 We bought them, we unboxed them, and we endured tech support hell. And now finally, after three weeks of waiting, we're ready to share the performance of our $1,500 gaming systems in both gaming and game capture workloads. But, not before we share with you some interesting discoveries that cropped up while we were taking a closer look at these machines. Because, uh, oh boy, there is far more here than meets the eye. Thermaltake's A500 has a modern, minimalistic design with brushed aluminum panels and dual hinge-swinging tempered glass doors. Check it out today at the link below. Okay, uh, I know. I am just as psyched to find out which of our rigs produces the most FPS as you guys. But, we've actually got some other really, really important stuff to go through here first. Let's start with Alienware. So this thing shipped with a reasonably reasonable price tag. So this thing shipped with a reasonably recent version of Windows 10, Build 1803, and needed very few updates in order to get up and running. The theme, wallpaper, and boot logo were all set so you'd know that, dude, you're getting a doubt. Excuse me, I mean, Alienware and bloatware didn't look too bad. So let's see here, we've got updater, mobile connector, customer connect, AlienFX, whatever, for lighting and overclocking control. But let's come back to bloatware later. First, something got weird. This system uses over 4GB of RAM at idle. That is double our other machines. And after we manually killed any and all Alienware slash Dell processes, it barely budged. Then we subjected the machine to a CPU stress test and this is even weirder. Normally, this kind of stress test loads up all of the cores to the hilt. But on this machine, the load fluctuated. Not only that, but the CPU would boost to 4.5 ish GHz, hit temperatures in the high 90 degrees Celsius, then do this weird thing where the cooling would rev up super hard. Then the temps and the clock speeds would go down, rinse, and repeat. What? Because like, if the processor can't handle the standard load, why on earth do they have overclocking support? Well, to see how bad that would be, we fired it up and... Wait, are you sure you got this right? This is bizarre. This shows that the CPU, while overclocked, neither overheated nor dropped below 4.3 GHz. That is the max six core load per Intel spec. That means that enabling OC stage one was faster and cooler than the out-of-the-box settings. And not to mention essentially required to get the processor running the way that it was supposed to to begin with. Stage two was not as rosy with our processor shooting up to 4.8 GHz occasionally, but then quickly toning itself back down to 3.7. Okay. What made this even more puzzling was that after we disabled the software OC, that weird turboing up and overheating behavior completely disappeared. And that's not even the end of our software and firmware and whatever issues with this box, but we really need to move on to hardware now. So our graphics card is a standard issue GTX 1060 that behaved entirely predictably, minus the driver set from six months ago. So that's all right, but there are some issues here that we missed during the initial inspection. First, we found that the machine had a sloppily wired Wi-Fi module. Then we noticed that while the box said NVMe, our configuration is actually equipped with an M.2 drive that uses SATA rather than PCI Express, meaning that there is no performance benefit over a traditional two and a half inch drive. Now our invoice was marked correctly. It's not false advertising or anything like that. It's just kind of a drag. Anyway, much more interesting is the top most PCI Express lot that runs at only 8x electrically rather than 16x, no matter what we did and that our multi GPU approved power supply only has 385 watts combined on its 12 volt rails with no 80 plus certification whatsoever. Now given that this machine already pulls around 300 watts from the wall under a combined CPU and GPU load, calling that SLI capable is misleading at best. One positive note is that the power supply fan does stop under low load and our machine idles at just 26 watts. Furthermore, after the rev up, throttle down behavior magically disappeared, the system would only hum up under load with no sharp fan rev ups. Those naked VRM modules that we were concerned about before, by the way, those did not end up heating up pretty much at all. And finally, when it comes to the UEFI BIOS settings, they were about as sparse as you'd expect with a pre-built machine like this, with no option to save a profile and SATA mode set to RAID, which then disables BIOS recovery from a hard drive, which is enabled by default. So I guess all we can really say is, uh, let's move on to the HP Omen. Unlike the Alienware, our HP Omen shipped with Windows 10 version 1709 from over a year ago. So between that and replacing the graphics driver from five months ago, it took over an hour to get this thing updated out of the box. Of note is that the issue with games running slower off of the hard drive versus the SSD that we encountered while using this machine in our Walmart PC video has gone away, so that's good. And we were also pleased to see less than two gigs of our RAM being used at idle. That is half of the Alienware. On to software. The so-called Omen Command Center commands almost nothing except for enabling dual force mode to send low priority networking traffic