Are Walmart Gaming PCs actually THAT bad?

[Bouzoo]

Is it just me or is Linus still salty on Steve for candy battle?

[MandoPanda]

1 hour ago, maksakal said:

GN did a full coverage already covering all the points, I would've sticked with GN's review.

LTT has a much farther reach than GN. It is the duty of people who know what they are talking about (GN, Linus and other tech reviewers) to get the truth of these crappy machines out to as many people as possible so Grandma doesn't get ripped off when she thinks she's buying a good computer from a "trusted" seller that has never let her down before.

 

Everyone that has an ear to any size of followers should share and investigate on their own. That way more people can see the truth, and given enough heat, although unlikely, Walmart could fix the issues with their computers. If enough people don't make noise, nothing with change.

[MandoPanda]

1 hour ago, Brickmite said:

Cyberpower systems at Wal-Mart fall under same? Im thinking of buying one. 

It depends. Which one?

[MandoPanda]

1 hour ago, Luscious said:

This really is for those who either don't have the know-how to build it themselves

This is exactly why the tech community needs to point out all of the flaws in these systems. The target audience for these products won't know that there is anything wrong with them.

 

You can't say it's ironic that experienced people are getting outraged when they are no the target audience for the product. LTT and others are tech reviewers, this means that they need to get their hands on products and audit them so other people who don't know what they are doing can take their advice and make an informed decision.

[Razor512]

There are a few things that Linus did not take int account when comparing the price to a home build.

 

OEM-non retail parts are often much cheaper due to the lack of a manufacturer warranty and volume pricing, where the system integrator is not dealing with retail markups.

 

A customer purchasing a prebuilt system is getting significantly less value. They are paying more overall, and they are not getting a 10 year+ warranty on the power supply, or the 3-5 year warranty on the motherboard, or the 3 year warranty on the CPU, or the lifetime warranty on the RAM, or the 5-10 year warranty on the SSD, or the 3+ year warranty on the HDD.

 

With a prebuilt system, you are often getting a 1 year overall warranty that may often require you to send the entire system in for repair (often at your own expense) for repair. This means that if your hard drive fails but the SSD is still good, you can't use the PC with just the SSD until the replacement hard drive comes, and there is no real alternative solution to this issue since they can't just mail out free hard drives to people otherwise their hard drive will "fail" every month until they get enough to fill their SAN build.

 

I understand systems like this are targeted at people who don't know how to build a PC, but this is not much of an excuse, the skills needed are a very low bar, and is something that a toddler could probably learn in about 20-30 minutes. It is like buying a car and not learning to at least do basic maintenance (changing the air filter, lights, sparkplugs, and engine oil).

Certain basics on PC hardware are mandatory to avoid being screwed over by greedy companies. Best of all, compared to other hardware we encounter in life, PC hardware is of the simplest to deal with.

[corrado33]

3 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Seems like Steve was the only one to notice the board they used run on Intels H310 chipset which uses DMI2.0 instead of DMI3.0, that means the bus speed is halved from 8Gb/S to 4, the available PCIe lanes are halved from 12 to 6 and even the SATA interface runs at 4Gb/S instead of 6.

Interesting. I missed that in the videos as well. Wait since it only has 6 PCIe lanes does that mean the GPU is being bottlenecked by the PCIe itself? I know there isn't MUCH of a performance difference between 16x and 8x, but down to 6x? And that's even shared with USB and stuff? 

 

As for the SATA at 4Gb/s, that's not a huge loss. I doubt the SSD in there would reach those speeds. 

[Hunter259]

16 minutes ago, corrado33 said:

Interesting. I missed that in the videos as well. Wait since it only has 6 PCIe lanes does that mean the GPU is being bottlenecked by the PCIe itself? I know there isn't MUCH of a performance difference between 16x and 8x, but down to 6x? And that's even shared with USB and stuff? 

 

As for the SATA at 4Gb/s, that's not a huge loss. I doubt the SSD in there would reach those speeds. 

Those are lanes from the chipset not the ones coming from the cpu directly.

 

Lol. SATA 6 has been saturated by every ssd made in the last 4 years.

[corrado33]

4 minutes ago, Hunter259 said:

Those are lanes from the chipset not the ones coming from the cpu directly.

 

Lol. SATA 6 has been saturated by every ssd made in the last 4 years.

Not.... really. Most SSDs (non m.2 NVME) read/write ~400-450 MB/s, well below the actual speed of 6 Gb/s SATA, which is around 600 MB/s.

[Hunter259]

1 minute ago, corrado33 said:

Not.... really. Most SSDs (non m.2 NVME) read/write ~400-450 MB/s, well below the actual speed of 6 Gb/s SATA, which is around 600 MB/s.

Overhead is a thing. Most SATA SSD's hit 500-550 btw....

[Razor512]

Due to SATA overhead, you often top out at about 560MB/s under very specific read/write scenarios.

[corrado33]

1 minute ago, Razor512 said:

Due to SATA overhead, you often top out at about 560MB/s under very specific read/write methods.

Very specific read/write methods =/= saturating the 6Gb/s SATA port with every SSD in the last 10  years. 

[Hunter259]

Just now, corrado33 said:

Very specific read/write methods =/= saturating the 6Gb/s SATA port with every SSD in the last 10  years. 

TIL 4 = 10. Every bit of a modern SSD is saturating SATA. Period. Full stop. There's a reason why the NVME drives are faster in every single benchmark. It's called extremely higher bandwidth allowing for it combined with NVME also has lower overhead than SATA which helps for all those random read and writes.

[Razor512]

Basically you need linear reads and writes of the right queue depth to get the max speed. Here is my basic 256GB Samsung 850 pro  (had it for a few years, and is mostly filled).

