When buying a computer, we've always recommended manually selecting components and custom assembly to avoid conflicts, but many people out there don't want to follow that path and prefer prebuilt PCs. The problem is that some companies are very inconsistent with quality control, and that leads to true horrors like the one Gamers Nexus recently found. After paying 5,000 dollars for a prebuilt PC, what they received in exchange was a damaged heatsink, fans installed backward, a processor at 100 degrees, and an official response worthy of a bot...
The recent "Great Graphics Card Crisis" forced consumers to modify their strategies to acquire a GPU without sacrificing organs in the process, and one of the most effective was buying a prebuilt PC. In general, the main OEMs withstood the component shortage much better, and the user could either use the system intact, or extract the card and sell the rest of the hardware to recover part of their investment.
The folks at Gamers Nexus, known for exhaustive hardware testing and marathon overclocking sessions, decided to adapt to the 'drought' and analyze different prebuilt PC models, from Dell and HP to Lenovo and NZXT, plus iBuyPower, Alienware (which is also Dell), and other strange specimens. In most cases, Gamers Nexus found pure junk, whether in the form of bloatware, terrible component selection, or sheer incompetence during assembly. The latest 'bug' on their list is the Skytech Mark 9, with $4,941.98 on its price tag...
5,000 Reasons Not to Buy a Prebuilt PC
The unit suffered shipping damage: one of the fans on the heatsink was left hanging inside the case, and its front received a dent in the grill area. The initial contact from the company was very good, as they offered a full replacement. But the real problem... is everything else. The fan didn't just arrive hanging; its partner was installed backward, creating a vacuum zone over the heatsink that sent the processor to 100 degrees Celsius. When they asked about it, the response was basically "what's the problem," which suggests a certain disconnect at Skytech.
The heatsink also ended up bent (this is better appreciated in one of the images), which represents a greater risk to the motherboard. Additionally, they used glue on the RGB connector, a bad idea from every point of view (as it could tear off the connector), and at least two of the screws on the motherboard were loose. Some of those details could be the result of a problematic shipment... but not the backward fan. To top it off, the BIOS wasn't even configured correctly (e.g., XMP profile disabled).
In summary, no one should judge an entire company for the failures in one of its computers (after all, the sample size is still 1), but it's reasonable to expect another level of attention to detail if we pay $5,000. Caveat emptor.
