How to buy the best video card in 2021

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We’re going to talk about the pros and cons to building your own computer versus buying a pre-built this is a subject that a lot of people usually are resistant to when it comes to the enthusiast computer space or pc gaming because we i think majority of people watching this channel are all about building your own stuff there’s so there’s a lot of reasons why you would want to there’s a lot of reasons why you wouldn’t want to and on the same other you know the other side of the coin the same reasons why you would and wouldn’t want to buy a pre-built computer so it’s call go and talk about some of the pros to building your own obviously you get the satisfaction of choosing the parts that you want buying it from where you want the brands putting it all together firing up the learning experience if you’re trying to learn you get to just really kind of fill your brain with a whole bunch of the goodness of doing it yourself which is i think most people who would build your own computer probably are natural tinkers work on their own cars maybe like to build legos whatever the downside to trying to build your own right now is prices are obviously through the roof and finding products in stock specifically cpus and especially gpus is extremely difficult because we are in the midst uh midst of low inventory and high demand because of cryptocurrencies being you know once again just through the roof a couple of the benefits though to building your own is you know what’s in there you know what wiring’s hooked up.

You know what’s not you know the expandability you know whether or not you’ve run stata cables uh to where the other hard drives can go so if you ever want to expand your storage you can just plug them in you don’t have to run extra cables you basically know every inch of the system the downside is if you build your own system right now you have to service it yourself you have to warranty it yourself you are the warranty so you can see that that’s probably not really a con for a lot of people for a lot of first-time builders it might be let’s talk about build your own because or no not build your own let’s talk about pre-built that’s what i’m trying to say pre-build’s something people tend to push back on this channel quite a bit down in the comments section but i think what a lot of people forget is with the amount of people watching this channel and the newcomers especially that have joined this channel in terms of subscribing within the last year or so are are very green they they are new they don’t have a lot of experience and so they’re trying to weigh whether or not they want to build their own versus buying buying a pre-built computer has a lot of benefits to it one it has a service plan you know you have customer service you can call and get tech support and troubleshooting over the phone two it has a warranty which means if something goes wrong or uh you know something dies you have a company that will assist you in getting those parts replaced some companies though however once you send back the entire system others the tech support might walk you through taking the component out depending on what it is that way you can send back just the component but there is obviously the time that you have to wait for the rma to get it you know approved and send it back and wait for the parts to be replaced one thing to consider though as a con with the entire concept of buying a pre-built computer is the fact that if it is a graphics card that you are waiting on uh in terms of rma yeah waiting is is going to be time consuming just like those that are doing build your own however one of the extreme benefits right now to pre-built is the fact that the sis and an si stands for system integrator which are like the origin pcs the digital storms the exotic pc cyber power i buy power uh digital storm i don’t know if i said digital storm twice doesn’t matter they basically get their own separate allocation from the same aibs that you’re trying to buy from through retail so the distributors for the aibs will have a pallet or whatever that will go to the various builders that way they can continue to operate their business and then they have their for retail distribution so waiting for an rma might not take as long with a pre-built versus build your own because with build your own you can send it back to the manufacturer but what’s been kind of happening lately when people have been tweeting me telling me about their experiences or emailing me they’ll send the part back to you know xyz brand and instead of going on a list or a waiting list or just getting sent a replacement they’re being sent refunds because they’re not able to replace them or even guarantee a replacement within months right now i’ve had i’ve had people send back a couple week old 3080 that has like a fan go bad or something like that and then the brand takes the card and goes oh yeah the fan’s bad we can’t send you another one because we don’t have one so here’s your money back whereas if this were me i’d be like no send me back my card let me put an aftermarket cooler on there or let me water block or something on there don’t just take my card because then they send it off to taiwan or wherever it goes and you never get it back and that’s unfortunate that a lot of the brands have taken that route without even giving you the option they just do it so that’s something to keep in mind if you’re gonna do build your own i think probably the largest benefit right now to going with a pre-built and again this is not a sponsored video this is just an opinion piece is the fact that the pricing for the components in the pre-built are very close to msrp for instance the red x pc which is this one right here actually doesn’t mark up the parts at all you pay you basically pay a 100 bill fee and then um there are you know up sales you can do if you want to go up to a higher tier graphics card higher to your cpu go from an air cooler to a water cooler whatever you only pay the difference in price for the part you don’t have to pay a markup on the part see a lot of sis will handle this like mechanics do a lot of mechanics or automotive repair places will add a 20 parts price fee on top of the price of the part so they’re making 20 of the cost of the part is profit and then obviously the labor to r r or repair and replace the uh um part that’s you know bad so the nice thing about a lot of the sis is because they want your.

