Custom PC Build Experience at Guanghua Digital Plaza

Linus explores buying a custom PC in Taiwan, tests and gives it away.

### Building a Custom Gaming PC in Taiwan's Guanghua Digital Plaza
* 🇹🇼  Visiting Taiwan's Guanghua Digital Plaza, a six-story tech mall filled with **a variety of tech products**.
* 💻  Looking to build a custom gaming PC in the plaza, with the goal of **finding a good deal** and **experiencing the process**.
* 💰  Main Gear's Apex Rush system in the plaza costs around **$5,000**, featuring a Core i5 CPU, a decent GPU, **16GB of RAM**, and **512GB of storage**.
* 🛠️  Following the process of building a custom PC, including **setting a budget**, **discussing requirements with the shopkeeper**, and **making a payment**.
* 🏪  Choosing a shop on the fifth floor based on **intuition** and having a **smooth interaction with the shopkeeper**.
* 📦  Receiving the custom-built gaming PC, which features an **RTX 4090 GPU**, **64GB of RAM**, and **4TB of storage**.
* 🛠️  Encountering a memory compatibility issue that required **rearranging the RAM sticks** to achieve the **correct configuration**.
* 🔍  Inspecting the build quality, which included **excellent cable management**, a **fully water-cooled GPU**, and **legitimate Windows 11**.
* 🎮  Testing the custom PC's performance, which delivered **impressive gaming performance at 4K** and maintained **good thermals under load**.

I am at Guanghua Digital Plaza in Taiwan, and this place is flipping amazing. It's six stories of shops just like this one, packed floor to ceiling with treasure. But is it a good place to buy a PC? I'm going to put it to the test. But which shop should I choose? There's so many options. Sporting Goods has technology, I guess, but not PC. H two console, I think. Yeah, ink is more Colton's thing. Now we're getting closer. Ooh, these look like good deals, but I want a game. Oh my God, Jake found the one. It's up a floor. But like guys, if I was going to commission a system like this back home, it would cost a fortune. I'm talking like one of my cameraman's legs. What? How much? About $5,000. And that's just the starting price for one of Main Gear's Apex Rush systems, coming with Hardline liquid cooling. And while that config has a decent GPU, they've got it backed up with a Core i5 CPU, 16 gigs of RAM, and just

512 gigs of storage. I mean, Main Gear, I know you guys make good stuff, but who do you think you are, Apple? I bet these guys can do a little bit better, and I bet I can find someone to sponsor this, like Corsair. The all-new K65 Plus Wireless features preed Corsair mlx red linear switches and connectivity options of 2.4 GHz Bluetooth or wired us USB. Learn more at the link below. Step one is to introduce myself and set a budget. Oh, hi. Do you like to build PCs like this here? Yeah, I want to play like the best games at like 4K. Um, I have a monitor. I just need a PC. Okay, uh, my budget is $170,000. Okay, New Taiwan dollars, of course, but I want something that looks really cool. Like, can you build this? Can you build that? Yeah, I build it. You built it? Yeah. I was worried there could be a language barrier with the shopkeeper, but as it turned out, not only was his English great, but he said he's the one.

who built those demo systems step two play dumb. I've always believed that our character is determined not by how we treat our peers, but by how we treat those who might be in a vulnerable position. So I am not going to be flexing any of my tech knowledge here. How does it work? I don't know what parts I want. I just know I want something that can game at 4K, um, like really, really fast, like, with, um, like, I, yeah, like. I don't want, like, the one with the floppy tubes though. Hard pipe, okay, yeah, like if someone come Iron Man, do I like what Iron Man? Sure, yeah, yeah, sure. I built an Iron Man and the Cyber Punk before. Oh, cool, okay. I don't need it to have like a special theme or anything though, just like, like honestly, just like a nice clean look, like that is pretty good. Okay, um, but can I get it by Friday? This Friday? Yeah, yeah, I think so. You think you can do by Friday? Yeah, I think so. Okay, I can give you a menu of

