The Newer System's Venial Disease Situation: A Gaming Enthusiast's Experience

Upon first firing up the newer system, I was greeted with a healthy spattering of pubic lice - literally. Most of it was a bunch of asses crap which, I guess, you could argue you need to control the RGB and stuff, but why does that have to be spread over like four malignant pieces of software? Of course, there's the biggest ripest lice of all - Maffy Wao while loading in. There was also a huge power draw spike on the CPU it stabilized now we're running about 60-ish Watts which is fine, but those power drill spikes are part of the issue with these CPUs so I'm really curious to see kind of stability wise what's going to be happening here.

Uh but other than that the game is running very well. This is Counter Strike 2 and 1080p low settings, and it's an orc's title so obviously we're getting a lot of frame rate, but even if you have a super high refresh rate monitor this is going to go very well which makes sense it's not a very demanding game. Now on the note of the whole CPU explosion issue there is an updated firmware for this system on Asus's website with the micro code which according to Intel helps with the issue a lot. The problem is who installs firmware updates on an OEM pre-built they bought at Best Buy and the Best Buy employee that sold out of the system didn't mention the problem so if you don't know what you're looking for and stuff starts being unstable, what are you going to do with this system.

Going by the recent controversy Asus's customer support isn't going to help much. The point I'm getting to here is that Intel Domin in the OEM pre-build space potentially screws over a whole bunch of non-hardware Enthusiast Gamers but let's try some more games to see if the problem surfaces on this system.

Next, I fired up some Doom Eternal at 1080p ultra settings which was giving us some hella frame rate and more importantly I didn't see any worrying power draw spikes on the CPU and then jumping the resolution up to 1440p didn't lose us that much frame rate. Also look at the temperatures they're really good and the system was running very quietly, which I'll compare it to the older gen one in a second but first let's check out Cyber Punk. I haven't seen Cyberpunk run properly in a long time but here at 1080p High settings we are hovering around 90 frames per second it does occasionally jump up to 100 and also scales up to 1440p decently even with a demanding game like Cyberpunk, although I still feel like we would have gotten better performance if they swapped the faster CPU out for a faster GPU at this price point.

