I Paid a Best Buy to Build Me a Gaming PC...
**A Mixed Experience with Best Buy's PC Building Service**
I recently had the opportunity to try out Best Buy's PC building service, and I must say it was an experience that left me both impressed and frustrated. The process started with a stated budget of $1300 Canadian yen, but due to the parts crisis, I ended up having to bring my own components as placeholder parts. Despite this, I wanted to stick to the original budget, which meant that I had $400 left over for the actual graphics card, motherboard, and CPU.
**The Build Process**
When I arrived at Best Buy, I was greeted by a friendly employee who helped me get started with the build process. They asked me about my expectations and what I wanted to achieve with my new PC. I explained that I wanted to play some games and do some light video editing, which they seemed to take seriously. The first issue I encountered was when they added an extra terabyte SSD for $130, which I felt was unnecessary for my intended use. A 500GB SSD would have been sufficient, but instead, they opted for a more expensive option.
**The Cost of Upgrades**
One upgrade that did seem justified was the switch from a CX-650M power supply to an RM750X, which is a better power supply. The employee explained that this was necessary due to the motherboard's limited power connector capabilities, and I couldn't argue with that. However, the justification for upgrading seemed a bit weak, as I wouldn't be using the full capacity of the new power supply.
**The Assembly Process**
Once the components were installed, the employee performed a thorough check to ensure everything was working properly. They also applied thermal paste to the CPU and other components, which is always a good practice. However, I couldn't help but feel that there was too much thermal paste on the pins, which could potentially cause issues in the future.
**The Final Bill**
When it came time to pay, I was surprised to see that the total bill had exceeded my original budget by a significant amount. The assembly of the PC cost $100, and an additional $280 for the Windows installation fee, including the cost of a Windows key, brought the total cost to over $400. This left me with only $200 remaining from my original budget.
**Conclusion**
In conclusion, while Best Buy's PC building service did not exactly meet my expectations in terms of budget, I was pleased to find that the final product was well-built and functional. The employee who assembled my PC seemed knowledgeable and competent, but the initial price quotes were a bit off-putting. Overall, it's clear that this service can produce high-quality PCs, even if the prices may be a bit steep at times. If you're in the market for a new PC and want to see what Best Buy has to offer, I would recommend taking them up on their offer, but be sure to carefully review your options and budget before making a decision.
WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enfor today's video i played best buys geek squad which a little bit of a stupid name in my opinion geek squad sounds a little bit like a terrible 90s superhero cartoon it was cancelled like three episodes into the first season but anyway i paid geek squad to build me a shiny new gaming system now how we went about this was i sent anna to the local best buy with a thousand three hundred canadian drachmi budget for a gaming system although there was a little bit of a problem considering the fact that pc parts are rarer than a comfortable bowel movement in a busy public bathroom they didn't have core components so they told us we had to source our own cpu motherboard and graphics card before they can build us a system so anna and i played it cool and we took two days before going back so that it wasn't obvious that we lived in a house full of pc components and this is obviously a sting operation but anyway we told them that we had a friend loan us these parts the thousand three hundred dollar budget still stood we were just going to substitute the parts in later when they became available so with that let's have a look at the kind of pc that the gross squad built us and here it is now we're going to discuss how much it cost and how much they charged for building it and installing windows and stuff like that after we look at what kind of job they did just to know how outraged to be by the price let's talk about the case they decided to go with a corosair 220 which is the case that has this front panel design which really scared and confused steve from gamer's nexus and i get it like it's it's a bit of a weird looking front panel design but at least you've got airflow you've got three fans in the front pulling fresh air into the case which means the inside's not going to resemble a thai prison in summer so it's a good start with that let's open it up and see what the inside looks like straight off the bat that's a pretty well put together looking system i mean you can see here that there's reasonably effective use of cable management over here at the top as well they've hidden the cables properly down here as well look at that i mean they could have used the holes slightly closer to the motherboard but it still looks really good this is a decently put together looking system now the parts in here that we recognize are the cpu with the cooler the graphics card and the motherboard but other than that we've got i think it's a 16 gig kit of ddr4 let's the i think it's the patriot viper and it's a 16 gig kit running at 3 200 megahertz which is okay i mean verizon you'd like a little bit faster but it's not it's not a train smash which is in dual channels so that's a lot better than you're gonna get with most pre-built uh that's pretty good things mostly seem to be plugged in decently although i did see up at the top here the one extra extra four pin isn't quite clipped down but that's not a huge deal now as far as the ssds go they have a main boot drive in here which i think is a 500 gig western digital black sn750 which is a really good nvme drive but then they also added a one terabyte msata ssd which is a little bit brave considering the budget