Amazon, Please Stop This Gaming PC Scam

- "Paid so much for this PC, and it crashed one week after the return window closed. My son is heartbroken. We are unable to fix it. Not sure what to do. Removed by Amazon. "Twice now this company has sold me a damaged computer. First one, the graphics wouldn't register in the computer, and now my computer won't register to the monitor." Crossed out. "I'm super irritated that my wife can't use the gaming PC for gaming because they sent her a defective PC." Removed. What? It is 2023. And you've s

een me get scammed purposely on many occasions. But this, this, my friends, goes beyond a mere scam. This is fraud. (echoes) This is fraud. (stamp thunders) I, last year, did a video building the cheapest Amazon gaming PC I could that was remotely okay. It's like 300 bucks. Fun video, performed well, yada yada yada. So it's 2023, I figure, "Hey, let's do an updated version. See what parts are out there." And so I went on Amazon, typed in gaming PC and started scrolling and kept scrolling until I

started finding some results that seemed a little odd. Behold, my friends. This holy... - [Matt] Where's the rest of ya? - Where's the rest? (laughs) This is a system that I paid $500 for. It is advertised gaming PC, gaming PC, gaming PC. And look what you get with your gaming PC. Okay? So you get yourself an RGB strip. You get yourself a tiny little graphics card, which is a GTX 7, wait 750? Wait, that's not even what they told me it was. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. - The listing do

es say that it comes with a GTX 650. - [Matt] You defrauded them! (Austin laughs) - "Please don't move this label. These video ports are disabled. Use video ports of your video card below." It's just like the crappiest sticker. Like Cool. Matt, no, we B roll this. Oh, okay. - [Matt] This thing was $500! - Desktop computer, Intel i5, 3.1 gigahertz. Okay, now I'm gonna stop you right there. Intel i5, sounds reasonable, "But what kind of i5?" you might ask. Well, if you scroll down, and you scroll

down, it's an i5 2400, 10 generations behind. I'm telling you, these components are basically e-waste. Oh! Aha, they didn't give us the parts at all. It literally immediately pops up. It's an i7 2600, which is a reasonable step up from the i5 that they were promising. Did we get lucky and get a better system this time? Yeah, I'll take an i7 and a slightly newer GPU, theoretically, but you could probably just as easily get a worse one. This stuff is all worth literally nothing. So they don't care

which one they even send you. Let me actually show you what I'm talking about. "Cause it's one thing to like talk about it. I'ma open up amazon.com. Gaming PC search on Amazon, okay? Ignore the top two sponsor listings. We've got this. Number two is the system that I purchased. This is the Alarco. This is exactly it. This has 2,700 ratings! I didn't see. - Okay, I just wanna make sure you rebooted there. - Hold on, I'm gonna conservatively say that one out of what? Maybe 10 people will review s

omething on Amazon. So they're selling tens of thousands of these. And here's another one in another different case for the same price. Here's the one that I supposedly purchased. Another one that I supposedly purchased. You know what I think is going on right now, is that there are a couple of companies like Alarco, who clearly are the most successful from, you know, first glance, who've gamed the SEO on Amazon, have owned the gaming PC search. - [Matt] You think for someone who doesn't know PC

s, they're gonna look at this $1,500 one, and they go, "Oh my god, that's too expensive." And they go, "Oh, a $500 one, it's a little slow. But is it a thousand dollars slower? I don't know." - It is clear to me there are shenanigans afoot. Skullduggery abounds. Let me take a minute. Let me build a system for you. Let me show you what $450 should actually get you if you have a little bit of time to actually build a system yourself, and what a modern system should contain. So it's one thing to ta

lk about the performance or the lack of performance of the system, but it's another thing to actually show you what you're really getting with this. So the first thing I wanna do is get a closer look at the CPU. The advantage of having a large case with nothing inside is it is very easy to work on. The downside is that there's basically no reason to ever do this because, while this is old, there's actually no real upgrades you could do to this. Not really. This, my friends, is our Intel Core i7