After an extended play session the new system was running about 10 degrees cooler than the old one and much quieter, more than a 10 DB decrease in noise is massive. Finally, in terms of stability the three days I was testing the system it was running games pretty much constantly and I didn't have any issues with it but that's not very long and it doesn't mean it doesn't have problems so if you have an OEM pre-built with an Intel CPU in it even if you're not having problems go and find a firmware update for it now and download it just to be safe.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit's been so long since I last covered a mainstream gaming pre-built that since then  pretty much every manufacturer has brought out an entirely new generation and I don't know if  it's all the lead fumes I've been huffing but from a distance some of them actually seem a  open a new store in Miami but there's a new store coming in Santa Clara and if you sign  up for Early Access you can get a free 128 gig flash drive when the store opens September is  also Micro Center's clearance event where you can save big like on this gaming system or if  you need help building a system try out Micro Center's PC Builder where you can even get it  built by their expert technicians and pick it up the same day links for everything down belownow when it comes to gaming pre-builts there are two main kinds OEM and si si stands for  system integrator and these tend to be smaller companies that use off the shelf parts to build  their systems and they tend to be higher quality although the key word here is definitely tended to  be higher quality is I've seen my own fair share of dumpster fire SI prebuilds but then there's  the other kind OEM preos which come from much bigger companies like Acer HP Asus and because  these companies have much bigger R&D budgets they tend to make much worse products for some reason  now if you've watched any of my videos making fun of OEM pre-builts like these bad boys here you'll  know that most of them have some combination of four common problems now the first of this quadrad  of shortcomings is insufficient cooling not only do they often not have enough ventilation for cool  air to replace the hot air and side but they'll also use coolers that are small enough to get you  laughed out of a bath house and all of this leads to noisy hot running systems that often need to  slow themselves down so they don't catch on fire the second common problem is lowquality components  these OEM manufacturers often cheap out on the quality of the cases the coolers the motherboards  and this can lead to temperature issues like we mentioned before or even problems with longevity  and that leads into the third common issue which is that these OEM systems tend to use  propr propriety lowquality parts and what I mean by proprietary is that they'll use a nonstandard  shape of motherboard or power supply connector or whatever so that you can't upgrade any of the  lowquality components in your OEM system that's a real naughty issue and aside from low quality  components they can also have weird configurations of components like a single stick of ram which  is very common and has a huge negative impact on their performance and then the final very common  problem is they just load these systems down with a whole bunch of bloatware which is unnecessary  software that can impact the performance of these systems but like I said in the beginning of the  video there's been a whole new generation of these gaming prebuilds launched since the last time I  looked at them and on First Impressions they seem to fix at least some of the problems so let's go  have a look at the market so I can show you what I mean before we have a look at a specific system  let's start off with the legendary Acer loser Nitro 50 which is now in like its fourth variant  it looks pretty similar to the one that I have standing on the desk over there but they've CAU  a bunch of holes in the front and these holes are one of the things I noticed that made me want to  do a video like this uh now it could be pretend ventilation OEM prebuilds do like doing that as  well but down here you can see the metal holes through the plastic ventilation as well so that's  kind of promising in terms of airflow it doesn't show us the inside of it so I don't know what kind  of cooler it's using but I'm willing to bet quite a bit of money that it's that standard terrible  pre-build cooler that they use on everything although I've immediately noticed two very big  problems that it still has it's got 8 gigs of standard memory and that almost always means a  single stick of ram so that's one of the problems that it still has and protect your purchase Oh  wait that's actually not what I thought it was oh that's Acer care never mind I thought that  was going to be maafi or something from what we can tell on the website the Nitro 50 looks like  it's going in the right direction if you go over to the higher end system the Nitro 70 this has  got full mesh on the front which is madness no way did they paint the inside of the case what Madness  I mean they didn't do it particularly well cuz you know through the sides you can still see the  bits of silver poking out but with the side panel on it looks painted although look at that cooler  that is not a good-looking cooler for a system that has a ryzen 9 7900 in now moving over to  Lenovo the thing with Lenovo is even the previous generation of pre-builts that I did a video on  it wasn't that bad it had decent cooling decent ventilation in the configuration was pretty good  and it seems like the New Gen 8 Lenovo systems are just an iterative improvement on that so it  seems like a good option I'm not going to spend much time talking about asus's new systems here  because I got one of those for later in the video but this airflow graphic looks very exciting and  maybe marginally less misleading than with the previous moving over to HP oh that is not a better  looking case I mean that case looks like they just changed some branding on it and I don't think they  even did that for their higher end system I mean that's a reasonable looking interior there's some  good things going on here we've got dual Channel Ram we've got a motherboard that looks like it's  standard matx we've got standard power supply connectors and at least as far as OEM systems  go a reasonable looking Tower CPU Cooler so these are all good signs and uh even in terms of the  case I mean it does have some front ventilation at least pretend front ventilation and the final  brand I want to have a look at is Dell because Alienware has been real notorious for being  terrible in in the OEM