but we'll talk about all of that a bit later in terms of power supply they ended up going with this rm750x which again considering the budget is very brave and it's not necessary for the components that we have in here it's like an rx 580 and a 3700 x and then with that let's have a look at the rear cable management which i'm expecting to be pretty good considering the state of the rest of the system looking at the back it's okay it's nothing spectacular but you know there's a huge amount of cable mess that they had to deal with in a really small case so i get it i probably wouldn't have been able to do much of a better job there are a couple of small things though like you can see here there's a fan hub and they didn't actually plug the fans into that they plugged it into the motherboard in the front not a big deal but you know it's it's a little thing in terms of the additional storage it's actually a sata ssd on the back here so it's not an m.2 one and then here you can see they've got two cpu power connectors running up to the motherboard so that is going to be pretty important when we're discussing the budget of this system because that's kind of where they screwed it up a little bit yeah so all in all it's not too bad i mean you know what they say about cable management if you can put it in the back dirty's fine although when it comes to budgeting they did kind of screw the pooch on that one a little bit but we'll discuss that at the end of the video first let's fire it up and have a look at the windows installation because that is actually an additional service that you have to pay way too much money for so yeah let's have a look at what they did with that now first things first we need to see if this bad boy works so oh okay oh so they actually took some time to install some bloatware on it it seems let's see what they've got on here i mean that's a bit of a plot twist let's see down here okay so they installed okay they've got the amd drivers on here okay so they've got the most recent graphics card drivers on here which is good job best buy well done okay so let's see what geek squad support is oh it just it just takes you to the tech support page on their website okay that's not too bad let's see here what else did they install on here so we've got um i mean most of this is the standard windows affair of crap so it's just like acrobat reader which you know that's that's useful i get that and then they've got google uh google chrome edge so yeah i mean it's it's this is a reasonable windows install i'm gonna check the thermal paste application because that's weirdly noisy but anyways when it comes to the memory oof they actually didn't overclock it that's a shame so it's running at 26 66 megahertz and that's a 3200 megahertz kit in there and verizon that matters that that is pretty important um so it's a shame that they didn't do that naughty geek squad okay so i've been gaming for like 20 minutes now and everything seems fine temperatures are pretty good uh it's a little bit noisy but it's not it's not a big deal and you could deal with that with like fan curves and stuff so just out of curiosity let's see what a best buy thermal paste application looks like that's if i can figure out how to get the cooler off that happens every time no way oh louder so there's so much thermal paste that it's stuck to the cooler and then in the process of taking it off the thermal paste has just gone absolutely everywhere i mean look at that what the hell if you also look at the base of the cooler i mean they absolutely went to town with the thermal paste application this is like the full on like thermal paste scene we've got going on here so that was definitely no more than 50 percent my fault that cpu drop um there ended up being more pins bent than i initially realized but i managed to get the cpu socketable again just by straightening out the pins but there's still a lot of thermal paste on the pins which isn't necessarily gonna break anything because thermal paste isn't electrically conductive by design to avoid shorting anything out in this kind of screw-up but i don't want to get a bunch of thermal paste in a brand new cpu socket i really don't know why they used all this thermal paste but anyway with that let's get into how much all of this thermal paste cost us because remember i said in the beginning we went into this build with a stated budget of 1300 canadian yen but then because of the parts crisis it meant that we couldn't get our hands on a cpu a graphics card and a motherboard so we had to bring our own but we told them that we're gonna swap them out they're just placeholder parts that somebody else is lending us and we still wanna stick to that thousand three hundred canadian drachmi uh budget that we had well we ended up spending on the rest of the components and having them actually assemble it we ended up spending 900 canadian rubles which leaves 400 canadian rand for the actual graphics card motherboard and cpu later down the line which isn't ideal especially considering some of the choices that they made now the first issue in my opinion is that added one terabyte storage ssd for a hundred and thirty canadian dollars anna said she wanted to play a couple of games on that pc and do some light video editing honestly in my opinion a 500 gig ssd would have been fine but then they added what is essentially the cost of a motherboard worth of ssd in that and then they upgraded from a cx-650m power supply to a rm750x power supply which is a better power supply but they charged an extra 70 now i don't want to spend too much time complaining about getting a better power supply because i think it is a very good investment but the justification that they used was that the motherboard which was a placeholder by the way has an eight pin and a four pin cpu power connector and only the more expensive motherboard had the second cpu eps power connector or whatever and that was why they specked up the power supply but you don't need to plug that in so that's a bit of a weak source reason to spend almost double on a power supply and then finally in terms of how much they