like like menu what I use inside oh I mean yeah sure I don't know any of that though so you just got to tell me you got to tell me what's good for that price okay yeah I I'm trusting you okay okay again go around I'll just send you a picture the okay menu and price okay how about that okay oh that's perfect okay sorry it was name right okay nice to meet you okay thank you thank you okay well that went pretty smoothly I think so I'm committing to just handing over the money regardless of what quotation comes back let's see if they give me a good deal or rip me off oh buddy got back to me do I like white or black I think I like white it is mindblowing to me that we don't do more of this back home he's just like yeah what's your number can I just text you boom sends me a gallery of systems like yeah how do you want it white or black what's your Vibe it's great it feels so

personal he ask what brands I like. I don't know what brand is good. Just trusting you to put together the best system that looks like you said awesome. And he keeps wanting to ask me. He's like, Do you want AMD Intel? I'm like, Which one should I get? You tell me, man. Let's go. Give me a good system. Step three, payment. I was legitimately pretty stressed at this point. I don't have any idea what my work credit card limit is, and accounting is not going to be impressed when I hand them a receipt for some computer in some foreign currency with no tangible asset to show for it. What? I'm going to carry this thing home with me. I'm going to have to find someone to give this thing away to before I leave. But that's a problem for another day. Just got the quote, time to pay my deposit on what I think is going to be a pretty, uh, sick system. Okay, let's see if my car works when I finish. I'll write you a ticket. And again, great. And then I can come pick

up Friday yeah perfect. You have it all right yep. Should be good great okay great. So uh you'll message me on Thursday or Friday yeah okay perfect thank you very much success eventually uh shout out bank one for the you know fraud detection this random $5,000 transaction over sees. And I guess also shout out Bank to for having my back and making sure my money can be spent so end up using that card. Sorry accounting department we'll get it reconciled now we play the waiting game. I can't believe it let me just tap a card. I didn't even have to enter my pin just like Scribble on a touch screen for my signature and poof money gone let's see what I get in return. I wouldn't blame you for thinking does the world really need another handheld gaming PC at this point. Here it is my friends concrete proof that satire is dead I think you can take notes faster than that like the Speedy segue to our sponsor. Who's laughing now Colton well he says it's ready good luck.

everybody can't believe he finished in 3 days. I don't know what this this is. Sorry it's a computer. We oh, we spent 5 grand on a computer. Oh my God, us us. The best part is we have absolutely no way of transporting this thing home, so we're going to have to let give it away or something. Oh, okay, all right, that's probably F. Oh, hi, just uh, picking up the system. Okay, wow, that looks awesome. Wow, hold on, I want to get a picture of it. So you did like a thermal test already, yeah, awesome. I guess I should have asked this before, is there some warranty on the system or how, like, how if I have a problem with it, can do you guys fix it? Yeah, for how long, about a year, one year. Okay, great, three, four years, you can still find me. Oh, okay, I came here on the bus. Good luck, good luck, yeah, 40K AG, wow, okay. How many computers do you guys build every day, about five, wow, wow, okay, wow, busy every day, okay, thank you.

you very much good doing business with you time thank you. I will you have any problem okay sounds good thank you. You know, I got to say, other than the lack of a, you know, I don't know, card or something to carry the system out of here, that's about as Boutique an experience as I could have expected. I mean, he had it running a test suite and everything right when I walked in the door, so I could see everything running, including thermal testing. It's all packed up nicely, gave me all my accessories, seemed confused by the fact that I wanted a receipt for such an expensive purchase, but other than that, pretty good experience. I want to know, is this system so custom that if he didn't give you a receipt, he would still know how to warranty it? Uh, I mean, he's only been at that location, he said, for seven months, so I don't know how they would have known. Um, do they just take people's word for it? The level of trust seems pretty high. I mean, he doesn't even leave his store.

