iBUYPOWER Gaming RDY VIBG202 System Review

by

We are influencers and brand affiliates.  This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.

Pre-built PC’s and home built PC’s can be very different.  OEM’s many times can water down components, make upgrading impossible with proprietary components, but they can distract you with AMAZING pricing.

Home built PC’s are great, if you know what you are doing, have the time and have deep pockets.  You and I don’t get the discounts the OEM’s do but boutiques do.  This is where I introduce you to iBUYPOWER and their RDY VIBG202 offering.

iBUYPOWER is not a OEM, they don’t build PC’s that have proprietary components trapping you into their support scheme.  iBUYPOWER is a boutique PC builder, meaning they use off the shelf components you and I can buy today at better pricing than you and I can get building a PC to suite your needs.  Now the question comes up though, are they good, can they build the PC that does what you need for today and maybe for the foreseeable future as well affordably, we will go over this as well, not just performance.  You and I will find out together.

In this review, we will go over the iBUYPOWER RDY VIBG202, checking out the components and the performance of the PC as well as the price to find out if this PC is worth it, or if it is just another rip off.  Let’s check out an unboxing first to see what comes in the package.

It is almost a complete system, you get a keyboard, mouse and a PC, you only need to buy a monitor, unless of course you already have one.

Now let show you what’s inside

Everything separately comes to about $1,756.61 but iBUYPOWER is selling this at the moment for $1599.99, so you get some savings, but is it worth it, we will get to that a little later.

I will not be comparing this to my own system at the moment, as I am currently benchmarking my machine, but I will add on to this review shortly.  I wanted to give you all this information as soon as possible.

I will be benchmarking using 3DMark Firestrike, 3DMark TimeSpy and PCMark 10.  Then I will also be benchmarking with games like FarCry 5, Metro Last Light, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Tom Clancy’s Wildlands.  Now a gaming PC doesn’t just only game like a console does, a gaming PC can do everything a regular PC can do but a lot faster and to gauge that, I will be running tests like AIDA64, BootRacer, CINEBENCH, Crystal Disk Mark and again PCMark 10 so you can see just what you are getting.

Metro Last Light I have been using for some time, but potentially will be updating soon but FarCry 5, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Tom Clancy’s Wildlands are newer ones on the line up.

I will also be recording power consumption throughout these tests using “P3 International’s” “Kill A Watt” so you can see how much power this thing is taking.  Also, I will be recording temperatures as well.

Without further a due, let’s check out the next chapter of this review, Gaming Benchmarks.

Continue: GAMING BENCHMARKS

[nextpage title=”GAMING BENCHMARKS”]

This section will give you an idea on what you can expect on the benchmarks to compare to your own system to see how it fares.

Let’s start it off with 3DMark’s Fire Strike

The score we normally would look at is the standard score of 19,021 which is actually pretty impressive scoring 93% better than all other results.  There we can see that the system consumed a max of 306 Watts and on average consumed 236Watts.  The system pumped out a max temperature of 62°C on the CPU and a 65°C on the video card, decent temperatures, though liquid cooling unit seemed a little under powered.

The RTX 2070 is fairing very well paired with the Core i7 9700K, but let’s check out the rest of the scores.

Off of the same utility, let’s check to see what TimeSpy offered.

The score here is 8,190, scoring better than 79% of all other results.  While the 2070 is a great card, it might start to struggle a little at 4K, which is what TimeSpy runs at, though still not bad.

On this test, we can see that the system consumed a max of 223 Watts and on average consumed 207Watts.  The CPU heated up to a max temperature of 61°C and the GPU 63°C.  These are decent temps, not amazing though.

This focus mainly on the video card, and a little on the CPU, let’s get an overall feel of the system though and for that we will use PCMark 10.

PCMark 10 benchmarks the entire system to see how well it will work in an office environment for productivity, digital content creation, web browsing and also some gaming as well.  While a synthetic benchmark, it can better help you gauge overall system performance.

The score here is 7,010, performing better than 98% of all other results, this includes prebuilt and custom-built PC’s here, there is no bias.

Coming close to the top, we can see that the system consumed only a max of 256 Watts and on average 111 Watts.  The CPU heated up a bit more at 75°C and the GPU 65°C.  75°C is nothing to be alarmed about, since the point of danger where the CPU starts to throttle is 100°C.  This does however show that this may not be the best liquid cooling solution, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves on this, there’s a little more to this that I will go on to a bit later in the review.

So this configuration on 3 tests scored over 90% better than all other systems tested, that’s nothing to overlook, we have some serious performance here.