actually charged for building the pc well the actual assembly of the system they charged a hundred canadian drachmi for which is not bad i mean i considering the quality of the job that they did i think that that's okay but then they charged an additional hundred canadian rubles to install windows on it and that doesn't include the windows key they charged a hundred dollars to install windows on it go into windows for the first time and install catalyst control center and add a link to the geek squad website for a hundred dollars that's crazy if that included the windows key it would be okay but then they wanted to charge an additional 180 on top of the install fee for the windows key 280 dollars in total to get windows installed with a key is kind of madness if you ask me in conclusion yes they did screw up the budget a bit and they charged an obscene amount for installing windows but this went way better than i thought it was gonna go the fact that they didn't break anything or that i didn't have to get like an exorcist involved in the process is is honestly better than i thought and if this is representative of the average best buys pc building quality then that's very impressive it probably isn't but it shows that you can get a decently built system from a best buy even though it is it is a bit expensive to get it put together by them anyway with that if you like this video like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one uh yeah and until the next video bye youfor today's video i played best buys geek squad which a little bit of a stupid name in my opinion geek squad sounds a little bit like a terrible 90s superhero cartoon it was cancelled like three episodes into the first season but anyway i paid geek squad to build me a shiny new gaming system now how we went about this was i sent anna to the local best buy with a thousand three hundred canadian drachmi budget for a gaming system although there was a little bit of a problem considering the fact that pc parts are rarer than a comfortable bowel movement in a busy public bathroom they didn't have core components so they told us we had to source our own cpu motherboard and graphics card before they can build us a system so anna and i played it cool and we took two days before going back so that it wasn't obvious that we lived in a house full of pc components and this is obviously a sting operation but anyway we told them that we had a friend loan us these parts the thousand three hundred dollar budget still stood we were just going to substitute the parts in later when they became available so with that let's have a look at the kind of pc that the gross squad built us and here it is now we're going to discuss how much it cost and how much they charged for building it and installing windows and stuff like that after we look at what kind of job they did just to know how outraged to be by the price let's talk about the case they decided to go with a corosair 220 which is the case that has this front panel design which really scared and confused steve from gamer's nexus and i get it like it's it's a bit of a weird looking front panel design but at least you've got airflow you've got three fans in the front pulling fresh air into the case which means the inside's not going to resemble a thai prison in summer so it's a good start with that let's open it up and see what the inside looks like straight off the bat that's a pretty well put together looking system i mean you can see here that there's reasonably effective use of cable management over here at the top as well they've hidden the cables properly down here as well look at that i mean they could have used the holes slightly closer to the motherboard but it still looks really good this is a decently put together looking system now the parts in here that we recognize are the cpu with the cooler the graphics card and the motherboard but other than that we've got i think it's a 16 gig kit of ddr4 let's the i think it's the patriot viper and it's a 16 gig kit running at 3 200 megahertz which is okay i mean verizon you'd like a little bit faster but it's not it's not a train smash which is in dual channels so that's a lot better than you're gonna get with most pre-built uh that's pretty good things mostly seem to be plugged in decently although i did see up at the top here the one extra extra four pin isn't quite clipped down but that's not a huge deal now as far as the ssds go they have a main boot drive in here which i think is a 500 gig western digital black sn750 which is a really good nvme drive but then they also added a one terabyte msata ssd which is a little bit brave considering the budget but we'll talk about all of that a bit later in terms of power supply they ended up going with this rm750x which again considering the budget is very brave and it's not necessary for the components that we have in here it's like an rx 580 and a 3700 x and then with that let's have a look at the rear cable management which i'm expecting to be pretty good considering the state of the rest of the system looking at the back it's okay it's nothing spectacular but you know there's a huge amount of cable mess that they had to deal with in a really small case so i get it i probably wouldn't have been able to do much of a better job there are a couple of small things though like you can see here there's a fan hub and they didn't actually plug the fans into that they plugged it into the motherboard in the front not a big deal but you know it's it's a little thing in terms of the additional storage it's actually a sata ssd on the back here so it's not an m.2 one and then here you can see they've got two cpu power connectors running up to the motherboard so that is going to be pretty important when we're discussing the budget of this system because that's kind of where they screwed it up a little bit yeah so all in all it's not too bad i mean you know what they say about cable management if you can put it in the back dirty's fine although when it comes to budgeting they did kind of screw the pooch on that one a little bit but we'll discuss that at the end of the video first let's fire