supervised, so why did I choose a shop on the fifth floor? I don't know. This is very reminiscent of our early days, though. Following you around a tech hall or te spot, you calling weird stuff. I thought you meant the early days of the channel, and I was going to say, Yeah, it was fun doing a video like this. It's so hard these days because like a lot of the time, people recognize me. I wasn't sure if he was going to know LT. It's possible he did, but he just has a good Poker Face. I'm not sure 'cause I did kind of seem like a real idiot. No, I don't know what Intel is. You know, if I was anywhere other than Taipei, I would not want to ride a bus with this thing, but we're not, are we? Okay, so he said he builds four to five systems a day. That about right? Uh, in the shop, yeah, probably. I mean, looking at how much inventory they carrying, probably not systems like this, but okay. Then why were you surprised by 3 days?

because I thought he might have to wait for, you know, water blocks to come in stock and stuff like that. Like there's a lot of specialized parts in here. I didn't think he'd necessarily have a 4090 on hand. Small shops back home stock almost nothing when it comes to high-end hardware. I mean, look at the stuff we cleared out of Keith's shop. I don't know enough about computer components. Like I've heard of 490, but is the rest of this really high in? Oh yeah, I think you guys are going to be pretty impressed when we have a look at how this stacks up to that main gear system. Finally, let's have a look at what we got. Haven't done an unboxing in a long time. I'm rusty. You help this. No, no, I don't need help. I got this. Dang it, break it. No, I'm not going to break it. I'm not going to break it. Okay. Oh, right. I forgot to mention. Really good packaging, by the way. It's double boxed and uses a really, really

nice closed sell foam even though this system is probably too heavy for the packaging. If it was a more reasonable one, I think it would survive shipping pretty well. Not that they would normally ship the systems to the customer at a store like that. It occurs to me I don't know what the store is called. Oh, not bad. Wow, those ubben though. Okay, buddy's got skills. Let's get this side panel off. This is so flipping clean. It wasn't that long ago that bixy would have been considered a budget-tier water cooling brand, but I got to say they do not look out of place in this system, and the craftsmanship of these bends is just outstanding. This length right here is the hardest one to nail because this one or this one, well, you can always do the bend and then make slight adjustments to it after the fact. This one right here, you can't adjust, and he's got it perfectly parallel to the rest of the case. That is awesome. You know I'm looking for flaws here, and I just

can't find them. When an ignorant customer gives you a budget, you could just not bother buying a vertical GPU Mount. You could just pocket the difference. You could not bother putting in the extra work of grabbing a reverse Direction fans so that from the inside, you know all the hubs are facing in, but they put in the work. Okay, maybe the back side, maybe the cable management sucks, let's have a look. Not bad, not bad at all. Oh, I found a flaw. Andy, ah, he's an Andy man. The peels are still on. Okay, not a flaw for my camera operator, he's into that. Yep, I like peels removed. No, keep there, no, no. And while we're back here, we've got a seic vertex 1 1200 W fully modular power supply. Multiple opportunities to cheap out there, chose not to. All right, time to fire it up. How convenient is it that our hotel has a little gaming room? Look at this. Are they odds you put English Windows on it? May 'cause they us speak English, yeah, maybe. Let's hope you're ready, big moment.

let's do it here we [Music] go wo wow oh wow buddy. When the instruction is make it look awesome and you deliver this, you followed the instructions. This looks great, man. I'm just admiring again how parallel these tubes are. This one coming off the reservoir is perfectly aligned with the one coming off the GPU, which, again, he had to spend extra in order to achieve. To put in these spacers, I can't find a cut corner, at least not yet. What about the spec? Maybe main gear comes out ahead there. Conveniently, we can check that with the pre-loaded it of 64 extreme. Very nice. It's a trial version, which technically not what you're supposed to do, but let's have a look at the specs here. Oh my God, Andy. What main gear just got taken for a walk. They had a core i5, right? This has a 7950 x3d top chip on the market. Okay, they had a 4080 super, which is pretty okay. 490. They had 16 gigs of RAM. I'm looking

