Sites like Craigslist and Facebook are full of people who offer custom PC building services, but should you trust them with your gaming budget? I'm going to contact completely random people on Facebook Marketplace, give them my money, and then just pray I don't get scammed. The rules are simple: each builder gets a budget of 1,250 Canadian rubles, and then a different member of our team is going to go undercover, meet these guys in person, and bring back something, I hope. Then I will judge the quality of their craftsmanship, drag race the PCs, and at the end maybe even meet our builders in person, talk to them, that is unless they scam me. Oh hey, that's one of them now. Uh yeah, yeah, Radon 7600, that sounds good. Uh, but do you also have segue to our sponsor MSI? Their Meg Pano M100R PZ case has a cool 270° glass view, it fits a 360 M AO cooler, and it comes with awesome ARGB lighting for an epic look. Check it out at the link in the video.

[Music] description. Our opening line was the same for every builder: Here's my budget. I need a gaming PC. There were other requirements that we kind of had in mind, but there's a catch. If they wanted that information, they had to specifically ask us for it. That's going to affect their communication score. Then we're going to rate each system for quality, performance, value, and beauty. At the end, whoever has the highest rank will get the PC returned to them for free so they can resell it. As for who comes last, they go on the Wall of Shame. Let's start with Jason's system. We decided to purchase from him because he seemed experienced with an Instagram and website specifically for showing off PC builds. And look at this, he even gave us an invoice. Unfortunately, what he also gave us is one of the weirdest systems that I think I've seen in a very long time. I've never even heard of the Manmo brand. Game Max only showed up on my radar when one of their power supplies blew up during labs testing recently, and he's using a mobile.

engineering sample CPU, also Soyo motherboard. I've never even heard of this brand. Oh, I have, but not since the early 2000s. I mean, I guess they have a storied history since 1985. Yeah, it's not the kind of story that I would tell my kids at bedtime. Might keep them up late, if you know what I mean. Why did we end up with two power supply boxes? Um, I don't know. He gave us two power supply boxes. Like, was there something in it? No. He also gave us a different CPU cooler box. Oh, than the one that he... Yeah, this is a completely different cooler. Yeah, and also, there's nothing in any of these boxes. I'm very interested to see how this performs, especially with that slow memory, but I can't wait. Do you leave the plastic peel on that fan? I was going to go easy on him for build quality, but I'm sorry, this is a... This is a three out of ten. Oh, it gets so much worse. You don't even know. We'll get to

that later how is this communication though. We got this nice invoice total made differ by plus or minus 1 cent due to rounding error. Yeah, I mean the invoice shows he was professional. He answered our messages quickly. He offered things like do we want used parts or new parts so to save a couple of bucks. That's good to know. He was upfront about some of the weirdness like getting the engineering sample though maybe not as upfront as he should have been. He kind of just said that hey it's going to be an engineering sample and it won't show up in Windows right. But that doesn't address the complete lack of warranty, the potential reliability issues, and potential performance issues. Yeah, he also said that it would perform the same as a 12900 K. Uh no. And when we went to go pick it up well uh reys what did you say. He was professional. It looks like he had done this before. You know he he's obviously a Salesman kind of good at selling the product that he's selling right but you already bought it but I

already bought it, so I don't know. He was a nice guy. He was a very nice guy. Why did we end up with random boxes, Reese? He had the computer set up, and I went up and tried it. Everything worked fine, and he just like, Oh, grab the boxes. Like, Okay, and I just grabbed what was there. So, he didn't tell me yes or no. He just, I just grabbed all the boxes that were available. Did he have like other systems being built or at the same time, or uh? I think he said he had other ones on the go for communication. What would you rank him? I'll say eight. I'll say online. Maybe a six, 'cause he wasn't super forthright. Let's call it a seven, sure. But the next guy, Ree said, was the nicest person he'd ever met. Really? I don't know if I said that, but he is very nice. For one thing, he didn't charge us a building fee. Every dollar is accounted for here. 6 core Ryzen 5000 processor.

