 Four years ago, we went to the local Best Buy and bought whatever gaming PC the rep recommended in our price point We were expecting disappointment, but ended up pleasantly surprised by how competitive their offering was But it's a new decade and there's been plenty of time for them to bung things up since then so we decided to take Another swing at it and see what your hard-earned dollars can get you from the folks over at Best Buy Ifixit's Mahi driver kit includes their quarter inch aluminum screwdriver handle with a magnetic bit socket, knurled grip and swivel top and 48 driver bits. Check it out at the link below Now to keep our tests somewhat controlled and in the spirit of our last attempt We needed to send someone with limited gaming PC knowledge and who wouldn't be immediately recognized So we enlisted special agent Janice to correct the case Buy the case. The PC case that is with there's a PC inside Anyways, you get the point her mission was simple buy a system for her imaginary little brother with a budget of around a thousand dollars And in case she runs into a very inexperienced Best Buy staffer to make sure the system has a graphics card at the very least You might recall that last time around without Yvonne's quick thinking We would have been left with a gaming PC That didn't have a graphics card which isn't much use to anyone upon arrival to our local Best Buy's computer section Special agent Janice was pretty much immediately helped by a pretty knowledgeable staff member He walked her through in layman's terms the performance benefits of having an SSD Over a standard hard drive and mentioned that her little brother might actually prefer an i7 over an i5 But that it wouldn't necessarily make a huge difference Just for gaming the sales associate also made sure to clarify any gaming PC He would try to sell her had a GPU and was in stock very important Overall the experience was actually really solid and a huge step up from last time Where we actually had to go to three different stores just to buy the system the first store recommended and reserved for us GG Best Buy, but your mileage may vary. So what did we end up with? I'll be honest when I first saw the box my first thought was oh no We ended up with an Optiplex, but after cracking it open things started to look up I present to you the Dell G55090 gaming desktop Which we spent a cool 929 US dollars on before tax might I say she sure is a beaut Just like this shirt from LTT store.com Jokes aside what really matters is what's inside in life and in PCs in the configuration We bought the G5 features an Intel core i5 9400 6 core processor clocked at a cool 2.9 gigahertz with a turbo of 4.1 It's paired with a single stick of 8 gigabyte 26 66 megahertz DDR4 meaning you're running in single channel mode But at least the proprietary AF H370 Dell motherboard in this system has four slots So that's an easy enough upgrade if your budget allows the rest of the board is pretty lackluster with no video outputs despite our CPU Being equipped with integrated graphics on the back are four USB 3.1 and two USB 2.0 ports Gigabit Ethernet and your standard audio jacks up front is a pretty similar story back inside We find a total of three PCIe slots an integrated a quantia AC Wi-Fi card Precisely enough SATA ports to fill this specific case and a single m.2 slot I also noticed the board doesn't have a 24 pin ATX power connector They instead opted for a proprietary 6 pin connection with SATA power coming from a header on the board So good luck upgrading the power supply without also getting an entirely new case and motherboard Thanks for the unnecessary engineering Dell now Let's get back to that m.2 slot for a sec because in it is one of the cutest little NVMe drives I've ever seen this little nugget is a DRAM-less 512 gigabyte Toshiba TLC NVMe SSD Normally we recommend against DRAM-less SSDs as both performance and write endurance or the longevity of the drive can be a lot worse Without a cache you can check out this tech wiki for more info on that However, as Linus mentioned in a recent video this SSD makes use of a cool technique called host memory buffer or HMB for short Allowing it to ask the computer's processor if some of the regular system memory can be used as a cache instead Which for general consumer use does help mitigate these issues as for the graphics card our Configuration comes equipped with an OEM single fan Nvidia GTX 1660 So nothing special there except you do at least get the new Turing and VINC encoding chip on this card So this rig should actually be pretty solid for streaming Bafflingly though the case is limited to a single 80 millimeter exhaust fan for cooling I mean does a bigger punch out really cost that much more guys and unsurprisingly It's fitted with a basement tier 360 watt Dell power supply. So as for performance, it actually seems like it should be okay We've got six decently clocked Intel cores and modern Nvidia GPU and a pretty solid SSD I would have liked to see 16 gigs of dual channel RAM in 2020 and this tier of power supply wouldn't be acceptable in a custom rig but This is a Dell pre-built and you get what you pay for or do you? To find out we fired up Amazon to see if we could build the same thing for less money Specking everything as close as we could while still including Windows 10 Home Edition a crappy keyboard and mouse AC Wi-Fi and the labor to have someone like Micro Center build it for you Wow, it turns out you would end up spending nearly a hundred dollars more than Best Buy's price for the g5 Now you do end up with some creature comforts like easier upgrade ability Thanks to non proprietary parts a better power supply and more SATA connections But it's still pretty dang hard to be competitive with OEMs on pre-built systems due to the cost benefit They have thanks to bulk part ordering as well as the vastly discounted Windows pricing Microsoft offers them But we don't have to play by their rules Do we just like a Mac is often a good deal if you compare it to exactly the same hardware? But a bad deal if you get a bit more creative we think we can beat this DIY style Kung Fu let's assume you're an avid LTT viewer you can build a machine for yourself And you don't need to add another crappy keyboard and mouse to the pile now that we have the flexibility to choose whatever parts We want a Ryzen 3600 is a lot better value with a lower price tag and Performance that should be slightly better in virtually every workload thanks to its six extra threads better IPC and higher boost clock It pairs nicely to an ASRock B450 motherboard and with the money you save building it yourself 16 gigs of 3200 megahertz DDR4 fits wonderfully into the budget along with an 80 plus bronze 450 watt power supply Then for the cream cheese icing on top we can spend just 80 dollars more than you would on the GTX 1660 and jump up to a full fat 2060 ko from AVGA which should give us vastly better performance But does it? Yes, of course it does computers aren't magic and assuming no egregious Configuration errors they behave more or less as the sum of their parts So at 1080p medium settings using DirectX 12 in shadow of the Tomb Raider frame rates get a big ol bump Nearly 34% higher than our Best Buy special both GTA 5 and CS go show even more impressive gains with 43 and 44 percent higher frame rates respectively Rendering in blender while not as huge of an improvement was still very noticeable with the BMW blender test finishing 25% faster and in the 7-zip compression benchmark the 3600 absolutely wipes the floor with the more expensive i5-9400 from our pre-built thanks to the six extra threads So conclusion time if you're in the market for a pre-built Honestly Best Buy has proven again to not actually be a terrible choice You may still be able to find a slightly better deal from one of the system integrators out there who don't have the same Retail overhead as Best Buy but before you do Make sure you check out our secret shopper series if you want to see an in-depth Investigation on the entire purchasing experience of a bunch of major si's oh and get subscribed So you don't miss out on future videos like the very different unlimited budget gaming PC Sounds pretty cool, huh? 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