at wait wait wait wait wait hold on oh I don't know how about 64 what do we got for storage whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoo dude they had 512 gigs of storage this has eight times that amount okay it was a little sloppy leaving my uninitialized drive that's not great it's a lot better than not having it how are we doing for bloatware though IO 64 ryzen Master furm Mark obviously those are not part of a bare Windows install but I don't consider them malicious in any way so I'm okay with that MSI Center Nvidia drive I'm the one who put OBS on it nothing zero bloat wear I feel like this is too good to be true though no one can be perfect oh I got something Expo is not enabled and my Ram is running at 3600 megat transfers per second that is very slow for a rizon system let's see if we can turn it on to his credit though that's a

nice up-to-date bios love to see that. Okay Moment of Truth did he validate Expo and maybe it just reset we're going to find out does that bky CPU block have a coolant temperature LCD on it. 3 hours later no post oh wait wait it changed the code changed from 15 to 64 oh who Who whoo oh oh oh uhoh. The good news is the fix should be as simple as removing half of the memory still giving me twice as much as my main gear would have had as long as I can actually get it out the the um water tubes are a little bit in the way still no dice but I do have an idea it's been a long time since I've seen this really matter but I noticed that my two dual Channel kits you can tell from the serial numbers are separated so here's the two I pulled out before which were in a dual Channel pair and here's the one I pulled out just now one10 that's a kit and the one that's in.

there in this one are another kit usually doesn't make that big of a difference, but if the sticks have different ic's on them, it can cause compatibility issues especially running at maximum speed. Wait, no way was that it, dude. Okay, I haven't seen that in years. That's like ancient troubleshooting from the Dark Times. 5600 mega transfers, that's it. It's such a simple error. You open up two kits, you just have all four sticks, you put them in in any order, and 50/50 chance you get it wrong. Let's put the other two back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's put the other two back. Let's see, I'm going to give it one more chance, and then I'm going to pull those two sticks, and we're going to call it 32 gigs. Yeah, well, there you have it. It wouldn't be an LTT video without a little bit of troubleshooting, and I still consider it a win for the system configuration, but I'm not super thrilled about my memory running at 3600 megat.

transfers per second by default and needing to spend bunch of time moving memory sticks around in order to get 5600. Which on this platform would result in a measurable performance difference. Hi, I just noticed Google Chrome was pre-installed too. It's one of the first things that I install, so I just didn't really register it. But questionable while this is some stress tests. Why don't we have a look at how the shop handled all of our included accessories? Okay, good power cable in a pretty obvious spot right here. All manuals included, extra cables included for our power supply, pretty much as expected. GPUs don't come with much in the way of accessories these days, but the reason I want to open this one up is I want to see what he did with the stock cooler because that card is not water-cooled by default. This is S tier, this is exactly what I would do if I was taking the time to do it myself. He pulled out every screw obviously to get the block on and he put every screw back in where

it goes so putting this card back together is as simple as undoing it, remembering everything, putting the PCB back in the middle, and doing it all back up. If there's one thing that I could criticize, it's that, you know, maybe I would cover up this thermal paste so it doesn't, you know, get goop on my hands when I'm trying to handle it in the future. That's really such a nitpick though. This is really good. So there's my two kits of memory, one of which works at a time. Legit Windows 11 can't take that for granted in smaller shops, but there it is right there. It's worth noting that we did find some minor errors, but I'm still extremely happy for the price. Buddy was extremely responsive, and the customer service was maybe too much. He messaged me at 2:30 in the morning last night being like, Did you set it up? It's a fair assumption that someone who just bought a $5,000 gaming PC is probably up all night playing on it.

