 You can keep hoping the market will magically change and GPUs will begin appearing on the shelves or you can do something about it. That's right, there is a way. Come closer, don't be shy, a little closer. Don't tell anyone, but graphics cards are still on the shelves. They're just hiding in much bigger boxes. Ones that look like this. And today we're gonna find out if getting the RTX 3070 in that PC is worth all the extra money you might end up blowing on the substandard parts included with it. We're also gonna see if there's a cheap way to turn a pre-built like this one into an enthusiast grade machine. Like say by putting a proper power supply in it from our sponsor, Seasonic. Seasonic makes great power supplies for brand new machines and for fixing up older ones. And we're gonna have them linked down below. Pre-built gaming PCs can be cheaper than building one yourself, but it's an open secret that you kinda get what you pay for. In no particular order, here are some of the tricks that big manufacturers use to save a buck on production. Installing only a single memory module rather than two, cheaping out on unsexy components like the motherboard, cooling and power supply, all of which can affect performance, upgradeability and long-term reliability, and signing deals to include bloatware on your PC for an upfront payout. Basically, if it doesn't fit on the price tag at a best buy, they probably went for the bare minimum. I mean, who needs a DRAM cache on your SSD anyway? Now one area where they don't tend to cheap out as hard is the GPU. I mean, sure, you can find gaming PCs on the shelf that have onboard graphics. You can't cheap out much harder than that. But when they've got a GPU in them, it tends to be built to a similar standard as the one that you would buy standalone. Keyword being would buy. Because the reality is it's been so hard for gamers to find GPUs on a shelf that they've resorted to buying entire computers like this one, just to extract their precious graphics cards. To find out if this is actually a good idea, I sent Ploof to our local best buy. His mission, to buy a prebuilt gaming PC with an enthusiast tier graphics card inside. Now the ASUS ROG Strix G15DK wasn't, strictly speaking, on the shelf, but it was available in store. And once the sales rep came back with his big brown box, Ploof paid the 2800 Canadian pesos with the company credit card, strapped that machine to the back of his snowmobile, and made a beeline for the Mexican border. Thankfully, Mexico doesn't have snow, so we caught up with him pretty quickly. Let's take a look at it here then. It's an ASUS, so it should be more like a custom rig than your typical Dell? Starting off strong, we've got an ASUS dual fan RTX 3070 and a Ryzen 5800X cooled by, ooh, a random tiny 80 millimeter fan tower cooler. There's just a single 16 gig stick of SK Hynix memory, although at least it is 3200 megahertz, I guess. There's a 512 gig Western Digital SN530 for our boot drive. This appears to be an OEM only skew with no DRAM cache, and they used a 7200 RPM, two terabyte Toshiba hard drive for extra storage, which is fine. And all of that is sitting on an ASUS Prime B550MK micro ATX board, or so we thought. Our BIOS lists it as a G15DK. And the rig is powered by a Great Wall C700 80 plus bronze power supply. Now, this video is sponsored by Seasonic, so we're not gonna create an obvious conflict of interest by evaluating this beauty in any way, but we can say that the model of our unit is so obscure that the only place we found one for sale is a now delisted post on what appears to be Russian eBay. Now, the case is an ASUS prebuilt special that I absolutely hate for many reasons. We'll get into those later, but let's say it would cost, I don't know, 100 bucks. So that puts us at around 1750 US dollars so far. Throw in a Windows 10 license, an RGB strip, assembly, a cheap wifi card, and we're getting pretty darn close to the $2,000 price tag. Not bad on the face of it. That is, as long as we ignore the fact that the 3070s MSRP was never formally adjusted by Nvidia from 499 to $870. You know what you can still get for MSRP? Trusty LTT water bottle with the new lid, new design, and new colors. Get yours today, lttstore.com. Now, to be clear, it's not like this thing's a pile of garbage. Our out-of-the-box performance was pretty solid, but our CPU reached as high as 90 degrees Celsius in Cinebench, and while our GPU maintained a respectable 69 degrees in FurMark, nice, the piddly 80 millimeter exhaust fan means that as soon as the going gets tough, the fans get going. User complaints about the noise of this machine appear to be entirely on the money. That's strike one, crappy case. Now let's start with the things we can do to improve our situation without spending any more money. We uninstalled all the bloatware we could find. Thankfully, it wasn't that much. Then we installed Ryzen Master and MSI Afterburner to see if our power supply and cooling could handle any overclocking. The GPU managed some minor improvements with a quick and dirty 800 megahertz overclock on the VRAM, though major core clock adjustments resulted in instability. And as for our CPU, well, if the cooler was at its limits before, overclocking is unlikely to fix the problem. So what can we do? Nothing really, at least not without spending some money. Our first idea was to swap it out with the tried and true and cheap Hyper 212, but unfortunately the case isn't deep enough to fit a 120 millimeter tower cooler. That's strike two. Now there are downdraft style coolers out there still, but high performance ones aren't cheap enough that we're really saving any money. So our next thought was to add some more case