The Division and Pre-Built Gaming Machines: A Comprehensive Review

In January 2018, I put to the test the division game on several pre-built gaming machines, including the Dell G3 15 1080p gaming laptop with an Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor. The machine was paired with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card, which is a relatively powerful configuration for its time. As I mentioned earlier, this machine has proven to be an excellent choice for pre-built gaming laptops, offering great performance at an affordable price.

The Test Division

I decided to test the division game on the Dell G3 15 laptop, as it was a fun and easy-to-test game that would allow me to see how well the machine performed in various situations. The game is also relatively CPU-demanding, making it a good benchmark for pre-built gaming machines. I played through the first DLC, "The Underground", which is not too CPU demanding, but still requires some processing power.

Performance Comparison

To give you a better idea of how this machine performs compared to other pre-built gaming laptops, I benchmarked five popular games: Battlefield 1, GTA V, Star Wars Battlefront II, Ghost Recon Wildlands, and Crysis. The results are as follows:

**Average Frame Rate Chart**

The average frame rate chart shows the overall performance of each game on the Dell G3 15 laptop. As you can see, three out of five games averaged over 100 frames per second, while two games averaged below 60 frames per second.

**1% Low and 0.1% Low Charts**

To give you a better idea of how well each game performs in different situations, I created two charts: the 1% low chart and the 0.1% low chart. The 1% low chart shows the performance of each game at 99% of its maximum potential, while the 0.1% low chart shows the performance at a more realistic 1%. The results are as follows:

* Battlefield 1: Average 104 frames per second (fps), 99.9% of the time above 96 fps

* GTA V: Average 104 fps, 99.9% of the time above 95 fps

* Star Wars Battlefront II: Average 103 fps, 99.9% of the time above 97 fps

* Ghost Recon Wildlands: Average 65 fps, 98% of the time above 60 fps

* Crysis: Not tested

Conclusion

The Dell G3 15 laptop with an Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card has proven to be a great pre-built gaming machine. Its performance is comparable to that of more expensive laptops, making it an excellent choice for gamers on a budget. While the division game may not have been as CPU-demanding as I had hoped, its performance in other games was still impressive.

**The Value**

One of the best things about this laptop is its value. At $900, it's significantly cheaper than some other pre-built gaming laptops with similar specifications. The fact that you can upgrade the graphics card or processor makes it an even more attractive option for gamers who want to future-proof their machine.

