at 4.1 gigahertz. I'm running faster than you. So have they configured this system to use a full core turbo on those VRMs? Now the thing to keep in mind is that our Omen desktop

actually

sticks to Intel specs, while this one is technically somewhat overclocked so some aftermarket motherboards will be set up, ready to go, to work.

Something to keep in mind, however, is that while ours seems to perform well even in a stress test with all cores loaded, your mileage may vary. We may get a really good CPU that handles all-core turbo perfectly. Your system may be unstable. However, we can only judge what we have in front of us, and so far this thing is managing 4.1 gigahertz, all cores loaded into its 8700. And with temperatures that are in the 50 degree range or so. So to put that into context, it's probably about 35 degrees above room temperature. It's pretty cold here today. No! The front ports are all USB-2!

That's why they have that weird USB-3 on the back. Why would they do it? How can you ship a system in 2018 with front USB-2 ports? That's why they had the internal header free, for that weird thing in the back. They do not have front USB-3. What is this, why did they create four partitions for the hard drives? What possible purpose (bleep) could that have? You know that partitioning a hard drive is useless, right? Regarding reliability, ease of organizing files? Why would you do that? - Maybe make it easier for people to compartmentalize their files? - It's called a folder! (taps keyboard hard) Now, we're not judging the game's loading times here, just because Shadow of the Tomb Raider is installed on a hard drive here and an SSD here, so let's ignore that.

But that doesn't affect gaming performance. (beep) Uh, we were wrong about that. I don't know, maybe it has to do with the fact that we load new game scenes so frequently? Anyway, the point is that we now have all of our games on the SSDs for both systems. Let's click run and see them side by side, honey. Everything seems pretty normal so far. This one actually seems to be running a little faster? But I guess. Shit, so I went to change the color and it turns out there are like a billion different patterns if you keep pressing this LED, I swear I've already gone through at least fifty different patterns.

What the hell? This is as RGB as I think is possible. What is this? I'll give them credit. The system actually looks pretty crisp and clean. I mean, for now. The only problem is that these shots don't have any filters, so it will look like ass pretty quickly. But anyway. It all comes down to results, let's take a look. Average FPS, 86. Minutes seem reasonable. Things don't get any better in Assassin's Creed: Origins. This is in Ultra 1080. So everything looks good. 63 FPS compared to 71. Okay, yes, that's an improvement. But if you look a little closer, the CPU frame times are 50 milliseconds, while our CPU here is 9.

So you can clearly see that the GPU is the difference, that's where our frames per second are actually not much higher. here. But our CPU is performing much better for some reason. Okay, bringing us to the last one, Deus Ex. Same here. All in all, this is exactly why you can't just rely on average frame rates. 87.8 vs. 88.2 here, but the lows are more than 10 frames per second less. That's like, 15, 18 percent? Probably about 15 percent. That's crazy. Okay, let's get the HP out of here and take this thing down. So I take this, no, no, okay, we can leave it here.

This will be the first time we remove the other side panel. There are some things I really don't like here. Number one, it's a single 16 gig RAM unit. I understand the argument for upgradability, but single channel memory? Oh, I wonder if that's what's killing our CPU performance. Anyway, single channel memory cuts bandwidth in half. Also, these cables? I don't know what better way to describe them than as a pinner. These are really thin cables. These provide all the power to your motherboard. We have an 8-pin connector for our CPU, so I guess that's probably a relatively good sign. - Look again. - Hope for?

Oh no, it doesn't matter. It is an 8-pin connector on a 4-pin connector on the board. Can you get something here? Well, that's far from the worst cable management I've ever seen. The strange thing about this whole experience is that there are a few hints of competition, but somehow they ended up with a final result that underperforms the hardware inside it, by a very significant margin, and just has these surprisingly stupid bugs. They hot glued the USB-3 connector, why would they do that? It's not even a connector that is generally known. If anything, these things can be so difficult to remove that you may end up ripping the dash casing off when you try to disconnect them.

What a strange thing to do. And then they didn't even hot glue this one. There's this weird moon logic stuff going on here, where if we see this as a concern that needs to be rectified with hot glue, why is it a concern here but not here? It's the same connector. Okay, so it's not super light, but it's also a Great Wall unit, which isn't really known for making amazing OEM power supplies. So it's a 500 watt unit, of which 21 of the 45 amps on the 12 volt rail are dedicated to the CPU, apparently, and then you have 24 amps left over for I/O, whatever that means, like this What is a 2-rail power supply, meaning it can't be more than 300 watts?

Now there's one more thing we can see here. Let's see how good a job they did with applying the thermal compound. Frankly, I don't know what to expect, because some things have been done with a reasonable degree of competence. Honestly, like the cable management, considering the parts for this system only cost about $60 less than this full system, so they only charge us $60 for assembly. It's definitely a $60 assembly job. I consider it quite adequate. But there are other things, like not having the graphics card connected, that are just incredible. No worries there. However, this was probably the thermal compound previously applied on this heatsink.

So it's a bit of a heavy application, but it's pretty thin where these direct contact heat pipes actually touch the integrated heat sink, so I don't really have any concerns about that, and I didn't see anything about the thermal performance of the system that raised red flags. And that's the point. I think the bottom line here is that while they're not actually making a huge amount of margin on this, and they're not charging an unreasonable amount for what they're getting, there are just these serious errors in the setup. that make it impossible to recommend. USB-2 ports on the front panel.

What's that? And the motherboard needs a significant upgrade so you don't have to give up performance to upgrade. You should use a proper board with 4 memory slots and a bit more expandability while you're at it. What I really feel is that they spent the motherboard and power supply budget on RGB lighting. And I understand that RGB is for gamers. But first and foremost, gamers need performance and stability, and at this point, this system has too many red flags to recommend. And this is all unfortunate, because I really wanted to be thecontrary. I thought maybe Steve was being too picky or something.

Not that Steve was ever picky about a minor technical detail, not Steve. But I thought maybe he was being picky or something, but I'm in a position where I also don't feel comfortable telling anyone to buy this. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes in design, business, technology, and more. And premium membership gives you unlimited access to high-quality classes on must-know topics, so you can improve your skills, unlock new opportunities, and do the work you love. Taren, here at Linus Media Group, has been using Skillshare a lot. He has taken logo design courses, mastering Adobe Illustrator.

Skillshare is more affordable than most learning platforms out there, with an annual subscription available for less than $10 a month, and the first 500 of you to use the promotional link in the description will get your first two months free. So check it out. Thanks for watching, guys. If you don't like this video, you can press that button. But if you liked it, please like, subscribe or maybe consider checking out where to buy it. I don't know if there's anything in this video that we're presenting that I would necessarily recommend purchasing right now. But maybe we'll put something fun down there.

While you're in the video description, you can also check out our merch store, which has cool t-shirts like this one, and our community forum, which is definitely worth joining. - I was going to be smart and give you a hint about CPU performance, like what were you before you met Ivan? - I'm sorry? - What were you before you met Iván? - Single? - Channel.