2600. This processor was released 12 years ago, 2011. - [Kinsley] I think I used that for the first gaming PC I ever built in high school. - [Matt] That, that's made me feel old. Mine was a Pentium III. - You're old. This, my friends, is an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G, and for the low price of $178 purchased directly from amazon.com, this has a massive amount of performance compared to what you're getting with the Core i7. So we're gonna go from four cores on this to eight cores on the Ryzen chip. They're

also far newer. They support hyper threading, and importantly, this also has totally reasonable integrated graphics. You'll be able to game way better than this dedicated graphics card, which is almost 10 years old. Well, how much would I actually be spending on this? - So on eBay, what's actually really funny is that like, it's actually kind of hard to find those specific parts. Like all the i7 2600s I got were the K version, which will overclock, 30 bucks on eBay, and then the GTX 750Ti, whic

h is also better, 56 on eBay. - Something else I don't understand is they're using a one terabyte hard drive, which is just stupid. Like I get that you're getting capacity, but like so for my system, I'm using a 500 gigabyte Crucial P3. Not only is this going to be like legitimately 30 times faster than the hard drive, but this also wasn't even that expensive. 50 bucks? - So for the SSD, that was actually 35. - [Austin] Wha, no! - Which fun fact, that is exactly how much we found the same HDD fo

r on eBay. - Now I understand that because the system is so old, I actually couldn't install this. I'd have to get a SATA SSD, but even then, it's still the same price. It's gonna be so much faster. Like the fact that they put that in there, I'm gonna just guess that they just had a pile of old hard drives, and they also just stuffed it in here. But I really do wanna tell you, what do you think they're actually doing? They're probably taking these old systems which are e-waste. They're meant to

be recycled. They're salvaging the components that they can out of them, which to be fair is not, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, beats it going in a landfill, but they're not spending $150 on components for this. No, no, no, no, no. Companies are probably paying them to take these components. I mean, this stuff is a decade old. Looking at the rest of this, I mean, it looks like they just straight ripped it out of a Dell. So we've got a very generic cheap board, which especially for a s

ystem this old, you can get for pennies on the dollar. GHT 2022. Wait, they. Wait, I'm just realizing, they watermarked this RAM. Says, "GHT 2022." So I'm assuming when they get these things in, and they're recycling from the Dells, they probably do a quick little test to see if the RAM still works. They put a little stamp on it, and they put it in their pile of components. - [Kinsley] $18 on Amazon, that's almost $1 per gigabyte. - Now I'm actually going to be using pretty much the exact same a

mount of RAM. So I'm gonna also be going with 16 gigs of RAM for my system. The big difference is this is going to be running far, far faster, which is important, because this is going to be feeding, not only my CPU, but also my GPU. We've got a good idea of how bad this system is, but let me actually build my system, which, again, cost the same amount of money, is gonna be a lot more powerful. Let me build this, we're gonna put them side by side, and let's just see what kind of performance you'

re getting out of the Scamazon PC compared to what you could do if you did it yourself. 'Cause feeling pretty confident my system's gonna be a little bit better. By a little bit, I mean like a lot. Alright, so my $450 build is ready to go. Now at first glance, it looks very similar to the Scamazon special over here. Now while in hindsight, I probably should have picked a case that didn't have a white interior to make my cable management look a little bit better. But other than that, this is actu

ally really similar. We've got ourselves four RGB fans, as opposed to three on this system. I would say my RGB is maybe not quite as bright as that, but honestly, the cases are very similar. To illustrate the difference between my system and the Alarco, I've got Cinebench. Now this is a CPU benchmark. It's generally a good sort of idea for the responsiveness and the processing power of each system. So the Alarco scored 681 on single core, 3342 on multi core, and I will say it took a very long ti

me to run. (coughs) When you come over to my system, I've got almost triple the single core, 1504, and like four or five times the multi core, 13686 compared to 3342. All this to say that for the same money, my system has a massively higher level of performance, but it's one thing to see CPU and responsiveness, and I've got an SSD which means it doesn't take me five minutes to load "Fortnite," but let's actually do some gaming. They promised that this is great for "Fortnite." So let's take 'em u

p on it. Let's actually load up a game of "Fortnite" on each and see how they compare. If I lose, I'm gonna be really sad. So I will say, as we were setting up this, we couldn't exactly match the settings from the leaflet. Mostly because "Fortnite" has been updated and some things have changed, but we've got it pretty close. So we actually have a pair of matching 1600-by-900 monitors. They're tiny and not very good looking, but, again, we're trying to keep it fair. So my settings here are essent