it up and have a look at the windows installation because that is actually an additional service that you have to pay way too much money for so yeah let's have a look at what they did with that now first things first we need to see if this bad boy works so oh okay oh so they actually took some time to install some bloatware on it it seems let's see what they've got on here i mean that's a bit of a plot twist let's see down here okay so they installed okay they've got the amd drivers on here okay so they've got the most recent graphics card drivers on here which is good job best buy well done okay so let's see what geek squad support is oh it just it just takes you to the tech support page on their website okay that's not too bad let's see here what else did they install on here so we've got um i mean most of this is the standard windows affair of crap so it's just like acrobat reader which you know that's that's useful i get that and then they've got google uh google chrome edge so yeah i mean it's it's this is a reasonable windows install i'm gonna check the thermal paste application because that's weirdly noisy but anyways when it comes to the memory oof they actually didn't overclock it that's a shame so it's running at 26 66 megahertz and that's a 3200 megahertz kit in there and verizon that matters that that is pretty important um so it's a shame that they didn't do that naughty geek squad okay so i've been gaming for like 20 minutes now and everything seems fine temperatures are pretty good uh it's a little bit noisy but it's not it's not a big deal and you could deal with that with like fan curves and stuff so just out of curiosity let's see what a best buy thermal paste application looks like that's if i can figure out how to get the cooler off that happens every time no way oh louder so there's so much thermal paste that it's stuck to the cooler and then in the process of taking it off the thermal paste has just gone absolutely everywhere i mean look at that what the hell if you also look at the base of the cooler i mean they absolutely went to town with the thermal paste application this is like the full on like thermal paste scene we've got going on here so that was definitely no more than 50 percent my fault that cpu drop um there ended up being more pins bent than i initially realized but i managed to get the cpu socketable again just by straightening out the pins but there's still a lot of thermal paste on the pins which isn't necessarily gonna break anything because thermal paste isn't electrically conductive by design to avoid shorting anything out in this kind of screw-up but i don't want to get a bunch of thermal paste in a brand new cpu socket i really don't know why they used all this thermal paste but anyway with that let's get into how much all of this thermal paste cost us because remember i said in the beginning we went into this build with a stated budget of 1300 canadian yen but then because of the parts crisis it meant that we couldn't get our hands on a cpu a graphics card and a motherboard so we had to bring our own but we told them that we're gonna swap them out they're just placeholder parts that somebody else is lending us and we still wanna stick to that thousand three hundred canadian drachmi uh budget that we had well we ended up spending on the rest of the components and having them actually assemble it we ended up spending 900 canadian rubles which leaves 400 canadian rand for the actual graphics card motherboard and cpu later down the line which isn't ideal especially considering some of the choices that they made now the first issue in my opinion is that added one terabyte storage ssd for a hundred and thirty canadian dollars anna said she wanted to play a couple of games on that pc and do some light video editing honestly in my opinion a 500 gig ssd would have been fine but then they added what is essentially the cost of a motherboard worth of ssd in that and then they upgraded from a cx-650m power supply to a rm750x power supply which is a better power supply but they charged an extra 70 now i don't want to spend too much time complaining about getting a better power supply because i think it is a very good investment but the justification that they used was that the motherboard which was a placeholder by the way has an eight pin and a four pin cpu power connector and only the more expensive motherboard had the second cpu eps power connector or whatever and that was why they specked up the power supply but you don't need to plug that in so that's a bit of a weak source reason to spend almost double on a power supply and then finally in terms of how much they actually charged for building the pc well the actual assembly of the system they charged a hundred canadian drachmi for which is not bad i mean i considering the quality of the job that they did i think that that's okay but then they charged an additional hundred canadian rubles to install windows on it and that doesn't include the windows key they charged a hundred dollars to install windows on it go into windows for the first time and install catalyst control center and add a link to the geek squad website for a hundred dollars that's crazy if that included the windows key it would be okay but then they wanted to charge an additional 180 on top of the install fee for the windows key 280 dollars in total to get windows installed with a key is kind of madness if you ask me in conclusion yes they did screw up the budget a bit and they charged an obscene amount for installing windows but this went way better than i thought it was gonna go the fact that they didn't break anything or that i didn't have to get like an exorcist involved in the process is is honestly better than i thought and if this is representative of the average best buys pc building quality then that's very impressive it probably isn't but it shows that you can get a decently built system from a best buy even though it is it is a bit expensive to get it put together by them anyway with that if you like this video like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one uh yeah and until the next video bye you