over the integrated Wi-Fi and then higher priority packets over Ethernet. But, I mean, given that they both terminate at the same modem, I'm having a hard time understanding what the point of that is. Also of note, our Omen included McAfee antivirus. So if you want to uninstall it, John says hi. Now here's something weird. Our 8700 non-K processor boosted to about 3.5 GHz with all-core turbo. Now this is well below the 4.3 GHz all-core boost that Gamers Nexus measured for this CPU and only 10% above base clock. Now, why HP might have handicapped the CPU frequency in this way is not clear, but what we do know is that this can only hurt it when it comes to performance. Moving on, our graphics card is a bone stock GTX 1070 with as expected behavior and then finishing it up in here, we found a Wi-Fi module that we actually didn't notice during our unboxing. Also, it turns out that our power supply is rated to 470 watts max on the 12 volt rails with 80 plus certification. So far more SLI ready actually than the one in the Dell. Moving on to the BIOS, well, actually you just don't get to. Pressing F2 at boot takes you to a diagnostic screen for just about every subsystem in the Omen from CPU and RAM to USB and keyboard. Then going to advanced reboot yields a mostly useless gray on blue setup screen straight out of the 90s. All right, let's move on to the iBuy power rig now then, which is apparently so advanced that Janice is not even worthy of opening it. You're not able to help me through that? Not my ability to. Your ability to look inside a computer. If you're not familiar with the part, it's going to be very difficult to do anything inside of the PC. While this one shipped with a recent version of Windows 10, the machine still did require quite a few updates and the graphics driver here is the oldest one yet. I mean, I guess that's what they had rolled into their OS image and they just haven't bothered to update it. I mean, frankly, back in NCIX, we did a lot of stuff wrong. We did. But we did regularly update the bloody graphics drivers for our gaming systems. With that said, this behavior doesn't seem that surprising given the clap it together and ship it overall build quality that we observed. There were zero changes made to the UEFI BIOS, so that means no optimized profile was saved, even though the option is present on this motherboard. And in practical terms, this means that while our invoice boasted a free upgrade to 3000 megahertz RAM, you can see it in there, it's all shiny. Ours was only running at the default 2666 megahertz. Don't get me wrong, everything worked and it was stable with our CPU boosting to 4.3 gigahertz max across all cores as expected. And our graphics card was factory overclocked with idle RAM usage that was normal. It's just that we didn't really get a, you know, we care a lot vibe from the overall build quality. Like, again, this kind of sort of sloppiness doesn't affect performance, which we will see is definitely a strong point for this system. But not even one of the CPU cooling fans is plugged into the CPU fan header. They put the pump there when there's an empty pump header right here. I mean, why? And like, we found a grand total of exactly one zip tie and one twist tie in the entire system. Let's move on to the next, uh, ugh. So this is what you get for 1500 US dollars from Origin PC. A Core i5 processor and a GTX 1050 Ti. I mean, at this point, it almost doesn't really matter what else they do right, does it? But for the sake of completeness, let's take a look. The OS the machine shipped with was recent and so was the graphics driver. That shouldn't be worth bonus points, but apparently it is. Idle RAM usage was sub 2 gigabytes, another good thing. But we did notice that when we looked at the UEFI settings, that while our XMP 3000 megahertz profile was enabled for our RAM, the speed field was left on auto, which for some reason caused it to clock in slightly lower at 2933. To Origin's credit, even though only that one setting was tweaked on the machine, it was saved into a profile which we could load onto it for our performance testing. But profiles are only as useful as how enabled they are. We've really hoped that our tech would prompt us when we called in for tech support to load the profile after that whole only half the RAM is being detected incident, but he didn't. Looking under the hood, we found cable management that on the surface looked pretty good until we noticed that our pump was powered via Molex, which means no speed control and no warning if your pump dies. And then, making matters worse, we noticed that there is an available header on the motherboard that they used that they plugged the front intake fan into instead. Then, this is the worst thing yet, we came to the pass-through power cable that connects the rear plug on the back of the actual system to the power supply inside because it's got a really unusual internal layout. This here uses non-soldered hobby grade connectors, and on our machine, the metal contacts were slightly exposed with no power off switch available at the back of the system. That means that while it would be unlikely, these can slip off and someone could accidentally bridge those live wires full AC power with their fingers. This could and should be done better. Let's move on to main gear. First, we need to make a correction here. During the purchasing part of this system, the