Amazon PC Building: Navigating Sponsored Products and Choices

Shopping for PC components on Amazon can lead to questionable choices, especially with sponsored products.

### Navigating Amazon's PC Building Challenges: A Cautionary Tale
* 🛒 Shopping for PC components on Amazon can be overwhelming, especially for newcomers, due to the **plethora of sponsored products and unfamiliar brands** that dominate search results.
* 💻 When searching for a graphics card, it can be difficult to discern the **reliability of brands** like Showkings, which may not even receive **driver updates for older models** like the Radeon RX580.
* 🔍 The process of selecting components often leads to questionable choices, as the system tends to **prioritize sponsored results over quality options**, exemplified by the **Ryzen 7 5800 X being the only valid CPU listed**.
* 🛠 Despite the presence of sponsored items, some products like the **Asus Prime B550M A WiFi motherboard** and **Oloy DDR4 RAM** prove to be decent picks, although the latter's warranty raises **concerns about customer support**.
* 💾 The Crucial T500 2 TB SSD stands out with positive ratings, yet users still face common issues like the **absence of mounting screws**, which are typically provided with motherboards.
* The SE 214 XT RGB CPU cooler offers good value, but potential buyers should consider alternatives like the **Peerless Assassin** for **slightly more money and better performance**.
* ⚡ While the XPG Core Reactor 2 power supply seems reliable with a **10-year warranty**, customer reviews indicate mixed experiences with **RMA support and product quality**.
* 🎮 Ultimately, the experience highlights the **importance of thorough research and caution** when purchasing PC components on Amazon, as many sponsored products may **not deliver the expected value or performance**.

between all the sponsored products and the army of brands that you've never heard of before, shopping on Amazon these days sucks, especially if you're new to PC Building. Look at this. I searched for graphics card, and with prominent placement like this, how could I possibly know that Showkings is not a reputable brand of GPU? I mean, is the Radeon RX580 even getting driver updates anymore? Not since January. It's ridiculous. It makes you wonder just how bad of a PC would you get if you just searched for each product category, bought the first thing on the list, and threw it all together. I want to know, so I'm going to find out right. Wait, Radeon Ampere architecture? That's an Nvidia AR. Oh man, these guys are ridiculous. Okay, sorry, right now. And here it is. Everything from my Wu power supply to my View Edge Monitor and high-quality video card. There is one thing missing though. It's a segue. Oh no, here it is to our sponsor Acronis. In an age where the slightest infrastructure vulnerability could open the door to

cyber attacks or unrecoverable data loss. Acronis Cyber Protect has your back. Check it out using our link in the video description. Let's kick things off with the only non-sponsored item that managed to top our search results, or at least sort of top them, because the Ryzen 7 5800 X was the only actual CPU that showed up when we typed in CPU. It turns out the Amazon search engine is kind of like your Boomer Uncle, offering up a selection of random entire computers when you search for CPU processor. Meanwhile, does give us some sponsored results, but the rule of the game was we had to buy the first valid result for the first keyword we tried, so Ryzen 7 5800 X it is. At just $170, it's a great chip for the price and a solid start to what has now become an AM4 journey. However, if you want something a bit more affordable, Central Processing Unit comes up with the 5600X, which includes a Wraith Stealth cooler for extra value. Moving on to our motherboard, the Asus

