### Evaluating Amazon's Overall Pick for PC Building Choices

Amazon's overall pick badge may simplify choices, but it doesn't guarantee the best performance in PC builds.

### Evaluating Amazon's Overall Pick: A PC Building Experiment
* 🖥 In a quest to determine if Amazon's "**Overall Pick**" badge is trustworthy, a second PC build was created using only items that received this designation.
* 🤔 The "**Overall Pick**" badge was introduced in 2023 and requires products to have **high sales**, a **minimum four-star rating**, and **infrequent returns**, which could indicate **quality and reliability**.
* 💻 The build featured an MSI Tomahawk Wi-Fi motherboard, a Ryzen 7 7700X CPU purchased at a **39% discount**, and a 32GB Corsair DDR5 memory kit, all of which performed well despite some **minor compatibility issues**.
* 💾 For storage, a **Crucial BX500 1TB SATA SSD** was chosen, which raised questions about its suitability compared to **faster NVMe options**, but it had a **solid reputation with good reviews**.
* 🔌 The power supply was an RM850X, providing **ample power for future upgrades**, while a Corsair 4000D Airflow case was selected for its **good design** despite some complaints about **space**.
* 🎮 The final GPU was an RTX 3060, which, while not the latest model, was expected to **perform adequately for gaming at 1080p and 1440p**, though concerns about its **longevity** were noted.
* 📊 The total cost for the build was **$1,147**, which was competitive compared to other configurations, yet it faced stiff competition from a handpicked build that offered **better performance for a slightly lower price**.
* 🔍 Ultimately, while the Amazon-selected components were decent, they fell short of **outperforming a custom build that prioritized GPU performance**, showcasing the complexities of **trusting algorithmically selected products**.

when we took only the top results last time we noticed that hey if you're willing to scroll past the sponsored first result Amazon actually provides very clear guidance for what they feel is the best choice with this helpful little badge but should we trust it?

I mean on the one hand I'm sure that Mr. Bezos would only mine the finest of data from our purchases and reviews and use that to lead us to the promised land of value PC gaming town surely he would never use his powers for capitalistic evil but of course on the other hand

reality so we built a second all Amazon PC this time using only their overall pick to see if beating back the title wave of sponsored crap really is as simple as just trusting Amazon the guys who sold us out in the first place will it be better let's find out after this

segue the segue this segue this segue to our sponsor ug green their Uno series of charging accessories may have cute little faces but that doesn't make them any less feature so add some fun to the boring act of charging your devices check them out using our links and save

big during their Black Friday sale my first question was what exactly is is the overall pick badge well based on what we can find it looks like it was added to their Amazon's Choice system back in 2023 and in a nutshell it takes our herd mentality concept so the idea

of just buying whatever's popular cuz Hey it couldn't be that bad to a whole new level to become an overall pick though an item must not only be purchased often it also needs a four-star rating or greater and must be returned infrequently that extra bit of data about returns is

What makes this such a game-changer? Exposing that to shoppers makes sense for everyone: the buyer, the seller, and even Amazon themselves. I mean, nobody likes dealing with returns, so the only question is, did it work? If it did, I should have a high-value, high-quality

and reliable computer. And you know what, outside of a few odd choices, this build doesn't look half bad. While most folks probably don't need a motherboard with AMD's premium X670 chipset, the Tomahawk Wi-Fi from MSI is a pretty nice board. It's got an eight-layer PCB, PCI

Express Gen 5 on both the x16 and our top M.2 slot, loads of VRM cooling, solid I/O, 2.5 gig networking. What's not to love? Well, for one thing, apparently this board doesn't like WD or Samsung drives. That's not going to be a deal-breaker

for us because, spoiler, Amazon picked a Crucial VX500 for our system that we'll talk about later, but we're also going to try a Samsung NVMe drive just to see how that goes. Before we can do that, we need to get this to a state where we can

actually boot it up though. Starting with our CPU, the Ryzen 7 7700X for just $245. Now, this was on a deep discount at the time of purchase for a whopping 39% off, but hey, I mean, if that's what makes

something an overall pick, I'm into it. It's eight cores, 16 threads, Zen 4, and it'll boost to a max of 5.4 GHz, making it pretty hard to beat at this price. So, as you'd expect, most of the complaints about it were just about DOA chips or

Empty boxes probably due to the shipment being opened and intercepted, annoying but hardly AMD's fault. For our DDR5 memory, we ended up with a sweet-looking 32 gig kit from Corsair, but under the surface it runs at 6,400 megatransfers per second, CL 36.