rep mentioned the two-year extended warranty, and we laughed. Hello, here comes the warranty pitch. Well, you saved it for the last, you know. Oh, man. He mentioned it because it was free, and that's a good thing. But we were mostly laughing because we'd sat through so many warranty pitches in the last two hours. We should have corrected ourselves because free is free, baby. So thanks to our commenters for noticing that. As for the machine itself, well, the software side was virgin, other than a custom boot logo, wallpaper, and a red theme. Both the OS and the graphics driver were recent, and our GTX 1060 was a factory overclocked version. The processor clocked itself at about 3.9 GHz on all six cores. This is exactly what we would expect for a Ryzen 2600X, and we noticed that the machine had its high-performance power plan enabled by default. This would help explain why it had the highest idle power draw out of our competitors at around 50 watts, but that is considered best practice with Ryzen processors. The UEFI did have a factory settings profile set, but there was really nothing in there that would affect performance. Just a couple of networking-related settings and boot mode forced into UEFI-only mode. A closer look at the insides revealed that, uh... Well, in terms of issues, we had a really hard time finding fault in this build. They even cable-managed the backside of the motherboard tray. Digging deeper, the power button was... slightly off-center, I guess, but that's more of like a case-QC issue, and actually, no, this was one. The hard drive SATA cable clicked when we pushed on it, meaning that it wasn't actually in 100%, but the drive was detected and did work out of the box, and given Manegear's support, if that did come out in shipping, I'm sure they would have been able to help us with it pretty quickly. So then, do I wanna line them all up here, I guess? Let's finally do it for you. Let's summarize the specs of all the machines we ended up with. Alienware shipped with a liquid-cooled 8700K processor, 16GB of 2666 RAM, a stock GTX 1060 with a 128GB SATA OS drive, coupled with a 2TB of storage, and it was powered by a multi-GPU-approved 460W power supply. HP shipped our Omen with a non-K 8700 processor with 16GB of 2400MHz RAM, a vanilla GTX 1070, a 256GB NVMe drive, they were the only one to ship an NVMe boot drive, weren't they? And 2TB of mechanical storage. They also threw in a decent 80-plus 500W power supply, and they had a $200 Canadian, $150 US promotion at the checkout. It should be noted we bought all of these systems, though, during Intel's Gamer Days promotion, so every SI had the same opportunity to take advantage of that. iBuyPower jumped the gun, smartly selling us a pre-order of the Core i5-9600K before it was formally shipping. They cooled it with an AIO water cooler, threw it in an MSI Z390A-A motherboard, loaded up 16GB of 2666MHz RAM, and threw a 240GB SATA OS drive with 1TB of storage in it. We got a factory-overclocked GTX 1070, the most powerful graphics card out of the bunch, and that was powered by a quality 750W power supply that we got upgraded to for free. On paper, this one should be the fastest system for gaming. Origin. Oh, Origin. We got a liquid-cooled Core i5-8400 with a GTX 1050 Ti and 120GB of SATA SSD storage with no extra mechanical storage for our game library. The power supply is a high-quality 450W unit, but the fancy Z390 overclocking-capable motherboard, even though it's quality, doesn't make sense for this config. Our CPU doesn't support overclocking. Honestly, this config is a total dog's breakfast. Finally, Manegear sold us the only AMD system in the lineup with a 240mm AIO-cooled Ryzen 5 2600X. This could end up very interesting because we did specifically mention to everyone on the phone that we wanted to not only game, but also record our gameplay for YouTube. They went with an MSI B350M Pro VD motherboard with 16GB of 2666MHz RAM, a 256GB SATA OS SSD, a 1TB storage drive, and a factory-overclocked GTX 1060. All of this was powered by an EVGA 500W power supply, and of note is that the US$200 discount that was applied to our checkout due to Intel's Gamers' Days promotion was something we were able to take advantage of. However, that works for an AMD-based configuration. Okay, so which one of these is the fastest for gaming? Well, in a massive surprise to no one, iBuyPower and HP Omen dominated our suite of gaming benchmarks, with iBuyPower edging out its closest competitor pretty handily thanks to its factory-overclocked graphics card and the fact that its CPU was turboing correctly. I mean, you want your CPU turboing correctly, that seems like a good idea, right? Who knew? Manegears Machine and our Alienware Aurora then traded blows thanks to their similar grade of graphics firepower in the next tier down, and as for our Origin Chronos, well, it didn't manage to break 60 FPS in any of our gaming tests aside from CSGO. Also, for the sake of completeness, we actually tested the Origin Machine with both the Core i3 that fit within our budget and the i5 that they upsold us to make theirs not only the worst performer in the bunch, but also the most expensive system that we purchased. Now onto recording videos to post to YouTube. Now this is presumably what led Manegear to recommend a 6-core, 12-thread AMD system. Now we never mentioned streaming, so we were actually kind of hoping for someone to