Prime B550M A WiFi 2 was sponsored and was the first of our many sponsored results. We'll talk about what this sponsored tag means a little bit later, but for now, it's not really a problem. While this board may not have the highest-end features like PCIe Gen 5, it's certainly a decent board and should fit perfectly into the vast majority of PC cases. Next up, DDR4 RAM nets us a pretty decently specked kit from Oloy. Well, thankfully, whether you've heard of them or not, they seem to be a perfectly cromulent memory supplier. Not only are they extensively reviewed on Amazon, with this kit having almost 8,000 ratings, but Tom's Hardware ran an article a few years ago with promising results. That is, at least until they looked into support. Oloy describes their warranty as limited lifetime but doesn't elaborate on their website on what exactly those limits are. And when Toms reached out, they discovered that they only provide brand new replacements for

any failed sticks for one year, and after the third year, they reserve the right to charge you for any repairs technically that can legally be described as a limited lifetime warranty. It just demonstrates that ol's attitude toward customer service is less trust me bro and more good luck bro. What about storage? Oh, another good result with the Crucial T500 2 TB at the top of our list. It's got 4.7 stars with over 3200 ratings, and the bad ones are mostly upset about DOA drives, which do happen from time to time, and the lack of an included m.2 screw, though. In fairness to Crucial, SSD mounting hardware is supposed to be included with your motherboard, so once again, I'm happy with Amazon search results. They're three for four. Wait a second, does my motherboard include SSD mounting hardware? It's certainly not on the board, and I don't remember seeing any accessories in here. Oh, there they are. Yep, we're good. Of course, if you've spent

more than 2 minutes on Amazon in the last year. You knew that wasn't going to last forever. So let's see our result for CPU Cooler. Ah, the SE 214 XT RGB from ID cooling. I mean, I actually can't really fault the value here. Four heat pipes, $18. That's like $450 a heat pipe. And it's got a respectable 4.6-star rating, with most of the complaints focusing on what I feel are insignificant issues like a cheap-feeling backplate and, uh-oh, bad instructions. Oh, and not receiving AM4 mounting hardware. Uh, one moment please. This looks pretty complete. Fan mounts, AM4 mounting. But it looks like they're right. There's no instructions. Oh, guys, you got to look inside the box. The instructions are right [Music]. There, yeah, as long as you find all the pieces, this is a pretty nice package. At 20 bucks, though, that still doesn't make it an obvious win, 'cause for just $15 more, you can get a Peerless Assassin, and that's a really nice cooler. In fact,

Amazon seems to acknowledge this because a couple of results down they've got that one tagged as their overall pick. With that said, it's not like modern AMD CPUs need a ton of extra cooling for overclocking or anything, so this could end up being the best bang for the buck. Only the results will tell. And look at that, it has addressable RGB on the fan. Moving on to our case, whoa Antec. These guys might have had the spotlight stolen by newer players like Fractal, Corsair, and Phanteks, but personally, I will always remember them fondly. And after getting acquainted with the DF700, I might just have some fondness today for just 90 bucks. You get five total cooling fans, three with RGB on the front, all hooked up to a nice addressable RGB fan controller. And it's got a front panel mesh, built-in cable ties, a removable hard drive sled, and while we don't get rubber grommets for our cable management, the cutouts are rounded, so you're not going to scratch or cut either yourself.

or your cables. It's even got a bit of side ventilation for your power supply and any hard drives you want to chuck in there. Very tasteful, very cool. What's not to like? Well, individual front panel headers, though that's still common in most cases, and not all motherboards use the same layout. So, I actually back Antec here. Someone got a dented bottom, some faulty fans and lights. One person got a fan hub, though was allegedly so defective it burnt not one, but two motherboards and a power supply. And as for the middling reviews, most of them thought it was nice, but a tad expensive for what it is, which is fair. But if you catch it on sale, what a deal. Now we've just got to power the thing, and that's where our PSU, the XPG Core Reactor 2, comes in. This is another sponsored result, and while XPG might not be familiar to you, they are a branch of Adata that has actually been around since 2008. This fully modular 650 W 80 plus