ially, I've got custom, which is mostly just low. I've got view distance set to epic. I do actually have temporal super resolution anti-aliasing, which means that it's running at 66% of 900P, which is 720-ish or whatever. But we've got it as close as possible. But importantly, I'm going to match that on this system, which I'm sure is gonna tell me like, "Hey, you can run way faster," but. Matt, would you care to join me and see what the actual performance of these systems are? - Oh, we gonna fig

ht each other? - Yep. I'm going to be playing on the Alarco. Matt is going to be playing on the $450 system, and let's see what we're actually going to be able to get. Look, okay, you're in the game already. How long does it take for me? (fast forward whining) - [Matt] I'll get them with my sword! (fast forward whining) - [Austin] Bro! - [Matt] I just took out Tomato Town, so. - There we go. I'm in, okay. I will say my system is playable right now. I'm getting like mid-40s. It's not good. Yours

is consistently over 60 FPS though, right? - [Matt] My average right now is 71. - You're clearly getting a lot more performance than I am. - [Matt] I could definitely push this up higher for graphic settings, yeah. - But using, I kind of understand this computer right now. It's just barely good enough that if I'm some 12-year-old kid, and I get this, I'm like, "I'm playing 'Fortnite,'" 'cause it's technically playable. But you look at it compared to this, which mind you is not exactly a massivel

y powerful PC, but is better in every possible way, and you're getting like what? 50% more frame rate than I am? - Let's play some "Forza" on it. - It's one thing to just follow their guideline and, you know, play the game that they recommend. But I just wanna try a more modern title, and see if it's remotely feasible? Wow, you're not good at donuts, Matt. - [Matt] Cool, thanks. Really appreciate the. - There you go, you got it now. Just get a nice wide, wide slide. I mean, oh boy, wow, did you

see that lag? Part of my problem, especially with an open world game like this, is that it's running on a hard drive, which means that as you load assets in, it gets choppy. I think this Alarco is pretty much the bare minimum to be able to play most games. Now I'll actually say that the fact that they sent us the 750 instead of the 650 actually makes a pretty big difference. This has four gigs of RAM, which is pretty much the bare minimum for a lot of newer titles. That 650 that we had ordered o

nly had one gig of RAM, which means that most games like "Forza" probably wouldn't have even run. So one thing I don't understand with this are the reviews. Now there are a lot of negative reviews for Alarco on Amazon of people having very legitimate complaints, and instead of those complaints being heard, they're removing the comments. "They did not give us the license for the Windows. Now have no way to contact them, no website or customer service number." Perfectly reasonable one-star review

crossed out! "This item was fulfilled by Amazon, and we take responsibility for this fulfillment experience." "Ordered a gaming PC with an i7 Core processor as advertised on the listing. When I received the item and started it up, it says only it's an i5." Again, crossed out. "This item was fulfilled by Amazon." Like how we ordered the i5 and got the i7. Someone ordered the i7 and got the i5. Like they're just shipping these things out. They don't care. "I'm a 12-year-old boy who spent lots of m

oney on this PC. It never functioned as advertised. And local computer repair guys will not even look at it. It seems like this is a company that scams 12-year-olds out their birthday money." Removed by Amazon! This is a 12-year-old kid! He bought this, he even recognizes! How is it that a 12-year-old can recognize that this company exists to scam 12-year-olds out of money? And Amazon, not only is not doing anything about it, they removed his review! This is not okay. This is not okay. I hope, a

nd sincerely, I hope that someone from Amazon sees this video and does something about this. There's nothing against the idea of selling a computer on Amazon that has some older components in it. That's fine. But you should disclaim that. Don't just say Core i5 and call it a day and then bury the actual model number 15 pages deep on the listing. Tell me what I am buying. Disclaim that it does have some used components and charge me a reasonable amount. 200 bucks for this thing, I could buy it. B

ut $500 and being on the top of the Amazon gaming PC search, what are you doing? We look at a lot of silly scams and goofy things and everything, but like this is at a different level. This is a completely different level, and I really think that someone at Amazon needs to do something about this. Because these kids are getting straight up ripped off.