ASRock motherboard, Kingston NVMe SSD, and an RX 7700X GPU. Oh, look at that, a brand-named power supply. In terms of quality, is this three times the quality of the one we just looked at? I think so, yeah. But how is his communication? He was great. He was understanding when we had to reschedule. He was very prompt and clear. He even offered us multiple ways to pay him. He could do a 50% deposit, and he would order all the parts himself. That's a little risky, yeah. Or we could just bring the parts to him, and he would build it for us. Wait, for free? Yeah. What is he even? What's his business model? He says he just has free time, and he likes building computers. So, 10 for communication? Yeah, absolutely. We're going to need another field for business savvy 'cause Katon is setting very unrealistic expectations. I mean, was the pickup perfect too? BR, he's doing it for the love of the game. I love the guy. I think he's perfect. I'm

going to give tens across the board. Just heads up, reach out. We want to be friends with you. We want to be friends with you. All right, how about Mirus? You nicknamed this one Teenage Engineering, but I couldn't help noticing that's an NZXT case. Yeah, well, Mirla is like 17 years old, and the reason he's selling computers is because he's trying to save up for college. Wow, okay, yeah, so he's certainly more profit motivated than Katon, though I got to give him credit. This is a pretty nice build. Yeah, there's a couple of tweaks that I think I would make, like he got a SATA SSD instead of an NVMe SSD. Oh, you're not even really saving money on that. Yeah, but you know, still meets our criteria of a 1TB SSD. Yeah, and his build fee $100 Canadian dollar. That's pretty reasonable. That's only about 70 US. He was also happy to throw in extra fans at a discount. Oh, that's nice of him. Yeah, did we ask if he

was willing to throw in extra cable management and extra peeling the plastic off of our motherboard heat sink. Nope, it's got the world's most overcompensate Wi-Fi antennas, though, so that's good. I'm going to have to dock a couple build quality points for sloppiness, but I'm going to give one of them back for going with quality Cooling and a quality power supply. Those are the kinds of things that are very easy for people to cheap out on and take advantage of a not very knowledgeable customer, and Mira chose not to do that. He was really helpful in other ways, like instead of just looking at prices on PC part picker, he actually went and found like bundles on like Canada Computers. However, the bundle we ended up getting basically was the literal price of buying each of the individual components alone, so neither here nor there. All right, I mean, they're good parts. Yeah, it was an A for effort. I probably would have done what Katon did and spent a little more on GPU and a little less on

CPU, but depending on what we were trying to accomplish, this is a perfectly reasonable parts list as well. How was the pickup? Good, a little bit awkward. He's a young guy. Um, I think I was pretty awkward at that age as well, you know what I mean? Yeah, just at that age, just yeah, thank you. His communication over Facebook was actually really good. He sent some photos of the case. I got slightly damaged in transit. I can't see it from here. Um, yeah, very slight damages, but he was very upfront with that, which was nice. That's great. Um, n eight seven. I think I think seven eight eight so far. The professional is not looking so hot, but the professional might have the performance where it counts. Let's pretend we don't know that. Okay, this is true. Maybe leave them some suspense for crying out loud. Now to begin the Drag Race. 3 2 1. And I can already tell that it's not going to be close. Adam, we are dipping down to 5050 55 FPS on both the

professional and teenage engineering. Did I see that go over a 100? Teenage engineering is screaming right now. It's loud. Yeah, what is up with that? I think it's because of the GPU. It has a predator by Frost, which is like a half blower style card. I think he just didn't really tune the fan curves. Interesting. He actually did install fan control on this for us, and he put a nice big CPU heat sink in here. So maybe he just doesn't get bothered by noise, and he thought, Well, let's get everything to run as cool as possible. His temp should be really good. We have Ray tracing off right now, but it is crazy how neck and neck the 4060 and the 7600 are. They're basically the exact same, though. If we turned Ray tracing on, this would easily take the lead. Yeah, are you turning Ray tracing on a mid-tier card, though? I mean, I guess you can. You can. You got DLSS and stuff, but we're getting 60 FPS now. Yeah, I know, and it looks pretty good.

