The Pay-To-Win Gaming PC

High refresh monitors, force sensitive keyboards, and even gamer goo. These are all the things that are supposed to enhance your performance in gaming. But do they? We put our money where their mouth is by testing out a true Tryhard PC.

Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
2:30 Peripherals
6:41 Speed and Luxury
7:19 A Few Extra Tweaks
7:47 You Call THIS a Computer?
9:12 The REAL Test
10:45 These are All Legal
11:56 Aim Lab
12:45 The Verdict
14:07 Outro

[DustyTheDog]

I remember when these top of the line builds were called "Compensator". Good times.

[robertslater]

Love how it's basically, let's take everything expensive sent from short circuit and put it all on one place

[davidgreen]

It'd be interesting to see if you can do a blind/double-blind test to see if people actually can tell a significant difference (maybe use the same mouse on the average PC?) between the two machines, or if it's some sort of placebo effect.

[CNote]

I used to game on an 800x600 CRT monitor with a rubber ball mouse and semi-broken plastic keyboard harvested from my mom's office and I still managed to make it on the leaderboard of the CS1.6 servers I was playing on. Now that I'm older and have some income to buy higher end parts I'm terrible at games since I have no time to play them!

[AlexisLeskinen]

I would love a series like Donut's Hi-Low where a setup would be progressively upgraded in order to see what parts are more important.

[st_ar]

I think there’s a limit to how much FPS matters in games. You can give Linus the best PC on the planet, but skill will matter.

[theblackrose]

Fun fact: that 26ms delay between button press and screen response in the "average" PC is right around the conductance delay between your motor cortex and the FDI which is the abductor muscle of the index finger that pressed the button.

[unorthodoxbox]

I would've liked to have seen someone in the esports scene try this out compared to their set up. Would it have benefited them?

[kihayu]

It would be interesting to see how a competitive e-sports gamer would behave between these systems

[sigma-erebus]

I think the newer Wooting keyboard model used here actually uses the new Hall Effect sensors instead of the old flaretech optical sensors. (HE edition). Especially because the older flaretech models didn't support 0.1 mm actuation distance (iirc smallest was 0.4 mm on the older models)

[coreyh]

The problem with doing aim lab back and forth like that (as someone who used to work for them) is you WILL do better every consecutive round. That's what it's designed to do. So you'd probably have to keep going back and forth until you kept getting better on one system, and stopped getting better on the other. Or do 10min of warmup first on the avg system til you level out (like a stress test), and then go to the better system and see how much better you do. But even then it would still take some time for your body to adapt to the new abilities. But you can see if you plateau higher.

[codethecreator]

The most fun I ever had was running Black Squad on an old 4th Gen i5 and a 1050. Used the cheapest logitech wireless K&M and it was so much fun. The more I get into hardware now, the less fulfilled I feel. Mechanical keyboards, high DPI mice, high refresh rate. It all just seems like stuff to make me seem like I'm having more fun than I am.

For the record, I started gaming on a Pentium III playing Counter Strike with a ball mouse. I'm on about more recently when I got back into gaming as an adult.

[nin_]

Would love to see this test done with professional gamers

[Its-Just-Zip]

5:57 Note on the wooting keyboard: it's not OPTICAL, it's a hall effect sensor. It's a subtle difference, but it's an important one. An optical keyboard can't as easily distinguished distance as a hall effect sensor can.

Also, the keyboard is maybe the only thing I can recommend out of this set at about 6 minutes in and only for the practical purpose of the fact that in theory those key switches will never wear out as long as you replace the springs when they start to degrade, you can continue using that keyboard clear into the next millennium. Also, I really like the way they handled control software so there's no actual download to worry about. It's a web app and everything is stored on the keyboard

[Accuaro]

5:40 Anthony, the best thing about this keyboard is actually the "rapid trigger & tachyon mode", where upon lifting up on the switch the input can then be instantly triggered no matter where the switch has been actuated.

[SrNerd]

It would be interesting to see pro players trying it like you did in the "Refresh rate does matter? (Hertz VS FPS) test"

[TheXshot]

The heart popping out on MKBHD caught me off guard 😅

[justinmilam]

I think this would have been a great opportunity to have an esports gamer in studio to conduct the test along with the average gamer. I suspect that the average professional gamer would have some sort of benefit from the decreased latency and as for your average gamer it would make no difference.

[itsdomtoo]

the fact this takes not one but TWO extreme tech upgrades from AMD/Intel is crazy

[PeacelordApropos]

Love the all in approach. It's like money is nothing at all