That's not awful, but most folks should be shooting for about 10 NS of first word latency these days, especially now that prices have come down. If you want a bit more detail about that, stay tuned for our next memory speed matters video. For now, though, I'm still feeling pretty

good about this choice. Thanks to the low number of one-star reviews, most of which just seem to be complaining about DOA products. I mean to be clear, DOA is bad, but Corsair support seems to fall somewhere between adequate and hey, maybe even good. So if you get unlucky, reach

out and they should get you taken care of. Oh, you know who also has good support? LTTstore.com. Check out the new Circuitry hoodie, looks great, feels great, and it's punny as all heck. Circuitry. Now let's talk about our SSD.

While there's nothing inherently wrong with using a SATA SSD in 2024, I mean they're perfectly fine for booting your OS or running games, it does feel like a questionable choice for overall pick when you can get an M.2 NVMe drive for a

similar price. For one thing, they're faster, but perhaps more importantly, if you don't care about performance, you don't need to mount NVMe drives in your case and then run two flipping cables to them. So when Amazon recommended that we buy the BX 500 1 TB, I was a little

Surprised however we've had good experiences with Crucial drives overall and it's easy to believe that Amazon has too I mean heck I'd probably promote this drive on my store if it had a 4.7 star rating with over 120,000 reviews I mean they're not all

good but the one star complaints are mostly about right speeds and RMAs neither of which uh should affect us today for our CPU cooler I was pleasantly surprised to see the Peerless Assassin 120 SE I know it's good you know it's good but was

Amazon going to know it's good apparently yes and honestly there's really not that much else to say about this thing it's a great cooler from a company that's been playing the game just about as long as anyone and it comes at a great price now let's fire it

up and see if this Samsung SSD works  I guess before we can fire this up we're probably going to need a power supply Amazon suggested the RM850X which is a little overkill for our build today but it's a reputable unit and it gives us some headroom if we

want to upgrade our GPU down the line also being 33% off at the time that doesn't hurt now the key out among you might have noticed something though we thought we had an RM850X in our stock so we didn't order one but it turns out we

have the Shift version we could have delayed the shoot but we thought you know what shift happens and it doesn't make a difference to performance so time to get some modular cables installed power hey there we go all right theoretically we should just fire up

into Windows unless it actually has problems with Samsung drives. Did they say what the compatibility issue is supposed to be? Should just be a Motherboard BIOS update. Okay, well evidently ours is updated, so cool. But we can't leave it like this, so we took Amazon's advice and bought a

Corsair 4000D Airflow at full price. Honestly, it's a little on the expensive side, but at about 24% off, it's hard to say no. We've built in this case plenty of times and I like it. It's thoughtfully

laid out, easy to work in, and most of the low star reviews had to do with the lack of space around the power supply unit, which uh, we accidentally remedied by going with the uh, um, side-mounted modular cables. But you could also remedy

by just plugging in your regular modular power supply cables ahead of time, then sliding the whole thing in and finishing touch. Now, for the moment you've all been waiting for, the GPU. And wow, okay. No, I'm I'm kidding. It's not going to be an

off-brand RX 580 like last time. Instead, we've got something far more modern, an RTX 3060 12 gig. It's neither the latest nor is it the greatest, but it should do us just fine for high-end 1080p gaming or even 1440p in a pinch thanks to

Nvidia frame rate boosting features like DLSS. Most of the complaints about this card had to do with them breaking down overtime, which can happen, and it seems like most of those folks were frustrated that it happened past the return window. So maybe we found a fatal flaw in

Amazon's returned infrequently criteria after all a card that can't be returned is not necessarily a card that shouldn't be returned. Let's see if ours works. Hey there, we go. So overall, we paid $1,147, which is not too bad. We've said

for years that this is right around the sweet spot of price to performance and without even firing it up, I can tell you this is going to be a much better machine than what we built last time. However, the question isn't can we beat last time, the question is can we beat

this, Plof believes that his handpicked configuration will outperform Mr. Bezos's tech tips while also being cheaper by about $20. And I don't believe, I know, a bold claim. He is rocking the same 7700X thanks to that

sweet deal, but he managed slightly faster memory, a Gen 4 drive with a DRAM cache and a Radeon 7700 XT. Sure, we downgraded to a motherboard that lacks PCIe Gen 5 and the H5 Flow, it's not as premium a case as the 4000D Airflow

but man, is that ever a lot of GPU and the big surprise here is that almost all of the deals that we found to build this machine were on Amazon. So if their overall choice was algorithmically adjusted, they could have offered us this same config for just $60 more than what

we paid. So let's see if he slayed the dragon starting with Horizon Zero Dawn. So 1080p, quality, ultimate, ultimate quality. Okay, I mean, oh hamburgers. I know that we're in different zones, yeah, but still, I, I've got like over 50 or 60 FPS higher

Thank you. Yeah, this is not close. I I don't think it's close at all. I've got almost twice the frames. It's not a perfect scientific benchmarking system we're doing here, but uh I don't think even if I go to the same spot as you I'm gonna suddenly

shoot down to like 83 FPS. Let's go to another game. Let's check another game. Hold on. I want to try turning on frame gen. I can use DLSS. It's still not as good. No, it's really not. Yeah, that actually didn't boost your FPS as much as I thought it

would. It's higher, but not by a lot. Do I have AMD's upscaling method with super resolution? So don't get me wrong, it's not as good. It's not as good. I don't even like DLSS. Yeah, cuz I can tell when it's on.