mind you, we are running at 1440p, and the vast majority of people are still gaming at 1080p, so you could probably run at 1080 with ray tracing and get similar performance. Where did we land in terms of thermals, though? The hobbyist was sitting at a peak of about 70° on the CPU and 55° on the GPU. Meanwhile, as expected, teenage engineering didn't manage to get above 54° on the CPU and was at about 58° on the GPU. So clearly, there's some headroom for us to turn those hands down if we really wanted to. As for that mobile CPU, 58° max, and on our GPU, we ended up hitting about 70. The professional is uh, not the best system so far, no, but that could change in Cinebench. Let's see if all those extra cores are going to help out that, what is it, 12900 HKX HX. All right, ready, W brother [Music]. It may be an engineering sample, but it's uh, professional engineering apparently.

it does have just core numbers on its side, right? That's 24 threads versus a 12-thread and a 16-thread. This is as not close as that last one was in favor of the hobbyist. If you are doing something that benefits from multi-threading, like say you do a lot of video encoding on CPU, the professional looking pretty good for the money. Wow, that's a laptop chip. I know, right? And the 5600 is a well, it's a great choice for gaming. Yeah, cheapest CPU of the lot. And that is what we asked for. We asked for 1440p gaming, and the hobbyist gave us a better GPU and a lower-tier CPU. And you can really see that in the results here. Just 11,000 points compared to 14,000 and 19,500. But the professional promised that that had the same performance as a 12900 K. What? What's the score of a 12900 K? 25,000, 27,000. So it's not as good, not even close. This is pretty typical for

engineering sample chips you see because they're often not finished. And that even ignores that this poor motherboard is going to have no idea what to do with this thing in terms of power limits. We maxed out at 125 watts, which is kind of within spec, but it clearly never stretched beyond that. Oh boy, I can already tell in the menu again that teenage engineering is not going to be able to keep up with the hobbyist. It's so loud. Now we're looking at balers Gate 3 at 1440p Ultra details with no resolution scaling. And once again, the competition is not close. The 1% lows on the hobbyist, thanks to that 7700 XT GPU, are higher than the average frame rates on both of our other systems. To be clear, either of these is going to deliver a really smooth gaming experience in balers Gate 3. It just won't be nearly as smooth as the hobbyist. Between the other two, though, the GeForce 4060 manages to outclass the Radeon 7600, showing you guys that as bad

as Nvidia's current generation is, their competition manages to make them look okay, and that engineering sample CPU doesn't seem to be holding it back here in spite of it not being the same as a 12900K. Should we give them a score, or should we just rank them first to third? Either way is going to be complicated because, depending on the application, they're going to vary a little bit. Yeah, the hobbyist ran away with it in gaming performance, but even if your focus is gaming, it's never a bad idea to have a well-rounded system, and you've got to give the professional and teenage engineering some credit here. So, I'm going to say maybe, you know, eight for the hobbyist because we did give up a lot in terms of multi-threaded performance, but given how much the other ones gave up everywhere else, I'd say at best they can have a five. Five is perfectly adequate; it really middle; it's a pass. Yeah, now we turn to value, and you might think, Oh, well, line is that simple. It's

just performance versus how much you paid, but I see a value in, for example, having a warranty on my CPU. That's where the professional system falls apart. I see a value in having a power supply that's known more for powering computers than for powerful failures like we've seen from this brand in our Labs testing. So, for me, the professional, I don't know, three, two. What is this generic RAM? The generic RAM is 32 GB of Samsung DDR4 running at 2666 MHz CL19. That's twice as much RAM as the other systems. Yeah, it's at half the speed. It's slow as heck. Four. In fairness to the pro, those cut corners did allow him to undercut everyone else on pricing. But for me, peace of mind is a big part of value, and I feel that both the hobbyist and teenage engineering blew him away there for beauty. I think everyone captured the gamer aesthetic pretty well. Definite points for the hobbyist's use of RGB everywhere, but personally, I like to see a big heat sink more than I like to see flashy light.