recommend using ShadowPlay because it mostly just works and comes with very little performance penalty if you want to just cut together your frag vids. But no, I think everyone kind of assumed we were streaming. Anyway, onto testing. We set OBS to the same 1080p, 60 FPS, 3500 Mbps CBR settings on all machines, and then we just kept cranking the x264 encode quality until we started dropping frames, which actually brings us back to Alienware did what? So check this out. Regardless of encoder quality, our Aurora dropped a savage number of frames and spit out rendering errors. So the benchmark that we chose would run at 60 FPS, like so our game was fine, our CPU usage remained reasonable, and yet the end recording was unwatchable every single time. And this behavior persisted even when we switched to the N-Bank Nvidia encoder, which has nothing to do with the CPU. So Ivan's like racking his brain for a week on this stupid thing, trying different settings, recording to a different drive, resetting and reinstalling the software, using a different graphics card out of our inventory, and even going as far as asking one of the key OBS devs, what the heck is going on here? Finally, we relented and popped one of our bench boot SSDs into the Aurora, only for it to immediately stop having the issues. But then the mystery goes deeper still, because we tried our Alienware OS drive in another similar spec test bench machine, and continued experiencing the same issue. So while we do not know what precisely is going on, we've done our diligence, and we've managed to deduce that something we're pretty sure is just broken in software on our Alienware machine. Maybe it has to do with the high idle RAM usage. On to the rest then. Our main gear machine hung in there until the medium quality setting, that's our best result, with our HP Omen coming in second. iBuy Power came in third, as expected, starting to lose frames at the faster preset when it came to CPU encoding. And then as for the Kronos, well, shit. Did I say it right? What were we really expecting on a system that couldn't hit 60 FPS in the first place? So what's the takeaway from all this? When it comes to raw gaming power for the price, iBuy Power took the prize. That is, if you're comfortable with their quality tech support. But that also doesn't necessarily mean that HP lost. Thanks in part to their promo price, they put up a surprisingly good fight when it came to gaming performance, and there were aspects of this system that don't directly impact gaming, but are certainly benefits, like the NVMe boot SSD versus a cheapo SATA one in the iBuy Power rig. Not to mention the carrying handle, the excellent I.O., and the handy, easy hard drive upgrade slots. Now their tech support was far from perfect, but they weren't dismissive or rude to us, and they did eventually solve the problem. After those two, we would have a tie for second if Alienware could get their preloaded OS figured out. And also if their pre-sales and after sales support weren't both abominable across the board. Now I'm sure Alienware would say that we got unlucky, but here's my response to that. Between all the call transfers that we went through, I'm pretty sure we talked to probably half a dozen people who worked there, and every single one of them was worse than both of the people that we talked to at Manegear. So there's just no contest here, Manegear comes in third. Speaking of no contest, Origin PC. They did do some things well. Their staff were polite, competent, and helpful. But at the end of the day, this was a pretty simple transaction. We you $1500 give, you us gaming PC send. And while they did a good job of taking our $1500, I would argue that they didn't really hold up their end of the bargain. Is this a gaming PC? Well, it's a gaming PC, but certainly not for $1500. So I guess that's it, right? Are we done? For this season. For this season? Oh Lordy, are we doing this again? Boy, this was time consuming, but we really hope that you guys have enjoyed it. I know Ivan's been tearing his hair out, but I mean, was it fun at least? Yes, it was. You know, you know, you know it was actually, it was a lot of fun to go through this. We will do something like this that's similar in the future. Leave us a comment in the video description with what you guys would like to see us secret shop, you know, Linum, Tech Investigator, and Stoicsky, and all that good stuff. So, now it's time for our sponsor. Mastrop. The Mastrop Sennheiser HD 6XX headphones sound fantastic. And why shouldn't they? Based on Sennheiser's legendary HD 650s with pretty much nothing tuned. That is why they have sold over 50,000 units of this stuff. Just nice natural bass and a really full sound to these open backed cans. They've got a detachable six foot cable now instead of the ten foot one. That's based on community feedback because people don't want to get tangled up in it. And they include a 1 1⁈ inch plug that's versatile for everyday use, a quarter inch adapter so you can plug it into anything you'd want, and Sennheiser's long term support. Check out the link below to join the drop today. Oh, we have them here. Yes. Look how nice they look. Thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video or even the entire series, go ahead and hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts, like, well, not these. And our community forum, which you should totally join.