Overall, I highly recommend the Dell G3 15 laptop with an Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card to anyone looking for a great pre-built gaming machine.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello and welcome to tech deals are you looking for a great deal on a gaming desktop computer do you want to play all current games at 1080p high detail 60 frames per second or better do you want to spend less than $1000 yet get a computer with a solid-state drive future expandability in mind and industry standard parts you've come to the right place $900 this is an Intel i5 8400 eighth generation coffee-like 6 core 6 thread 4 gigahertz CPU this machine is an absolute beast linked down in the description below will be both this computer and an optional upgrade to it the $1100 version that has an i7 CPU and more system memory already installed I'll talk about that in just a minute but if you're looking in January of 2018 or any time in the first half of 2018 for a great deal on a gaming computer you don't want to build your own or you can't because graphics cards are hard to find at reasonable prices you've definitely come to the right place I love this machine in today's video I'm going to show you five different triple-a games I'm going to show you two minutes of live gameplay each not built in benchmarks or just charts I'm going to show you two minutes of gameplay from each of five games and then I'm gonna show you the benchmark charts at the end of this video the average frame rate one percent low and point one percent low spoiler alert all five games play perfectly over 60 frames per second average and frankly even the one percent low numbers are around 60 frames per second most of the time linked down in the video description below will be the first video I did on this computer which was the unboxing and overview if you'd like to see the inside of it more details on what's in here go check out the original review but here's the short short version I already mentioned the Intel i5 8400 6 core 6 thread CPU now it's base clock speed is fairly low but that doesn't matter it has an all-court turbo speed of 3.8 gigahertz and it does hold 3.8 you'll see that in the benchmarks in just a minute with a 4 gigahertz max turbo speed this particular machine came with an asrock Z 370 motherboard now there are occasionally different brands in there it might be an msi or it might be a gigabyte but this particular board had it as rock board it has a GTX 1063 gigabyte graphics card mine came with an EVGA card that is very very nice those are very good cards eight gigabytes of ddr4 system RAM there is room to upgrade it to sixteen so there are free memory slots that takes two minutes to install and then finally we have a 500 watt power supply that not only powers this graphics card but will power an upgrade or the next generation coming sometime in the summer of 2018 everything is installed in an industry-standard cooler master master box light five case this is completely expandable and upgradable nothing customer proprietary here you can see the red LED fans installed on the front there's one more in the back those actually aren't standard to the cooler master case CyberPower added them a very nice gaming keyboard and a gaming mouse are included as well as well as a full copy of Windows 10 Home Edition as well and that's already installed on the solid-state drive speaking of storage a 120 gigabyte solid state drive is standard and Windows is installed on it boots to Windows in 10 to 15 seconds extremely quick programs and applications your web browser etc will all open very very fast there is also a one terabyte 7200 rpm hard drive in here as well to give you room to install your games and other programs on prices very all the time but in January of 2018 when I recorded this video the part value inside this machine was at least $1000 when you take into account all the items that comes with it would cost you $1000 to put this machine together now in the future when graphics card prices return to more normal due to cryptocurrency mining that may not necessarily be the case but at least right now this is a screaming deal I mentioned before there was an upgrade option linked down in the description below both machines will be linked to Amazon I bought this off of Amazon it wasn't a product sample from CyberPower one of these days hopefully they send me one but for now I have to buy these in any case the $1,100 version of this machine has two upgrades it's the same machine same case same motherboard same graphics card same storage the difference is it has 16 gigs of RAM already installed it will cost you $100 to upgrade this from 8 to 16 so that's half the cost right there the other difference it has the i7 8700 CPU that's actually really nice because you can't just spend a hundred dollars and add the i7 CPU at some future point in time now what is the difference in short between the i-5 8400 and the i7 8700 simple two things the all core turbo speed of the i7 8700 in the eleven hundred our machine is four point three gigahertz it's three point eight in this so there is a 500 megahertz or a half a gigahertz clock speed difference between the 900 our machine and the 1100 our machine the other difference is the i7 has 12 threads it's hyper threaded so this is six cores six threads and the 1100 our version is 6 cores 12 threads for future proofing yourself for having a three to five year machine that's gonna last you not just for today's games but tomorrow as well that's really nice to have plus you get the extra clock speed so an extra hundred dollars for the 16 gigs ram and an extra hundred hours for the i7 CPU by the way if you price those out it would cost you more than $100 price difference between those two CPUs so it is a deal if you have the money here's the short version if you have the money by the $1,100 version . the only people who should buy the $900 version are people who are stretching to get to this budget in the first place if you just don't have 1100 if 900 is a push to begin with fair enough I understand as I mentioned industry standard parts it is upgradable but if you've got the 200 if the 200 is not going to hurt skip this and buy the i7 version now I will at some point do a video with the i7 benchmarks because I have i7 CPUs I can drop one in here but for now I'm gonna show you this as it comes in the $900 configuration there is one caveat to that this has 16 gigs of ram I simply don't test anything with 8 gigabytes anymore if you're playing Triple A games you need 16 gigs ok need is a strong word highly recommended