space uh and this is what the new generation of Alienware pre-built looks  like the R16 it's a much less interesting looking case than the previous generations I can't see  an angle that gives us more information about this slit on the front so I'm going to assume  that it's not ventilation because well when in doubt it isn't although on the back we've got  what looks like 120 mm RGB fan so that's pretty good uh although I can see that the power supply  is proprietary shaped that's not good because you can't upgrade it oh never mind it still looks real  rubbish in there oh and it's Standard 1 time 16 so they give you the option to for free change  it out to a dual Channel stick but if you don't know what you're looking for you're going to get  one stick of ram okay so for some of the systems at least they've gotten better at pretending like  the systems don't suck in their marketing material but let's see how much that translates into the  real system I ended up buying the Asus G13 because it was the only one Best Buy had in stock that I  had the previous generation one of to compare it to okay so we still get the very acrylic  side panel as the previous generation which you know options are good and we no longer get e-waistperipherals oh it's so cute this one's like that one after it's gone through puberty  and apparently pre-built puberty involves growing not fake ventilation on the front  and even some ventilation on the top with a fan behind it so despite these two cases  using basically the same tooling the new one is practically much less offensive to my nerdsensibilities now now comparing the guts of these two systems is a little bit more difficult because  they're from different price points unfortunately Best Buy didn't have this more entrylevel price  point available for the new system so we can't compare things like the CPU Cooler which according  to the marketing material I'm pretty sure the entrylevel version of the current generation  still uses this CPU Cooler but in all fairness to the inside of both of these systems the old one  isn't too bad we don't have any proprietary shaped crap so just by cutting some more holes in the new  case this system goes a decent way to quelling my standard pre-built Instinct of wanting to  abandon it in the saddest orphanage I can find and when it comes to other abandonment triggers  like Ram configuration even the entry level of the newest system comes with dual Channel Ram  but aside from the internals looking decent for an oem pre-built there is a big problem  with the spec of this newer one and it's the CPU which is an Intel i7 14700 F and if you've been  following Tech news at all lately you'll know that that CPU is basically bankrupted Intel  because of how explody it is so I'm curious to see how stable it's going to be in this system  and then they paired that CPU with an RX 4060 an open air cooler cuz we've got more air flow  now so hopefully this cooler is going to be quieter but for gaming at this price point  I'd rather take a faster graphics scard and slower CPU oh and we also get a power supply  upgrade on the new system which again could be price point dependent but with that let's  check out the venial disease situation on the newer system and then see how it handles gamingunfortunately when you first fire up the system you are still greeted with a healthy spattering of  pubic Li most of it's a bunch of ases crap which I guess you could argue you need to control the  RGB and stuff but why does that have to be spread over like four malignant pieces of software and of  course there's the biggest ripest lice of all maffy wao while loading in  there was a huge power draw Spike on the CPU it stabilized now we're running about 60-ish Watts  which is fine but those power drill spikes are part of the issue with these CPUs so I'm really  curious to see kind of stability wise what's going to be happening here uh but other than that the  game is running very well this is Counter Strike 2 and 108p low settings and it's an orts title  so obviously we're getting a lot of frame rate but even if you have a super high refresh rate  monitor this is going to go very well which makes sense it's not a very demanding game now on the  note of the the whole CPU explosion issue there is an updated firmware for this system on asus's  website with the micr code which according to Intel helps with the issue a lot the problem is  who installs firmware updates on an oem pre-built they bought at Best Buy and the Best Buy employee  that sold out of the system didn't mention the problem so if you don't know what you're looking  for and stuff starts being unstable what are you going to do with this system and going by  the recent controversy asus's customer support isn't going to help much basically the point  that I'm getting to here is that Intel's Domin in the OEM pre-build space potentially screws over a  whole bunch of non-hardware Enthusiast Gamers but let's try some more games to see if the problem  surfaces on this system next I fired up some Doom Eternal at 1080p ultra settings which was giving  us some hella frame rate and more importantly I didn't see any worrying power draw spikes on the  CPU and then jumping the resolution up to 1440p didn't lose us that much frame rate also look  at the temperatures they're really good and the system was running very quietly which I'll compare  it to the older gen one in a second but first let's check out cyber punk I haven't seen cyber  punk run properly in a long time but here at 1080p High settings we are hovering around 90  frames per second it does occasionally jump up to 100 it also scales up to 1440p decently even with  a demanding game like cyberp Punk although I still feel like we would have gotten better performance  if they swapped the faster CPU out for a faster GPU at this price point and the temperature  and noise are very under control definitely a decent step up from the previous generation  after an extended play session the new system was running about 10° cooler than the old one and muchquieter more than a 10 DB decrease in noise is massive and then finally in terms of stability  the 3 days I was testing the system it was running games pretty much constantly and I  didn't have any issues with it but that's not very long and it doesn't mean it doesn't have  problems so if you have an oem pre-built with an Intel CPU in it even if you're not having  problems go and find a firmware update for it now and download it just to be safe so with  that what did we learn in today's video well if you're granny buys you an oem pre-built in 2024  it seems at least 133% less likely to eject VX gas at you which is definitely an improvement