gold unit was just $83, which seems fine. We haven't tested any XPG power supplies yet, but the reviews all seem pretty decent, and the community seems to like them overall. And this one comes with a 10-year warranty. However, and this is a big however, we found quite a few complaints about either poor warranty in RMA support or customers receiving not one but two units that were Dead on Arrival. So maybe you should stick with less sponsored, more trusted brands like EVGA or CIC. That wasn't an option for us though. Now these days, you might be thinking 650 Watts, that's a little on the low side, but uh foreshadowing with this cable I'm running here. Let me put it this way, we aren't going to be needing any more power than that. Meet the show Kings RX 580 sponsored. I'm talking a GPU that literally isn't even getting driver updates, 8 gigs of VRAM on a 256-bit bus, PCI Express Gen 3. Oh but this is nice dual fans for office and

gaming and a DVI connector for those of you out there like me who buy their monitors out of people's garages. This has got to be remanufactured. I've never even heard of showkings, but maybe that's just because they're ahead of enjoyment and led the trend. I've just fallen behind, so uh settle down, slap this 7-year-old GPU in your system and uh call it a day I guess or maybe don't. In all seriousness, I can't think of a good reason to buy from these guys when there are so many other options out there. Searching for them online brings up almost nothing except is this brand legit posts like we couldn't even find a company website and most of our onear reviews here have to do with the cards dying over time. You're honestly probably better off just buying something used on eBay, Facebook Marketplace or our recent sponsor of scrapyard 9 Java. But we didn't have that option and thanks to Amazon sponsored products here we are which I guess it's

time for us to address the way it works. Basically, sellers from around the world will place bids on specific keywords in order to help surface their products when you include those keywords in your searches. Generic keywords like CPU or RAM are generally more expensive, while more specific keywords cost less. And I know that most, if not all, of you watching right now are savvy enough to not just buy the first thing you see, but you would be surprised by how many people do. Amazon claims that the sponsored product system helps turn browsers into buyers. They also claim that because sponsored products only appear when in stock and include trusted Amazon shopping attributes, that they are helping customers make informed browsing and buying decisions. Sure, because when I buy an RX580 in 2024, I'm informed. Oh wait, we did peripherals too. Oh now let's check out our peripherals. I guess we'll kick things off with the Vue Edge CS24 FK, a 24-inch 1080P 165HZ IPS gaming display. Unlike show kings, these guys even have a website we can't find.

this monitor on their website at the time of filming. So, that's something. But realistically, at $90 for these specs, I don't think the product page is going to change too many people's decision. If only the specs were the whole story, the one-ear reviews are hating on everything from the awful speakers to product longevity to viewing angles to response times to you name it. Uh, should we fire it up? Oh, I'm going to need peripherals, and there they are, the gaming essentials from Red Dragon. Red Dragon's one of those brands that 5, 6 years ago, we were meing on their, you know, hardware store level quality, but these days, they've actually got some pretty decent products. It's too bad that this isn't one of them. The S113 and whatever this stupid thing is, the S113. They're both the S113. They don't feel great, but somehow they have 46,000 ratings. That's about 10,000 more than when we first mentioned this combo in our Why is everyone buying this keyboard video about three years.

ago cool if only people had watched our video. Well, anyway, let's try it again, shall we? It's an m601 Mouse. Is it though? Okay, that says s 1013. All right, fine. I mean, it's hard to complain for 30 bucks, but I'll find a way to the monitor's credit. It comes with a pretty nice feeling DP cable, and it has dual HDMI inputs. It's pretty good, and it's light. Yeah, I like the case actually. That's really nice to fuse RGB on a $20 cooler too. Oh man, this keyboard is awful. Don't you love membrane? I'm not even hating on people for having only $30 to spend on a mouse and keyboard. Dude, in scrapyard Wars y, I ended up with what? A g110 and a g502 for about $30. That's fine. You got a budget, no problem. Spend it smart. Having a tight budget is all the more reason to spend it. This is not smart spending. This is buying manufactured garbage. Speaking of buying manufactured garbage, what did we pay for this? Uh