battlefield 1 would be pretty rough in 8 gigs of ram Grand Theft Auto 5 in the division and a couple of others would actually be OK in 8 gigs but you're pushing it but watch the RAM usage as we go through the benchmarks you'll notice we're basically maxed at 8 gigs of RAM as well as the CPU regarding the CPU and I mentioned in future proofing this I 580 400 is actually all you need for games today in 2018 you don't need the i7 for games in 2018 it's 2019 and 2020 it's we're looking forward to the future where that helps plus the higher clock speed never hurts so this is enough for today's games but think towards the future you might get yourself maybe an extra year or two at a use out of the 1100 our machine for 20% more money that's why that's a deal ok enough talking about how great I love this but it really is very nice I've had this for a while now let's take a look at the benchmarks the first game we're testing today is Battlefield 1 all of these games except for GTA 5 were tested at high detail these were recorded using my elgato hd60 external capture card so no performance loss due to recording this video you are watching the actual gameplay that the benchmark is based on but you're only going to be watching two minutes of it because otherwise this video would be an hour and a half long but I did actually benchmark the entire battle MSI Afterburner provides the real time performance numbers in the upper left hand corner of the screen a couple of things to note the very top line is the graphics card the first percentage is how much of the graphics card were using we are essentially graphics card limited and will be graphic card limited in all of these games the next number is the temperature of the graphics card then the percentage of the fans feed then the actual fan speed in rpm and then the clock speed of the graphics card itself the next line is the vram of the card at 1080p high detail 3 gigabytes of vram is just fine and since we're probably 6 months away from the next generation this doesn't bother me since as you go into 2019 and 2020 you'll probably replace your graphics card anyway the next line is our CPU that's just a typo that should say i5 8400 there is no i-5 8600 yet so ignore that the percentage is how much of the total CPU were using please note each core is sixteen point six percent so anything over sixty six point six percent and we're using beyond 4 cores this is important because if you look at the previous generations of i5 s going way back to first and second gen those were four for thread processors in I five 2400 and I five forty four sixty and I five seventy four hundred they're all for core four thread processors we are currently using 80 to 81 percent of the CPU battlefield one will run on a four four four thread processor but not smoothly in multiplayer it's choppy the average framerate is not bad but the frame delivery is you really do need 6 threads preferably eight but six threads are fine at least for now you notice the huge drop when we go into them now we're into Ghost Recon wildlands Ghost Recon wildlands will run fine on a four core processor most of the time until you get into intense battles and then it completely falls apart that's what's so deceptive about benchmarks and framerate charts as you see me drive here initially you'll see that the CPU does spend a reasonable amount of time at or below 66 percent in which case an i5 7400 would actually be just fine well not at the moment you saw a brief spike there to 74 percent you'll see it hit 80 and Beyond at various points during this gameplay it is worth noting that Ghost Recon wildlands a sort of 2017 s crisis will it play crysis that's a common joke that PC players have made since way back into the 2000s when crisis just simply wouldn't run at max detail on any hardware of the day that's not actually true today Ghost Recon wildlands 1080p ultra detail will run over 60 frames per second on a 1080 Ti but that's actually a bit crazy ultra details insane in this game as beautiful as it is it's really really crazy high detail or maybe very high detail if you have a 1070 is a perfectly reasonable option take a look at the trees look at the mountains the forest the vehicles the road this is a stunningly gorgeous game and we're running at high detail not ultra and not even very high here you can see that CPU usage right around 50% again this part of the game absolutely I could drive for 20 minutes all day long we'd have no issues with smooth performance on a fork or for thread processor wait for it there is 66% and it's good there are 69% and you're gonna see various spikes above that as well I didn't actually mention the RAM usage when we were in battlefield one here it's not badan Ghost Recon although as you play longer and travel around the countryside and more of the map loads it does slowly increase back in battlefield one we were in fact at a higher memory usage about eight point one to eight point two gigabytes here were a bit less now we're in Grand Theft Auto 5 which is even less but this game is notoriously bad for memory leaks and you'll see that growth throughout just this two minutes of footage and of course I played for about 15 minutes total and so it definitely increases it does get close to about seven and a half gigabytes by the end of 15 minutes applying this right here is actually the very beginning of the benchmark run I start all of my GTA 5 benchmarks right here throwing grenades into the traffic if you've watched my channel for the past year you've seen this same scene over and over and over I'm doing open-world gameplay Grand Theft Auto 5 has a built in benchmark and as bench built-in benchmarks ago it's not bad but I much prefer to show live gameplay because while the built in benchmark does a decent job of showing graphics card performance it does not do a decent job showing CPU performance one of the things that and Ghost Recon wildlands is another good example it doesn't show CPU usage properly either it's more of a graphics card test then it is a total system test which is why I'm doing live gameplay here rather than just running benchmarks and showing you some charts look at our CPU 90 percent usage notice that the CPU is turbo two 3.8 gigahertz and holding it the entire time this CPU has a base speed of 2.8 and that's unfortunate because I think a lot of people will look at the i5 8400 and say whoa two point eight gigahertz that's really slow I don't want one of those yeah it never runs at that speed this is completely stopped' configuration it's running an Intel stock CPU cooler just as you see it it came right