Business they’re not marking up the parts at all you’re just paying an extra build fee so a lot of them right now it’s about a hundred dollars is the bill fee um what we found as we well phil did this specifically himself this week and i’d already done it in the last couple weeks is compare the price of specking out a mid-range computer whether it be like a 360 ti with maybe something like a 5600x you know a b550 motherboard like middle of the row type stuff i know a lot of people are like you just described a high-end pc well if you look at the parts sku and where they land that’s basically middle row it’s on average anywhere between 100 to about 300 extra versus the msrp of the parts remember we’re talking about the hypothetical price that was put on the suggested pricing by the manufacturers not retail pricing so retail price versus the actual parts when broken out into a parts list is anywhere between 100 to 300 more depending on the tier of the parts if you’re talking like 30 70s 3080s again msrp that stretches out to about that 300 the lower end the part it seems to be a lot closer to that hundred dollar mark however if you consider the fact that a lot of the sis right now are still not really marking up the cost i say not really sometimes they might add like five percent you know something like that they’re not adding up the marking up the price of the parts this might be the only way you can get the graphics card that you want because buying one via retail right now is nearly impossible so if you can get a 30 60 ti or you can get a 30 70 or even a 3080 in fact phil’s friend just bought from nzxt’s bld a creator pc with a 30 90. it’s gonna take him anywhere between 20 to 30 days to get it but how many of you been waiting more than 20 to 30 days right now to get your system or your graphics card that you need to complete your system that has no graphics card sitting in there remember that system we showed at the start with no gpu.

That’s a reality right now for thousands of people out there that have built their system and literally have no graphics card to put in it whether you sold your old one to try and get a 30 series and then you couldn’t or you decided to build a system when you didn’t realize you couldn’t get a graphics card that’s the reality for many people so here are some suggestions if you don’t have a system right now if this were me we’re talking retail jay i’m going into the store or i’m shopping online to buy something my what i would personally do is i would buy a pre-built the reason being you can still get a complete one now i know that takes a lot of fun out of the whole build your own and trust me uh the last pre-built i owned was actually an alienware aurora back in like 2007 or eight so we’re talking almost 15 years since i’ve personally purchased a pre-built but that’s.

Because for the last 15 years i could buy the parts i wanted at you know availability there there wasn’t an issue like we’re dealing with right now with the exception of the cryptocurrency boom that happened in 2016. so this is a new territory for a lot of people but putting on that whole buyer hat i would buy pre-built because you can still get the cpus you want the gpus you want one of the cons i forgot to mention though is a lot of times you don’t know which graphics card you’re getting it just says rtx 3080 or 3070 but you don’t know if it’s going to be an msi gaming x trio an evga for the win a founder’s edition you don’t really know because a lot of times the sis are just putting a tier there and they’re going to put in any card they can get that has that number on it regardless of whether or not it’s more of a baseline or a high-end card so one of the cons i wanted to mention versus that but i’d much rather know i have a 30-80 coming of some sort then sitting around waiting for the prices to come down you know last week somebody uh messaged me and said hey did you see that the price of 3080s have now reached 2 000.