 

 

[corrado33]

Just now, Hunter259 said:

TIL 4 = 10. Every bit of a modern SSD is saturating SATA. Period. Full stop. There's a reason why the NVME drives are faster in every single benchmark. It's called extremely higher bandwidth allowing for it combined with NVME also has lower overhead than SATA which helps for all those random read and writes.

Then how do all SSDs have different performance, with some being better than others. If the SATA were indeed saturated, there would be no variation in speed and every SSD would perform the same. 

[Hunter259]

Just now, corrado33 said:

Then how do all SSDs have different performance, with some being better than others. If the SATA were indeed saturated, there would be no variation in speed and every SSD would perform the same. 

Because not all controllers are built the same? Not all NAND is identical. Yada yada yada. The vast majority of modern SATA ssd's are with 10% in every category available. Just because you are saturated doesn't mean everything is going to be identical every time.

[Razor512]

For SATA SSDs you rarely ever hit anywhere near 500MB/s even if the SSD is easily capable of it. The performance differences come from the SSD controller, and how fast the NAND can be driven.

 

For example, a higher end SSD will have less of a performance overhead if you make it do something like do 2 large file copies at the same time, or a simultaneous read and write, or other tasks where it is being tole to complete 2 different tasks.

 

For example compare the performance of the Sandisk SSD plus to the Samsung 850 pro when it comes to read only tasks, similar linear performance but massive difference in application performance.

 

 

[ZacoAttaco]

Really excellent video, I think for generations to come, we'll still be wondering why they glued the USB-3-Connector to the motherboard and better still, not also to the actual USB-3 Expansion card itself...

[Canada EH]

36 minutes ago, ZacoAttaco said:

Really excellent video, I think for generations to come, we'll still be wondering why they glued the USB-3-Connector to the motherboard and better still, not also to the actual USB-3 Expansion card itself...

Because the building of the PC is outsourced to the lowest bidder.

That is how Walmart operates. Walmart wants the lowest cost, with the capacity of scale.

 

The bandwagon aspect of this ltt video is barfy. Love it how they stated, they dont sell in canada so we went down, yet they probably stated everything in miles and usd. LOLOLOL

 

Bandwagon on, catch them dollar bills while you can!

yes bills

[Spotty]

At around 14:30 when Linus is removing the CPU heatsink, he states that the parts for the system are only $60 less than the cost of the complete system. "Considering that the parts to this system only come to about $60 less than this completed system..." and goes on to say "even though they're not making a huge amount of margin on this thing, and they're not charging an unreasonable amount for what you get".

Using a site like PCPP and basing off the stuff we know, and substituting some of the OEM parts not available at retail for roughly equivalent parts such as the case and PSU, you can see that the cost of the system is actually much less. You also need to consider that these are retail prices for the parts listed in PCPP, and that system builders will get them for cheaper. So really there are several hundred dollars difference between the $1400 Walmart PC and the actual cost of components.

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel - Core i7-8700 3.2 GHz 6-Core Processor  ($319.99 @ Newegg)
CPU Cooler: Deepcool - GAMMAXX 400 74.34 CFM CPU Cooler  ($16.99 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: Gigabyte - H310M S2P Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard  ($57.31 @ Amazon)
Memory: G.Skill - Aegis 16 GB (1 x 16 GB) DDR4-2400 Memory  ($99.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: ADATA - XPG SX850 256 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($44.00 @ Amazon)
Storage: Seagate - Barracuda 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($58.50 @ Amazon)
Video Card: Gigabyte - GeForce GTX 1070 8 GB G1 Gaming Video Card  ($399.89 @ OutletPC)
Case: Cooler Master - MasterBox Lite 5 RGB ATX Mid Tower Case  ($69.99 @ B&H)
Power Supply: EVGA - 500 W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply  ($31.99 @ Monoprice)
Operating System: Microsoft - Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit  ($98.99 @ Amazon)
Total: $1197.64
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-12-02 20:40 EST-0500

 

 

However, I just doubled checked the price when writing this, and Walmart has since dropped the price from $1400 to $1200. So maybe now they're only making $60 off them.

[Speed Weed]

No dust filters.........cmon, dust filters aren't that expensive. 

[ZacoAttaco]

1 hour ago, Canada EH said:

Because the building of the PC is outsourced to the lowest bidder.

That is how Walmart operates. Walmart wants the lowest cost, with the capacity of scale.

 

The bandwagon aspect of this ltt video is barfy. Love it how they stated, they dont sell in canada so we went down, yet they probably stated everything in miles and usd. LOLOLOL

 

Bandwagon on, catch them dollar bills while you can!

yes bills

Yeah but don't forget, they mentioned it on the WAN Show well before anyone made knew about it and they said they would make a video on it. Luke actually pushed the idea the most himself. So I expected a video from LTT more so then GN and Bitwit.

[ahuckphin]

5 hours ago, CeluliodOverlord90 said:

What are the bench test software used especially the Adobe interface software at 5:55 6:00

it's cinebench 

[ahuckphin]

Can someone please confirm that with the Walmart PC, when you first boot, does it go straight to the desktop or does it promt you to enter your username and password?

[ahuckphin]

To recap, with the Walmart PC;

- the PCI-E connector will not be pluged in when shipped

- the USB 3.0 internal plug will be hot glued to the board

- the PSU is sketchy 

- the case has limited airflow 

- the motherboard is h310 with dmi 2.0

- the HDD has 4 partitions 

 

[Taf the Ghost]

I'm more amazed that two separate YouTuber purchases of the DTW1 SKU both had the 8-pin connector to the GPU dislodged. That's strange.

 

@Spotty At that price, it's starting to get reasonable. The case could be salvaged with some airflow from below the drive cage (with some filter over it), then a Motherboard swap and flipping the memory for a 2x 8Gb setup.