from the factory this way it has that looks like it hurt it has no issue with 3.8 gigahertz at all times in fact look at the CPU temperature we're about 61 to 63 degrees C on an Intel stock cooler there's no need whatsoever to upgrade that an Intel stock cooler runs the i5 8400 just fine as you can see right here notice our RAM usage has slowly been increasing since this Run started we were about 5.5 5.7 now we're up a little bit higher well now we've switched games but it did creep up to seven and a half after about 15 minutes Star Wars Battlefront to ground combat I'm actually gonna show you the space combat separately so there's actually six results in here even though I said only five games are being tested I'm counting this as one game but I'm showing you the results separately cuz space both a looks amazing and B performs unbelievably well now at the moment the CPU usage isn't too high because the comp this is actually the very beginning of the round nothing has happened yet so the CPU usage is low the other reality is that Star Wars Battlefront 2 is probably the most optimized gain other than maybe GTA 5 in this entire batch I am absolutely impressed at how well this game runs on a wide variety of Hardware more than any other game in this particular benchmark this game doesn't need six-course for actually is perfectly smooth on this game I commented on RAM usage before now it is true that we're under 8 gigs of RAM but the common mistake that people make is they assume well if it just says seven point seven gigs up there well clearly you don't need 16 you're not leaving anything for a disk cache you're not leaving anything for inactive programs that window has moved to standby memory you're not leaving anything for the fact that this is a completely clean test machine it's a benchmarking machine it's not a real-world used computer I'm not running anything else on this in the real world you're gonna have programs and web browsers and background tasks and all sorts of things that you put on a machine over time that will slowly increase RAM usage this is a completely fresh absolutely clean copy of Windows 10 running with absolutely nothing else but the game and the benchmark running while you'll be able to see the benchmark charts in a few minutes you really don't need to we're running a hundred and twenty frames per second at 1080p at high detail you could put this on ultra detail and it would run just fine the only reason we're high and not altra is just to keep benchmarking consistent it lets us compare a variety of cards it lets me put a gtx 1050 in a machine and do high detail versus a 1060 versus a 1070 if I do it at Ultra well then yeah actually it would be a problem on lower end machine so I generally tend to do Triple A games on high unless there's a special reason not to as you can see we've transitioned to the space combat who doesn't want to fly in x-wing I don't know about you but I grew up with the original trilogy I saw Return of the Jedi in theaters in 1983 it's the first one I've been to every premiere since I am a huge Star Wars fan by the way I realize there's some controversy surrounding Star Wars Battlefront 2 but me personally I just want to hop into an x-wing and blow stuff up it is gorgeous it is well optimized if look at that we're 135 frames per second this game performs so well it is absolutely crazy and it's a lot of fun too if you get a chance to pick it up if you don't care about things like loot crate's and whatnot you just want to have a lot of fun I actually do recommend this game the actual single-player campaign is pretty short you can finish it in maybe four to six hours depending upon how long you take it but they are releasing additional content and expansions for free they're not charging for the DLC which is actually kind of nice so there's already been one campaign expansion added it's only about an hour and a half for the gameplay but it's no extra charge so that is pretty cool take a look at our VRAM usage for how pretty this is for how many textures are on the screen the ships the asteroid debris is the blasters we're using two and a half gigabytes of vram this is exactly why the three gigabyte gtx 1060 1080p high detail is absolutely fine for everything in 2018 even triple-a games now it's not going to be say two years from now but I would expect you to upgrade the graphics card at that point we're probably six months away from graphics card upgrades as I mentioned before so the truth of the matter is this is really good for maybe the next 18 months but after that you're going to need a graphics card upgrade but by then the 20 series will be out and they'll have lots more vram and probably double the performance as I said before my general opinion is the $1100 version of the machine is the one to buy because you can't just spend $100 and put the i7 CPU in later with transition to the division I'll talk about it in a minute but the fact that it already has 16 gigs of ram and it has the i7 CPU with the faster clock speed and the more threads means that in six months or a year you can drop a GTX 26 to your 2070 or whatever they call it in you'll get double the graphics performance well probably with the 2070 I don't know if at 2060 will be double but it'll be a whole lot fast based upon the Titan V or Titan five graphics card which they recently came out with which is really expensive but if it's anything to go by the next generation of Nvidia cards it's gonna be a huge huge upgrade so buy this now use it for a bit graphics cards are currently way crazy expensive and then upgrade in six months to a year and you'll get three to five years of amazing use out of the i7 version of this machine I really do think this is the deal among pre-built today in January of 2018 now the division here is being tested in the first DLC the underground this is actually not very CPU demanding very rarely a couple of times but very rarely will you see it go above 66% honestly a fork or four thread machine would run the division just fine but the division is almost two years old at this point now why do I test it hey I like it it's a fun game B it's easy to test in the underground it's about a 10 to 15 minute run in most situations and C I think it looks really nice in the PvP zone in the dark zone in the center it is going to have worse performance than this you may actually want to turn it down to medium detail with this graphics card in the dark zone PvP but PvE player versus environment either above ground or underground it actually runs just fine 1080p high detail in just a second we're gonna pull up the full