Prebuilts...blah. Lesson learned, Rather long post.

Sequiro · February 16, 2016

So both my friend and I about 3 - 4 months ago were talking about getting into new gaming rigs. He had an aging gaming laptop and when it wouldn't play Fallout 4 in a playable condition he was looking to get into something else. Me well my budget build from a few years back was showing its age and things like the onboard sound died on it. I had decided I was going to build a new rig around this time with my taxes. Well in Dec my friend had tons of overtime at work and got a very nice paycheck. He was scared to build his own PC (gets nervous about messing with the CPU and Mobo) so he went to Frys and bought a prebuilt gaming rig an ASUS G11CD for about $1000.

Seemed pretty nice on paper, overpriced but decent I7-6700, 8GB DDR4, 1TB hybrid drive and a GTX 960 2GB. Also came with Wi Fi and Bluetooth. Now of course he wanted to upgrade the GPU so he was quick to replace the PSU in it to an 850w, but when he went to upgrade the GPU (to a 390) the case, cooled by a single 80mm fan only and no slots for any more, overheated the card showing temps of 90c, so he returned the GPU and at this point he was starting to regret purchasing it. Well in the meantime my tax return wasn't as good as I expected and didn't think I was going to get to build my own PC anytime soon. So he made me an offer of selling me his prebuilt for only $400. I thought about the cooling and i figured I could actually possibly mod the case when I get ready to get a new GPU, replace the one fan with a better noctua and put a 2nd one on the side panel. There was two dimm slots and only 1 8gb stick of ram so I saw potential ram upgrade as well. So I took him up on it, I figured it'd be impossible to build that rig for $400.

Well immediately within hours of getting it I encountered my first issue, ethernet. I have a pretty nice connection at home 200m down, on Bnet and Steam I could download games at about 20m/s but with this new rig i was only on speed tests getting speed tests of 50-60m and in steam or bnet downloads of only 7m down with both ethernet or wireless 5g. Driver updates didn't help. Bios update didn't help though it did help with the PC sometimes being unresponsive to mouse clicks. Within a day or two I found something else out that was odd, if i disabled the wireless adapter and re-enabled it, it would cause the PC to crash and reboot. The final straw came just the first of last week as I had ordered a new set of ram 16GB and an SSD for some upgrades. I'd checked the stick that was already in there, checked CPUZ and the bios to make sure I had the right type and had ordered the right ram. But upon trying to install it, the PC refused to boot, tried everything I could come up with. ASUS had locked down a lot of settings in the bios and there wasn't anything in there to change regarding ram either, the bios was pretty locked down. It was almost as if ASUS made it impossible to add more ram. I attempted to contact ASUS to get some information from them. Was there a setting I'm overlooking? Is it even possible to add more? Horrible service line btw. As soon as I started explaining the issue the guy on the other end went into robot mode, cut me off and just started reading from a legal script. Telling me they couldn't give any information and couldn't help me in anyway regarding modding or upgrading the system and if I had opened it I would have voided my warranty and they are no responsible for any damages. (was opened before I even got it) He kept repeating this till I hung up on him.

So apparently with the prebuilts you aren't ever supposed to upgrade them. I guess they are geared more towards a person that buys it plays it till its too old to run newer games then just buys a new one. For a $1000 bucks though you'd think they'd allow for upgrades. They must also use like the cheapest components they can get their hands on it, so many odd issues and glitches. I always considered ASUS a good brand, till now.

It was at this point I went back to my friend and explained everything that had been going wrong and how I did rather regret buying this machine from him. He then did a very kind thing, he didn't have to do this, but he offered to buy the machine back from me actually for a little more than what i paid him for it, for my troubles so I'd have enough and it would allow me to build my machine like I originally planned. Which I did this weekend.

I guess the point of my post is as a warning, becareful of prebuilts, I don't know if all companies are like ASUS with prebuilts but they are overpriced, locked down with little to no options for upgrade. To upgrade this one I would have basically had to gut the CPU, PSU, and HDD and put it in a brand new mobo and case.

New rig is running wonderful though, no glitches purring like a kitten. Hopefully get a new GPU later this year to finish the build off.