maybe not 2:30 in the morning next time. Still, it's cool to have that personalized touch, and I genuinely felt like he just wanted to know if I love the system. Let's go find out if we love it. Not bad, 10 minutes of fur Mark and Prime 95 blend. Nothing has crashed, and the hot spot on this GPU is under 70°. And okay, it doesn't get that quiet at idle, but it isn't any louder under load, so I consider this extremely acceptable. Let's fire up a real game. Casual 350 FPS at 4K, anyone? Sure, why not? Well, it works great. I think it's time for us to take this out and find somebody to give it to. We're going to keep it simple. The first person who walks up and says hi, they get a computer. Mainly, I just don't want to carry it for very long. Maybe I'll walk to the bakery. I like feel ridiculous if we were at the show floor. We'd probably have better luck. Hello, are

you sorry, are you how do I pronounce? Yeah, hi, I love your videos. Oh, uh, thank you. It's an honor to meet you. Oh, cool. So it's your lucky day. Yes, it's very lucky for me toet. No, no, no, you, you don't know though. You don't, you don't know why it's your lucky day because I'm giving that computer to the first person who recognizes me on the street. D, I don't know what to say. I'm in shock. Thank you. Is this real? You might need to get an Uber or a taxi or something. I can give you some cash to take a cab 'cause I think your bike is going to be, uh, not able to carry it. All the accessories are in there, all the cables and everything like that. Congratulations. Enjoy your computer and thank you so much and enjoy this segue to my sponsor Vessi. Here in Vancouver, we learned these past couple of weeks that just because it's June doesn't mean we're free of rainstorms quite yet.

thankfully, we have a secret weapon: vessie. They claim their shoes are extremely waterproof thanks to their diatex technology. So, even that June Monsoon won't leave us shaking in our boots. The Stormburst shoes are now available in low-profile form, so they're breathable and comfortable in the summer. Its rugged rubber outsole with extra grip means you can take on the trails, bike on the beach, or simply get to work without a second thought. Head over to vy.com, Linus Tech Tips, and get 15% off your first purchase. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the time I built a computer at a tech mall in China.

I Bought a $5000 PC in a Random Asian Tech Mall

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

Shopping for a High-End PC at Guanghua Digital Plaza

Guanghua Digital Plaza in Taiwan offers a wide selection of PC shops across six stories, with Main Gear offering a high-end system for $5,000.

The customer sets a budget of $170,000 NTD, plays dumb to negotiate with the shopkeeper, and is impressed by the smooth communication and the offer of a custom-built PC.

The shopkeeper quickly responds with a gallery of systems to choose from, offering a seamless and efficient customer experience.

Confusion and Satisfaction in Buying a Custom Computer System

The customer feels stressed about choosing the right computer components and is unsure about the payment process.

Despite the high cost, the customer is satisfied with the experience of picking up the custom computer system.

There are lingering questions about warranty and the high level of trust in the store's customer service.

Touring a PC Hardware Shop and Inspecting a New System

A tech enthusiast visits a PC hardware shop in Taipei and inspects a high-end custom-built PC.

The shop owner demonstrates impressive skills in cable management and water cooling.

The visitor is amazed by the attention to detail and quality of the build.

The PC build features impressive parallel tubes and carefully chosen components for optimal performance.

It outperforms the Main Gear system in terms of the CPU, storage, and lack of bloatware.

However, the build faces issues with RAM speed and initial boot failure, requiring troubleshooting for a successful post.

Troubleshooting Memory Issues and PC Build Quality

Different ICs on memory sticks can cause compatibility issues, especially when running at maximum speed, leading to the need for troubleshooting.

The PC build quality is praised, with attention to detail in the handling of accessories and the installation of components, despite minor errors.

The customer service for the gaming PC is noted as being extremely responsive, although possibly overly so.

Impromptu Computer Giveaway and Sponsor Segue

A YouTuber gives away a computer to the first person who recognizes him on the street, leading to a grateful and shocked recipient.

The YouTuber then seamlessly transitions into a sponsorship segue for Vessi shoes, promoting their waterproof and summer-friendly qualities.

The video ends with a suggestion for viewers to watch another one of the YouTuber's videos.