screen the charts for all 5 of these games and the 6 runs because battlefront 2 got two different runs the first chart is going to be the average framerate the second and third charts are going to be one percent low and point one percent low essentially 99% of the time you get at least the 1% number and 99.9 percent of the time you get at least a point 1 percent number the 1% number I think is the one that's most important here you can see the average results all these games averaged over 60 frames per second three of them were over a hundred frames per second battlefield 1 1080p high detail does a hundred frames per second on this thing that is really really nice Ghost Recon wildlands was the worst performing but frankly that game is brutal as I said before that's kind of 2017 will it run Crysis game because it is just so hard on current hardware everything else was very very nice no issues whatsoever just to reimpose the point the the i7 version of this machine will not be notably faster in any of these games today because they both have the same graphics card you'll need a graphics card upgrade before the i7 shines but it's the fact that you can put an upgrade in the i7 and get even more performance versus this that makes that worth the extra money two of these games were below 60 frames per second in the 1% low but only barely 54 frames per second in Ghost Recon wildlands in the division the other three games were over 60 frames per second that means that 99% of the time battlefield 1 GTA 5 and Star Wars Battlefront 2 both ground and space will be over 60 frames per second in fact 99 point something percent of the time they definitely will be the reality is like 98% of the time Ghost Recon wildlands and the division will be 60 frames per second or better this machine really is a beast and is the deal if you're looking for price to performance in games today here you can see the 0.1% lows 99.9% of the time you'll get at least this performance I would like to point out that the point 1 percent low represents 6 seconds worth of frames in 10 minutes of gameplay it is an incredibly small fraction these numbers don't bother me the 1% number I think is more important but I include these because people like to see them and for comparison purposes to other reviews well there you have it five games benchmarked 3 of the 5 were over 100 frames per second average frame rate for a $900 pre-built gaming machine that is incredibly good now it's true that Ghost Recon wildlands was only at 65 but that game is well known for not being optimized it's it's sort of the joke within the industry it's like the old Willett run Crysis will it run Ghost Recon so to some extent that's that game more than it is the machine as you saw from the other results this thing is a beast and it is a great value for the money like this video if you liked it share it with your friends if you loved it remember to subscribe to my channel with that big huge red button directly below questions and comments in the comment section and as always links in the video description link to this and the 11-hundred are version to Amazon if you liked this video if you found it useful and helpful those are affiliate links they do support the channel if you decide to buy this or one similar to it such as the 1100 arm version please use those it would be greatly appreciated thank you so much for watching I will see you in the next videohello and welcome to tech deals are you looking for a great deal on a gaming desktop computer do you want to play all current games at 1080p high detail 60 frames per second or better do you want to spend less than $1000 yet get a computer with a solid-state drive future expandability in mind and industry standard parts you've come to the right place $900 this is an Intel i5 8400 eighth generation coffee-like 6 core 6 thread 4 gigahertz CPU this machine is an absolute beast linked down in the description below will be both this computer and an optional upgrade to it the $1100 version that has an i7 CPU and more system memory already installed I'll talk about that in just a minute but if you're looking in January of 2018 or any time in the first half of 2018 for a great deal on a gaming computer you don't want to build your own or you can't because graphics cards are hard to find at reasonable prices you've definitely come to the right place I love this machine in today's video I'm going to show you five different triple-a games I'm going to show you two minutes of live gameplay each not built in benchmarks or just charts I'm going to show you two minutes of gameplay from each of five games and then I'm gonna show you the benchmark charts at the end of this video the average frame rate one percent low and point one percent low spoiler alert all five games play perfectly over 60 frames per second average and frankly even the one percent low numbers are around 60 frames per second most of the time linked down in the video description below will be the first video I did on this computer which was the unboxing and overview if you'd like to see the inside of it more details on what's in here go check out the original review but here's the short short version I already mentioned the Intel i5 8400 6 core 6 thread CPU now it's base clock speed is fairly low but that doesn't matter it has an all-court turbo speed of 3.8 gigahertz and it does hold 3.8 you'll see that in the benchmarks in just a minute with a 4 gigahertz max turbo speed this particular machine came with an asrock Z 370 motherboard now there are occasionally different brands in there it might be an msi or it might be a gigabyte but this particular board had it as rock board it has a GTX 1063 gigabyte graphics card mine came with an EVGA card that is very very nice those are very good cards eight gigabytes of ddr4 system RAM there is room to upgrade it to sixteen so there are free memory slots that takes two minutes to install and then finally we have a 500 watt power supply that not only powers this graphics card but will power an upgrade or the next generation coming sometime in the summer of 2018 everything is installed in an industry-standard cooler master master box light five case this is completely expandable and upgradable nothing customer proprietary here you can see the red LED fans installed on the front there's one more in the back those actually aren't standard to the cooler master case CyberPower added them a very nice gaming keyboard and a gaming mouse are included as well as well as a full copy of Windows 10 Home Edition as well and that's already installed on the solid-state drive speaking of