something around 800 for the whole setup. Yeah, mouse, keyboard, monitor, $888, about $890. You know what's funny about that is that is about the budget of the last scrapyard Wars. It is actually, yeah, you're right. In fairness, this is a way, way better CPU than I got, but everything else about my system absolutely smokes this thing. 370, I had a 370. Well, what about your drive though? You did not have a 2 TB SSD. Okay, that's true, but I did have a 256 GB SSD and a 750 GB hard drive. Unacceptable, it's 2024, hard drives suck for gaming. Doom Eternal 1080p medium. Oh, our 1% lows are dipping into like 40 territory. That's it. Okay, we thought it was 'cause we didn't have the display turned up to 144 Hz, which is all it does over HDMI, but that's not it. It's that the frame times are so inconsistent that it feels laggy even though the averages are about 100 frames per second.

interesting. Yeah, it's going as low as like 47, and then it jumps up to 80, 90, and then back down to 44. So, that's why it feels like under 60. No, wait, 60, 'cause it's all over the place. And it looked totally fine, like from someone off-axis. But yeah, playing it, I don't know how to explain it, just feels bad. Well, the way to explain it is that if you're only getting a frame in the time that it would take to be 40 FPS, that means it's taking 20 milliseconds to deliver that frame. It's going to feel like lag or like a stutter. Yeah, but it's playable. Definitely playable. Not great, but playable. Playable. The really bad part is that was Doom Eternal running at 1080p medium. I didn't even have it turned up. RX580 was a great GPU. Polaris was an outstanding value proposition. Was that was a long time ago. I think realistically this is a remanufactured mining card, so some miner farms.

Somewhere is just literally throwing these in the dumpster, and then the GPUs are getting cut off, and they're getting thrown onto new cards, and then someone's trying to make a quick buck on Amazon by selling them as gaming GPUs. And they'll play games, but they are not the best thing that you could buy for this kind of money. The question for me is, why bother to remanufacture it? Like, why not just dust it off so that it's less obvious? 'Cause this looks like a new card. Yeah, I guess that's true. Now it's time for some F1 with a keyboard. Oh God, how do I steer? What are your settings? I don't know what... What's happening right now? Go to settings. I... You're going to go off the track right now. Well, I can't steer. Ploff. Ah, what's going on with our keyboard? Let's check our settings. I mean, we're running at 100 FPS again. Okay, well, yeah, turn motion blur off, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but everything else is set to medium.

left a few lows here and there. That's fine, much better break. Which one's the break? Oh my god, look, I don't play a lot of racing games, smart guy. They even give you a racing line. If I don't know where the break button is, then that's not going to help me much, is it? No, we're shooting kind of late. We ran out of time. I really want to check out a few more games on the RX580 to see if it's actually any good in 2024. Let's start with Alan Wake 2. Wow, we're not getting much FPS. Let me make sure it's on like a lower setting, 720p. It's UPC, so it's upscaling from 720p with FSR. Fine, R Racing off. It's not going to do any RT. It's slightly better. It's still really not good, especially if we're actually rendering closer to 720p. Does just have video. This is just a cinematic. The game crashed due to graphics card fault and will now exit your pro. Your progress from last

checkpoint has been saved. RX580 cannot handle mesh shaders. I don't know exactly if this is the issue we're running into, but it's probably a problem. All right, Allen Wake 2, not so good. But you know what? It's a little older. Let's try Space Marine 2o that just came out. All right, you know we've got a solid 29 FPS in-game, 1% lows around 24, and this is 1080p low native. So we could be running 720p with some upscaling, but it's not very good. And I'll be honest, there's not a lot going on in here. Let's go fight some Tyranids and see if it gets any worse. It's honestly not as bad as I expected. We're granted only getting, you know, 30-35 FPS still, but I'm killing Tyranids. There's a lot going on right now, and it's a solid 30. So if you're okay with playing Space Marine 2o.