If you know people that are scalping or selling them on craigslist and i replied back have you seen they’re actually twenty eight hundred dollars now yeah right now you can still find some for two thousand but you’re finding a lot of them for over twenty five hundred and as high as twenty eight hundred dollars for a rtx 3080 and 3090s are now approaching four to five thousand dollars which is absolutely ridiculous however like i just said phil’s friend was able to buy an nzxt bld with a 30 90 in it yeah so so phil just said that when he added up the prices individually to see if it was a good deal because this friend was actually asking me if i would sell him a card it was 3 200 in msrp pricing which you know as well as i do that’s not going to be the reality pricing because of the fact that well just go google right now rtx 3090 is for sale and look at what they’re going for so the fact that they got a complete creator uh pc with an amd what 5000 series what what’s i actually forgot i think they only have one option yeah but the creator pc basically is the the upper tier of nzxt’s bld so he got a high thread count uh cpu he got probably 32 gigs of ram and a 3090 for 3 500 bucks you know what’s funny 3 500 for a pc people would probably like start screaming and yelling in the comments that’s overpriced and ridiculous i think right now people would just be like oh my god.

if i could buy a pc with a 390 for 3 500 bucks sign me up shut up and take my money but that’s why my recommendation honestly right now if you don’t have a system is just start shopping the sis out there look at the brands look at the feedback look at the reviews specifically the customer service reviews you’ve got videos from like linus and gamers nexus where they go undercover and check how the uh customer support and tech support is go with the one that you’re comfortable with and then um you know basically compare the pricing to what msrp is and then compare the pricing to what reality is usually the only thing you have to do to realize you’re actually getting a deal with going with an si right now is the fact of graphics card pricing that’s that’s it but it’s we’re really fortunate because for the longest time uh when the last cryptocurrency boom happened the si pricing was going up linear with the gpu pricing because they were like this is what they’re going for but i think a lot of the brands learned from the backlash that happened last time about profiteering on the pricing of scalp prices of graphics cards especially

When they get them at whatever their wholesale pricing is from the aibs and marking them up made a lot of torch and pitchfork mobs come after them this time around a lot of them are vowing to keep the pricing as close to msrp as humanly possible because of the backlash that happened last time if you oh and if you just want to have the the satisfaction of building it yourself and you don’t care about the warranty because you’re a power user and you just want the parts take it all apart and put it back together i mean i’ve done that before in fact another thing you can kind of do to save some money on the si if you want to go that route just to try and get a graphics card is save money on any of the up sales make sure it has the tier graphics card you want and and the downside is though if you want something like a 3080 or 3070 a lot of times you’re put into like a higher bracket anyway but don’t go with like big ssds don’t go with you know top tier case and you know hard drives ssds just go with basic hard drives go with a basic air cooler go with the cheapest power supply that you can on the list don’t click anything that has an extra cost to it because that’s obviously going to cut into the whole benefit of trying to get your graphics card through going through the si route not only that the fact that those parts are still readily available you know ssds hard drives power supplies coolers that.

Stuff’s not in short supply right now so don’t spend money on that if the goal is to get that but if you have a system that looks like the one we showed at the start of this video where it’s got everything but a graphics card well i guess you could technically buy an si take the graphics card out of it and sell the rest of the parts or let’s just be honest you could probably buy you probably buy an si for the same msr retail pricing right now of the graphics card unless you have all those extra parts for free sell them to your friends or whatever to make some of that money back but um it’s if you’re sitting there now with everything a graphics card that’s kind of a shitty scenario because of the fact that you’ve already spent all the money on those parts but right now there is no end in sight as to how long the msrp pricing or the i keep calling msrp pricing the retail price of graphics cards right now is not looking like it’s going to come down anytime soon now you’ve got companies like tesla going you can buy our tesla’s now with bitcoin which is really smart for tesla because cars depreciate the second you buy them but bitcoin continues to appreciate so it’s kind of an investment from tesla i guess and that’s that’s a rant anyway it’s a it’s a really crappy time right now to be a pc enthusiast but i don’t think a lot of people are even considering si when it comes to your new system.

Because you could be sitting around for months now i’ve got people that have messaged me saying that they’ve gone on to waiting lists from september and october of last year to get on 30 series waiting lists and they’re still waiting so is it worth waiting the approximately 20 days that we’re seeing on average for sis to have lead time for building your system and getting it sent to you um and then having a complete system ready to game or would you rather sit there and still hit f5 on everything and try and sign up for all of these notification groups and these like notification squads being told when certain stuff is in stock just for the hopes of getting that one graphics card and then still building the rest of your system.

So this is where you guys chime in what would you do right now depending on which camp you fall in comment down below with whether or not you just get an si take the graphics card sell the rest just get an si and use that computer or continue to wait for the unicorn that is any gpu.

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