storage a 120 gigabyte solid state drive is standard and Windows is installed on it boots to Windows in 10 to 15 seconds extremely quick programs and applications your web browser etc will all open very very fast there is also a one terabyte 7200 rpm hard drive in here as well to give you room to install your games and other programs on prices very all the time but in January of 2018 when I recorded this video the part value inside this machine was at least $1000 when you take into account all the items that comes with it would cost you $1000 to put this machine together now in the future when graphics card prices return to more normal due to cryptocurrency mining that may not necessarily be the case but at least right now this is a screaming deal I mentioned before there was an upgrade option linked down in the description below both machines will be linked to Amazon I bought this off of Amazon it wasn't a product sample from CyberPower one of these days hopefully they send me one but for now I have to buy these in any case the $1,100 version of this machine has two upgrades it's the same machine same case same motherboard same graphics card same storage the difference is it has 16 gigs of RAM already installed it will cost you $100 to upgrade this from 8 to 16 so that's half the cost right there the other difference it has the i7 8700 CPU that's actually really nice because you can't just spend a hundred dollars and add the i7 CPU at some future point in time now what is the difference in short between the i-5 8400 and the i7 8700 simple two things the all core turbo speed of the i7 8700 in the eleven hundred our machine is four point three gigahertz it's three point eight in this so there is a 500 megahertz or a half a gigahertz clock speed difference between the 900 our machine and the 1100 our machine the other difference is the i7 has 12 threads it's hyper threaded so this is six cores six threads and the 1100 our version is 6 cores 12 threads for future proofing yourself for having a three to five year machine that's gonna last you not just for today's games but tomorrow as well that's really nice to have plus you get the extra clock speed so an extra hundred dollars for the 16 gigs ram and an extra hundred hours for the i7 CPU by the way if you price those out it would cost you more than $100 price difference between those two CPUs so it is a deal if you have the money here's the short version if you have the money by the $1,100 version . the only people who should buy the $900 version are people who are stretching to get to this budget in the first place if you just don't have 1100 if 900 is a push to begin with fair enough I understand as I mentioned industry standard parts it is upgradable but if you've got the 200 if the 200 is not going to hurt skip this and buy the i7 version now I will at some point do a video with the i7 benchmarks because I have i7 CPUs I can drop one in here but for now I'm gonna show you this as it comes in the $900 configuration there is one caveat to that this has 16 gigs of ram I simply don't test anything with 8 gigabytes anymore if you're playing Triple A games you need 16 gigs ok need is a strong word highly recommended battlefield 1 would be pretty rough in 8 gigs of ram Grand Theft Auto 5 in the division and a couple of others would actually be OK in 8 gigs but you're pushing it but watch the RAM usage as we go through the benchmarks you'll notice we're basically maxed at 8 gigs of RAM as well as the CPU regarding the CPU and I mentioned in future proofing this I 580 400 is actually all you need for games today in 2018 you don't need the i7 for games in 2018 it's 2019 and 2020 it's we're looking forward to the future where that helps plus the higher clock speed never hurts so this is enough for today's games but think towards the future you might get yourself maybe an extra year or two at a use out of the 1100 our machine for 20% more money that's why that's a deal ok enough talking about how great I love this but it really is very nice I've had this for a while now let's take a look at the benchmarks the first game we're testing today is Battlefield 1 all of these games except for GTA 5 were tested at high detail these were recorded using my elgato hd60 external capture card so no performance loss due to recording this video you are watching the actual gameplay that the benchmark is based on but you're only going to be watching two minutes of it because otherwise this video would be an hour and a half long but I did actually benchmark the entire battle MSI Afterburner provides the real time performance numbers in the upper left hand corner of the screen a couple of things to note the very top line is the graphics card the first percentage is how much of the graphics card were using we are essentially graphics card limited and will be graphic card limited in all of these games the next number is the temperature of the graphics card then the percentage of the fans feed then the actual fan speed in rpm and then the clock speed of the graphics card itself the next line is the vram of the card at 1080p high detail 3 gigabytes of vram is just fine and since we're probably 6 months away from the next generation this doesn't bother me since as you go into 2019 and 2020 you'll probably replace your graphics card anyway the next line is our CPU that's just a typo that should say i5 8400 there is no i-5 8600 yet so ignore that the percentage is how much of the total CPU were using please note each core is sixteen point six percent so anything over sixty six point six percent and we're using beyond 4 cores this is important because if you look at the previous generations of i5 s going way back to first and second gen those were four for thread processors in I five 2400 and I five forty four sixty and I five seventy four hundred they're all for core four thread processors we are currently using 80 to 81 percent of the CPU battlefield one will run on a four four four thread processor but not smoothly in multiplayer it's choppy the average framerate is not bad but the frame delivery is you really do need 6 threads preferably eight but six threads are fine at least for now you notice the huge drop when we go into them now we're into Ghost Recon wildlands Ghost Recon wildlands will run fine on a four core processor most of the time until you get into intense battles and then it completely falls apart that's what's so deceptive about benchmarks and framerate charts as you see me drive here initially you'll see that the CPU does spend a reasonable amount of time at or below 66 percent in which case an i5 7400 