Right, so I think I'm going to give both of these a nine, or at least I would, if I didn't look at the cable management at the back. Maybe it's not worth a $100 to me, but ironically, the one with the worst cable management at the front has far better cable management at the back than our hobbyist. It's more of a party in the back. Yeah, but that's why it's behind closed doors, right? Sorry, Katon. I think I'm going to have to dock you a point here. As for the pro, Jason selected such a bare-bones case that I think the best I could give it is probably an eight. And Adam promised that I would find some interesting surprises once I turned it around to the back. This back plate is bowed out. That's not a good thing. I don't know if that's to spec or not. Nope, it's not. You know what it is? This is a mobile chip. It doesn't have an IHS, so it has to go down tighter in order to make contact. It is

making contact. The Thermals were fine, but that's why it's deeper than it would otherwise be. Now I'm really curious 'cause I saw listings for this online and they showed an image with an IHS. Oh no, no, you're right, there is an IHS on it. Okay, I have no idea then. I guess he just really gave her with the screws. You think he gave her with those screws? Just wait till you see the m.2 screw. While I was trying to figure out what kind of components were in the system, so I could try and figure out a relative price to see if he ripped us off with this 1150 thing. Look at the screw for the SSD. He just chucked a random screw in here. There's no standoff. Yeah, um, and not just any random screw, a wood screw. Oh, so it is. Can you retroactively cut six when you find stuff like this? It really makes you question everything else about the system. With the scores tallied up, surprisingly, everybody gets a pass. Yeah, the professional was just

barely, but to his credit, it is a functioning system, and he didn't ghost us or scam us outright. But it's clear that to actually win the challenge, we're only really looking at teenage engineering and the hobbyist. And at the end of the day, with the points we had to dock from teenage engineering for choosing a SATA SSD and going with a more powerful CPU for a 1440p gaming system, even ignoring the $100 build cost, which, by the way, is perfectly reasonable, we've got to give it to the hobbyist who we're about to meet. Hey, how's it going? Hey, Ken, how's it going? It is Katon, right? Dang, I forgot to get the screen recording started. Oh my God. Hey, hey, sorry, technical diffic. Um, okay, thanks for taking my call. Um, just to be up front with you, uh, there's nothing wrong with computer. If you ever heard of Linus Tech Tips? Yes. Okay, well, um, he'd like to say something to you. He's got some good news for you. Hey, Ken, nice

system. Oh hey, how you doing? Thank you. Oh my God, this is ridiculous. Hey, I just wanted to say you built a heck of a system for the money. But I got a question. What's going on here? You didn't even charge us a build fee or anything like that. Do you really just do this for the fun of it? I've been building computers since I was like 10 with my dad. Like, I work from home as a project manager, so I have a lot of free time. I want to Tinker with computers more often, but I don't want to go and buy used parts and get people good deals. Things, I don't have that much time. But I figured I'd like just do free builds and make sure like, you know, the tweaking is done right. I don't know. I just like helping people a lot, and I feel like computer stores are kind of like not where they used to be, and they're not really offering that kind of like premium service anymore. So yeah, the challenge was that we actually gave the

same budget to three different people on Facebook Marketplace chosen randomly, and whoever won, whoever gave us the best value system for our dollars, gets the system back so they can resell it to someone else. So, it's not that I don't love it; you did a great job, but you won, man, so this is yours. It's free real estate. Oh, wow, dude, that's crazy. That's awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. So, about how many of these systems do you do on a monthly basis? How many people reach out to you? Us? Probably do one to two a month. It's not like something that's super common. I guess people like partly thing is a trust bar. It's like you don't want to leave Parts with someone who you don't know who does this for fun. Absolutely. What a weird thing to tell people, you know? I get how it sounds, but honestly, I just, I like building computers. I like playing with computers. Yeah, I just, it's a passion of mine, and I enjoy it, and I can

do this and help people out the same same time. I think it's a really awesome thing to do. Cool. All right, see you later, man. Yeah, awesome. Thanks so much. We weren't able to get teenage engineering on a video call, but we reached out asking, Hey, is this a viable side hustle? Like about how many systems you do? And he said he's got about four of them on the go right now. So while it is difficult to break into, it looks like some people are making a go of it. So in conclusion, your mileage is absolutely going to vary, and being a Savvy Shopper, as always, is going to go a long way towards making sure that getting the most for your money. But it's clear that there's a alive and well, or maybe even vibrant ecosystem of buyers and sellers on these marketplaces. So uh, if you want to try your luck, hey, it might not be the stupidest thing in the world, and you might get Super Lucky and find someone like Katon who just loves helping people.

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overall, but uh hey. I'll let you guys be the judge. See you later.

I Hired Randoms on Facebook to Build me a Gaming PC... Let's See if I Get Scammed!

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