1080p low. Maybe you should just buy an RX 580 in 2024. It's fine, you know. You're not getting the same efficiency that you'd get out of a modern card. You're not getting the same performance that you'd get out of a modern card, but it's fine. I wouldn't have any expectations of warranty coverage on this thing either, but it's fine. I just hate seeing people get ripped off, you know? Yeah, like I don't want to be like, Oh yeah, well you can't even game on it, or whatever, 'cause you can. You just didn't get a good deal, and that's not the point of this channel, right? To pump up things that aren't a good deal. So overall, we did find some good stuff. I'm really happy with the case and the CPU. Solid choice too. But other than that, I would say maybe just ignore the Amazon sponsored items unless they happen to be exactly what you need anyway. And while we're at it, the CPU Cooler might be a diamond in the rough.

as well. We're sitting at 63° right now. Now, arguably, this is a game, not, you know, the most demanding thing, but for 20 bucks, it's hard to complain. Just like it's hard to complain about this segue to our sponsor, Squarespace. Tech tips can be very helpful for many things, but you won't even need them if you're building a website using Squarespace. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform that simplifies the process of getting your website up and running quickly. You can literally just drag and drop designs with Squarespace Blueprint. Just find a theme that matches your taste, add your product info, and you're done. No coding necessary. They also have integrated and optimized SEO tools that help your site rank higher in search results. Plus, your customers have the flexibility to pay via credit card, PayPal, or even Apple Pay. Our LUS Media Group website was built with Squarespace too. So don't wait. Start building your website today and get 10% off your first purchase at squarespace.com LT. If you

guys enjoyed this video. Maybe go check out the one where we tested a bunch of lesser-known GPU brands. Some of them ended up being kind of legit, I think, right? I honestly can't remember. I think so.

Building a PC… Using Only the Top Result on Amazon

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 PC components on Amazon has become challenging, especially for newcomers, due to the overwhelming number of sponsored products and unfamiliar brands.

The search results for essential components like CPUs and motherboards are often random and unhelpful, making it difficult to find reputable options.

Despite some good finds, like the Ryzen 7 5800 X and Crucial T500 2 TB SSD, the overall experience raises concerns about the reliability and customer service of lesser-known brands.

The ID Cooling SE 214 XT RGB CPU cooler offers great value with four heat pipes for $18, but has received complaints about instructions and missing AM4 mounting hardware.

The Antec DF700 case provides five cooling fans and RGB lighting for $90, but has received mixed reviews and some complaints about faulty components.

The XPG Core Reactor 2 PSU offers 650W of power for $83, but has faced criticism for poor warranty support and dead-on-arrival units.

The article discusses the challenges of purchasing remanufactured tech products, specifically a 7-year-old GPU from a brand with little online presence and negative reviews.

It highlights the common practice of sellers bidding on keywords on Amazon to promote their products, raising concerns about the effectiveness of this system.

The piece also critiques a 24-inch gaming monitor and gaming peripherals from Red Dragon, noting their poor reviews and questionable quality despite a high number of ratings.

The setup includes a $30 mouse and keyboard, a monitor with dual HDMI inputs, and a nice-looking case with RGB lighting.

The total cost for the entire setup is around $890, which is similar to the budget of a previous scrapyard project.

Despite the decent CPU and 2TB SSD, the inconsistent frame times and low 1% lows in gaming cause a laggy and stuttery experience, making it only playable but not great.

Remanufactured GPUs are being discarded and quickly sold as gaming cards, but they may not offer the best performance for the price.

The narrator struggles with steering in a racing game and adjusting settings for better FPS.

The RX580's performance in 2024 is disappointing, struggling with newer games and crashing due to graphics card faults, but it manages to maintain around 30 FPS in Space Marine 2.

The RX 580 offers lower efficiency and performance compared to modern cards, but it can still handle gaming.

The case and CPU from the current selection are solid choices, while the CPU cooler may be a hidden gem.

Squarespace is recommended for building websites, offering a user-friendly, all-in-one platform with integrated SEO tools and flexible payment options.