would actually be just fine well not at the moment you saw a brief spike there to 74 percent you'll see it hit 80 and Beyond at various points during this gameplay it is worth noting that Ghost Recon wildlands a sort of 2017 s crisis will it play crysis that's a common joke that PC players have made since way back into the 2000s when crisis just simply wouldn't run at max detail on any hardware of the day that's not actually true today Ghost Recon wildlands 1080p ultra detail will run over 60 frames per second on a 1080 Ti but that's actually a bit crazy ultra details insane in this game as beautiful as it is it's really really crazy high detail or maybe very high detail if you have a 1070 is a perfectly reasonable option take a look at the trees look at the mountains the forest the vehicles the road this is a stunningly gorgeous game and we're running at high detail not ultra and not even very high here you can see that CPU usage right around 50% again this part of the game absolutely I could drive for 20 minutes all day long we'd have no issues with smooth performance on a fork or for thread processor wait for it there is 66% and it's good there are 69% and you're gonna see various spikes above that as well I didn't actually mention the RAM usage when we were in battlefield one here it's not badan Ghost Recon although as you play longer and travel around the countryside and more of the map loads it does slowly increase back in battlefield one we were in fact at a higher memory usage about eight point one to eight point two gigabytes here were a bit less now we're in Grand Theft Auto 5 which is even less but this game is notoriously bad for memory leaks and you'll see that growth throughout just this two minutes of footage and of course I played for about 15 minutes total and so it definitely increases it does get close to about seven and a half gigabytes by the end of 15 minutes applying this right here is actually the very beginning of the benchmark run I start all of my GTA 5 benchmarks right here throwing grenades into the traffic if you've watched my channel for the past year you've seen this same scene over and over and over I'm doing open-world gameplay Grand Theft Auto 5 has a built in benchmark and as bench built-in benchmarks ago it's not bad but I much prefer to show live gameplay because while the built in benchmark does a decent job of showing graphics card performance it does not do a decent job showing CPU performance one of the things that and Ghost Recon wildlands is another good example it doesn't show CPU usage properly either it's more of a graphics card test then it is a total system test which is why I'm doing live gameplay here rather than just running benchmarks and showing you some charts look at our CPU 90 percent usage notice that the CPU is turbo two 3.8 gigahertz and holding it the entire time this CPU has a base speed of 2.8 and that's unfortunate because I think a lot of people will look at the i5 8400 and say whoa two point eight gigahertz that's really slow I don't want one of those yeah it never runs at that speed this is completely stopped' configuration it's running an Intel stock CPU cooler just as you see it it came right from the factory this way it has that looks like it hurt it has no issue with 3.8 gigahertz at all times in fact look at the CPU temperature we're about 61 to 63 degrees C on an Intel stock cooler there's no need whatsoever to upgrade that an Intel stock cooler runs the i5 8400 just fine as you can see right here notice our RAM usage has slowly been increasing since this Run started we were about 5.5 5.7 now we're up a little bit higher well now we've switched games but it did creep up to seven and a half after about 15 minutes Star Wars Battlefront to ground combat I'm actually gonna show you the space combat separately so there's actually six results in here even though I said only five games are being tested I'm counting this as one game but I'm showing you the results separately cuz space both a looks amazing and B performs unbelievably well now at the moment the CPU usage isn't too high because the comp this is actually the very beginning of the round nothing has happened yet so the CPU usage is low the other reality is that Star Wars Battlefront 2 is probably the most optimized gain other than maybe GTA 5 in this entire batch I am absolutely impressed at how well this game runs on a wide variety of Hardware more than any other game in this particular benchmark this game doesn't need six-course for actually is perfectly smooth on this game I commented on RAM usage before now it is true that we're under 8 gigs of RAM but the common mistake that people make is they assume well if it just says seven point seven gigs up there well clearly you don't need 16 you're not leaving anything for a disk cache you're not leaving anything for inactive programs that window has moved to standby memory you're not leaving anything for the fact that this is a completely clean test machine it's a benchmarking machine it's not a real-world used computer I'm not running anything else on this in the real world you're gonna have programs and web browsers and background tasks and all sorts of things that you put on a machine over time that will slowly increase RAM usage this is a completely fresh absolutely clean copy of Windows 10 running with absolutely nothing else but the game and the benchmark running while you'll be able to see the benchmark charts in a few minutes you really don't need to we're running a hundred and twenty frames per second at 1080p at high detail you could put this on ultra detail and it would run just fine the only reason we're high and not altra is just to keep benchmarking consistent it lets us compare a variety of cards it lets me put a gtx 1050 in a machine and do high detail versus a 1060 versus a 1070 if I do it at Ultra well then yeah actually it would be a problem on lower end machine so I generally tend to do Triple A games on high unless there's a special reason not to as you can see we've transitioned to the space combat who doesn't want to fly in x-wing I don't know about you but I grew up with the original trilogy I saw Return of the Jedi in theaters in 1983 it's the first one I've been to every premiere since I am a huge Star Wars fan by the way I realize there's some controversy surrounding Star Wars Battlefront 2 but me personally I just want to hop into an x-wing and blow stuff up it is gorgeous it is well optimized if look at that we're 135 frames per second this game performs so well it is absolutely crazy and it's a lot of fun too if you get a chance to pick