But now I'm getting almost 200 frames a second. Well, okay, it dipped a lot, but I'm 170, 160, especially in a game with a lot of nature, a lot of trees. I know it looks so bad. It looks so bad. It I can't I

can't do it. Even this, you can see, well, you're a diva. Look at this. You can see the shimmering. I can't do it. Okay, we're at different spots. Okay, that's fine. I've kind of got a bit more going on. I mean, I

don't. It's oh my God, look at this. 47, 43. My 1% lows are 90. It's amazing what skimping on basically everything but your GPU and then blowing as much money as possible on your GPU will do for your

gaming experience at higher resolutions or higher detail levels. Oh yeah, and we didn't even skimp that much. These are all pretty brand name parts I chose, you know, no weird thermal take power supplies or anything like that. Yeah, what power supply do you have? Uh, also Corsair, but I

went down 100 Watts. I don't think this is any kind of contest. I don't really think we need to run any more games. I think this has been very much settled at this point. Overall, then the system is nowhere near as bad as last time we were given

decent products from reputable brands, sometimes even at a great price. But while the 3060 12 gig is a perfectly cromulent card if you want to game at 1080p, well medium depending on the game, we'll have it linked down below along

with everything else. It's impossible to avoid the truth that it is getting a little long in the tooth, especially if you consider that 50 series is rumored to be right around the corner. Along with this segue to our sponsor, our sponsor, our sponsor, our sponsor, uGreen, you know

what can be a bit boring, charging your devices. I mean, it's such a mundane task. You'll plug in your iPhone when it's dead, you sit there and wait for it to get enough juice so you can send a text. Well, uGreen wants to add a little

spice to your life with their Uno series of charging accessories. They have all the uGreen power delivery and reliability we've grown to love, but the twist is that now every product in this lineup has a TFT smart display that shows your charging status in the form

of a cute little emoji for example check out their UGREEN 100w charger it's got three USB-C ports one USB-A port and according to UGREEN's tests it can take an iPhone 14 from 0 to 57% in just

30 minutes you can also check out their UGREEN magnetic 15 watt power bank it's Qi2 certified with a maximum output of 15 watts a capacity of 10,000 milliamp hours and it even has a built-in stand to prop up your device while it's

charging so learn more using our links and save big during their Black Friday sale down below if you guys enjoyed this video be sure to check out the one where we built a PC using only the top search results spoiler it was pretty much all sponsored products and a lot of them

Building a PC Using Only Amazon's 'Overall Pick' Products

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

Amazon's Overall Pick Badge and PC Build Experiment

Initial observation: Amazon provides clear guidance on best choices with a helpful badge.

Questioning the trustworthiness of Amazon's recommendations and their potential bias.

Building a second PC using only Amazon's overall pick to evaluate the system.

Explanation of Amazon's Overall Pick badge criteria: high purchase frequency, 4-star rating or higher, and infrequent returns.

Assessment of the PC build's components based on Amazon's recommendations.

Detailed Component Analysis and Potential Issues

Analysis of the motherboard, highlighting its features and compatibility issues with certain drives.

Discussion of the CPU, Ryzen 7 7700X, including its price and performance.

Evaluation of the RAM, Corsair 32GB kit, and its speed and latency.

Assessment of the SSD choice, Crucial BX500 1TB, and comparison with NVMe drives.

Review of the CPU cooler, Peerless Assassin 120 SE, and its performance.

PC Assembly, Power Supply Issue, and BIOS Update

Power supply selection and unexpected issue with the model received.

Addressing the potential compatibility problem with Samsung drives through a BIOS update.

Discussion of the case, Corsair 4000D Airflow, its features, and some negative reviews.

GPU Selection, Performance Expectations, and Total Cost

GPU choice: RTX 3060 12GB, its capabilities, and common complaints.

Total cost of the PC build and comparison with previous builds.

Performance Comparison with a Handpicked Configuration

Comparison with a handpicked configuration, highlighting differences in components and price.

Gaming performance comparison using Horizon Zero Dawn, showcasing significant FPS differences.

Concluding remarks on the performance difference and overall build quality.

Summary of the build, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses.

Sponsor mention: uGreen charging accessories.

Description of uGreen's Uno series charging accessories and their features.