fans. Unfortunately, ASUS made a couple of small changes to the Prime B550MK, including removing the second case fan header. So we ended up needing a splitter. We then scavenged a few cheap fans, putting our total cost at around 20 bucks for additional cooling, then spent about half an hour getting access to the top and front panels and jury rigging the mounts for our fans because ASUS didn't think, hmm, if I'm gonna put 500 holes in the case, maybe a few of them should be sized and spaced correctly for fans. Strike three. Surprisingly, better case airflow didn't actually address our CPU thermal issues under heavy load though. So we're at a bit of a crossroads here. In gaming, our temps with the stock cooler were perfectly reasonable, averaging in the 70s or even high 60s. So maybe the average gamer just leaves it well enough alone. But for anyone looking to do serious CPU heavy work with this machine, we would strongly recommend spending the 60 to $80 on a good downdraft style cooler like one of these. An all-in-one would be an option, but there's no cooling whatsoever on the VRMs of this motherboard. So going water cooling means that they could end up running really hot. Not to mention that getting a radiator into this thing is gonna be tricky to say the least. Just like putting an Xbox Series S into a computer case is gonna be a little tricky. Get subscribed so you guys don't miss that. Of course, we're not done trying to put lipstick on this pig. Let's increase our budget a little and fix the next most obvious problems, starting with the single channel memory. In a perfect world, we'd like to have another stick of exactly the same RAM. But despite what you may have heard elsewhere, you can mix and match. So we found this 3,200 megahertz module from G.Skill for 60 bucks on Newegg, bringing our new total to about 2150 US dollars. While we were at it, we replaced the Great Wall with a Seasonic Focus, 80 plus gold, 750 watt for a bit of extra peace of mind. To be clear, 700 watts was probably fine for a machine like this. But over-speccing a little bit on power supply means that even as the unit ages, it'll still be able to keep up. And it's a Seasonic, so you know that's gonna contribute to quieting down an already pretty loud machine. These changes also netted us some minor performance improvements in games and a slightly higher Cinebench score, but that's about it. And you can probably sell your Great Wall for 30 or 40 bucks on Facebook Marketplace to recoup some of the Seasonic cost, putting you at around 2100 dollars. And without spending unreasonable amounts of money replacing core components, like motherboard or storage, that's about all we can do with this sucker. So was it all worth it? Well, in the past, no, it wouldn't have been. But these days, for many people, the price that they're comparing against is what they would have to pay a scalper in order to get their hands on a GPU. So let's run the numbers here. Ignoring the GPU, let's recreate the system as we originally purchased it, but without wasting money on crap that we'd have to upgrade later. So better CPU cooler, two eight gig sticks of memory, a more robust motherboard and case, a Seasonic power supply from the get-go, and all SSD storage. That puts us at about 1100 US dollars. We're gonna have those parts in our affiliate links down below. Add a thousand dollar 3070 off eBay, and we're getting a significantly better system, actually, here for only a little bit more cost. Or we could even go back to a hard drive and we could match the cost for our better system. So then, wait a minute, what happened? Okay. This technique of shucking the GPUs in pre-built gaming systems might've been a good workaround near the beginning of the shortage. But as you can see, manufacturers have clearly clued in to the point where it's not actually any better to buy directly from the manufacturer in a system than it would be to buy the stupid thing from a scalper. And to be clear, this has always been a thing. I mean, EVGA basically wrote the book on releasing a card at launch for Nvidia's MSRP, then following it up with a version with their own MSRP that's 20 bucks more, a super clock for another 40, FTW for another 60, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all while quietly discontinuing that original MSRP skew and not shipping any more of them. And I don't blame them for it. The margins in their business are notoriously slim. But when this process ends with cards that are double the original price, like this, it becomes a little harder to swallow. Now this system ended up being just fine. There's nothing inherently wrong with buying a pre-built and using it as a gaming machine, especially if you make a couple of tweaks. And it'll probably go on to live a long and prosperous life as a workstation for one of my staff. But I also wouldn't go out and buy another one of these because priced as it is, it really feels like even system integrators are scalping GPUs at this point. Did you ever buy a pre-built? Are you happy with it? Unhappy with it? Let us know in the comments. And let us know if you're happy to see Seasonic sponsoring pieces like this, where we get to take a closer look at what's going on in the market, what's a good value, what should you upgrade? I mean, it's kind of an obvious one for them because power supplies are usually pretty high up on the list. So go check them out in the video description if you're looking for a power supply upgrade. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out the one where we tested some modern streaming services as an alternative to getting a graphics card at all. They're really not that bad. Well, some of them are not that bad.