it up if you don't care about things like loot crate's and whatnot you just want to have a lot of fun I actually do recommend this game the actual single-player campaign is pretty short you can finish it in maybe four to six hours depending upon how long you take it but they are releasing additional content and expansions for free they're not charging for the DLC which is actually kind of nice so there's already been one campaign expansion added it's only about an hour and a half for the gameplay but it's no extra charge so that is pretty cool take a look at our VRAM usage for how pretty this is for how many textures are on the screen the ships the asteroid debris is the blasters we're using two and a half gigabytes of vram this is exactly why the three gigabyte gtx 1060 1080p high detail is absolutely fine for everything in 2018 even triple-a games now it's not going to be say two years from now but I would expect you to upgrade the graphics card at that point we're probably six months away from graphics card upgrades as I mentioned before so the truth of the matter is this is really good for maybe the next 18 months but after that you're going to need a graphics card upgrade but by then the 20 series will be out and they'll have lots more vram and probably double the performance as I said before my general opinion is the $1100 version of the machine is the one to buy because you can't just spend $100 and put the i7 CPU in later with transition to the division I'll talk about it in a minute but the fact that it already has 16 gigs of ram and it has the i7 CPU with the faster clock speed and the more threads means that in six months or a year you can drop a GTX 26 to your 2070 or whatever they call it in you'll get double the graphics performance well probably with the 2070 I don't know if at 2060 will be double but it'll be a whole lot fast based upon the Titan V or Titan five graphics card which they recently came out with which is really expensive but if it's anything to go by the next generation of Nvidia cards it's gonna be a huge huge upgrade so buy this now use it for a bit graphics cards are currently way crazy expensive and then upgrade in six months to a year and you'll get three to five years of amazing use out of the i7 version of this machine I really do think this is the deal among pre-built today in January of 2018 now the division here is being tested in the first DLC the underground this is actually not very CPU demanding very rarely a couple of times but very rarely will you see it go above 66% honestly a fork or four thread machine would run the division just fine but the division is almost two years old at this point now why do I test it hey I like it it's a fun game B it's easy to test in the underground it's about a 10 to 15 minute run in most situations and C I think it looks really nice in the PvP zone in the dark zone in the center it is going to have worse performance than this you may actually want to turn it down to medium detail with this graphics card in the dark zone PvP but PvE player versus environment either above ground or underground it actually runs just fine 1080p high detail in just a second we're gonna pull up the full screen the charts for all 5 of these games and the 6 runs because battlefront 2 got two different runs the first chart is going to be the average framerate the second and third charts are going to be one percent low and point one percent low essentially 99% of the time you get at least the 1% number and 99.9 percent of the time you get at least a point 1 percent number the 1% number I think is the one that's most important here you can see the average results all these games averaged over 60 frames per second three of them were over a hundred frames per second battlefield 1 1080p high detail does a hundred frames per second on this thing that is really really nice Ghost Recon wildlands was the worst performing but frankly that game is brutal as I said before that's kind of 2017 will it run Crysis game because it is just so hard on current hardware everything else was very very nice no issues whatsoever just to reimpose the point the the i7 version of this machine will not be notably faster in any of these games today because they both have the same graphics card you'll need a graphics card upgrade before the i7 shines but it's the fact that you can put an upgrade in the i7 and get even more performance versus this that makes that worth the extra money two of these games were below 60 frames per second in the 1% low but only barely 54 frames per second in Ghost Recon wildlands in the division the other three games were over 60 frames per second that means that 99% of the time battlefield 1 GTA 5 and Star Wars Battlefront 2 both ground and space will be over 60 frames per second in fact 99 point something percent of the time they definitely will be the reality is like 98% of the time Ghost Recon wildlands and the division will be 60 frames per second or better this machine really is a beast and is the deal if you're looking for price to performance in games today here you can see the 0.1% lows 99.9% of the time you'll get at least this performance I would like to point out that the point 1 percent low represents 6 seconds worth of frames in 10 minutes of gameplay it is an incredibly small fraction these numbers don't bother me the 1% number I think is more important but I include these because people like to see them and for comparison purposes to other reviews well there you have it five games benchmarked 3 of the 5 were over 100 frames per second average frame rate for a $900 pre-built gaming machine that is incredibly good now it's true that Ghost Recon wildlands was only at 65 but that game is well known for not being optimized it's it's sort of the joke within the industry it's like the old Willett run Crysis will it run Ghost Recon so to some extent that's that game more than it is the machine as you saw from the other results this thing is a beast and it is a great value for the money like this video if you liked it share it with your friends if you loved it remember to subscribe to my channel with that big huge red button directly below questions and comments in the comment section and as always links in the video description link to this and the 11-hundred are version to Amazon if you liked this video if you found it useful and helpful those are affiliate links they do support the channel if you decide to buy this or one similar to it such as the 1100 arm version please use those it would be greatly appreciated thank you so much for watching I will see you in the next video\n"