While 3DMark and PCMark are nice, you can’t play them and they only give you an idea of what you can expect, let’s check out some actual game performance.

We will start off with Metro Last Light

Here are my presets, I ran all tests at these settings changing only the resolutions.  I tested at 1080P, 1440P and 4K UHD (3840 x 2160).

Starting off at 4K, the game was playable though potentially running into some hiccups as it hit an average frame rate of 57.07 and consumed an average of 276Watts.  The video card hit a max temperature of 67°C and the CPU kept its cool at 54°C which is not bad for a game.

At 1440P, we hit a much better gaming experience at 105.51, a 45.91% improvement, consuming on average 267 Watts, 4.30% lower than in 4K.  The CPU heated up a little more, but still manageable at a 27.8% increase at 69°C and the GPU 66°C, 1°C lower than in 4K.

Finally, at a very common 1080P, the game performed 41.42% better than at 1440P, coming in at 149.21 frames per second eat up an average of 276 Watts.  Since the resolution was lower, having more CPU dependency, the CPU did get 5.80% hotter at 72°C.  The GPU kept it’s cool on par with its 1440P counterpart at 66°C.

We can see the makings of a good system so far, game wise, so let’s jump into Far Cry 5.

Here are the presets for Far Cry 5, I ran all tests at the Ultra Quality settings changing only the resolutions.  I tested at 1080P, 1440P and 4K UHD (3840 x 2160).

This game surprised me a bit at how much it took.  You can see at 4K, it was not playable at a chunky 45 frames per second average, consuming on average 261 Watts and heating up that CPU to 70°C.  The GPU handled it a bit better heating up to 65°C, both temps are not high by any means but the GPU seems to be keeping cooler.

At 1440P, the game is excellently playable at 86 frames per second, 91.1% better than at 4K and taking up on average 278Watts only 6.51% more, that’s a decent exchange.  The CPU again maxed out at 70°C while the GPU dropped a degree at 64°C.

At 1080P, you are free as a bird hitting frame rates on average at 117, 26% better then at 1440P and draining the power plant running on average 286Watts.  The CPU stayed at a decent 70°C while the GPU regained that lost degree and went back up to 65°C.  Beautiful graphics and the engine seems to be relatively well optimized.

The 2070 and 9700K did pretty well on this game also, especially being that this is a newer game and all.  Let’s check out Shadows of the Tomb Raider.

Here are the presets for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I ran all tests at the Highest Quality settings changing only the resolutions.  I tested at 1080P, 1440P and 4K UHD (3840 x 2160).   Even though some areas show Ultra, High and Normal, those as the preset implies are the highest settings available.

Historically as I have tested before, Tomb Raider has not taxed the cards as much as this one has, you can see at 4K, we have a slide show at 30 frames per second on average.  It is so bad, the average wattage was only 255 Watts and the CPU and GPU kicked their feet up on the table and heated up to 54°C and 62°C respectively, they just gave up the ghost.

At 1440P, we were almost 100% playable at 54 frames per second, up 44.44% above 4K’s FPS and consuming 246 Watts on average.  The CPU now woke up and heated up to 62°C, 14.81% higher than before and the GPU was 4.84% hotter at 65°C.

1080P is totally playable at 78 frames per second and consuming 2.5% less power on average than its 1440P sibling.  While the power consumption was less, the CPU temperature increase a mere 4.84% to 65° and the GPU maxed it and the previous test at 65°C as well.

Laura kicked up the notch here and put the system to the test, demanding more and the RDY VIBG202 buckled a bit but picked up the pace.  Next up, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands.

Here are the presets for Wildlands, I ran all tests at Ultra changing only the resolutions.  I tested at 1080P, 1440P and 4K UHD (3840 x 2160).

The Ultra preset killed it on this game, at 4K, totally unplayable at 31.72 frames per second and consuming on average 249 Watts.  The CPU was a toasty 67°C and the GPU 68°C.

At 1440P, we saw a resurrection of sorts having the frames per second count improve 62.77% coming in a t 51.63, not 100% playable but very close to 60 fps.  During this test, the average power consume was 275Watts and the CPU and GPU matched at 67°C, mirroring the previous results and 1° lower on the GPU this time around.

At 1080P, the FPS count was 28.99% faster then at 1440P. this time achieve 66.6 frames per second.  This time the average was only 1 watt higher than before coming in at 276Watts.  With that lower resolution, the CPU kicks in more and heating itself up to a concerning 77°C, that’s 14.93% higher than before.  The GPU on the other hand relaxed a bit only heat up to 66°C, 1° less than on previous tests.

I like to run these all at their highest settings so that you know what to expect, a simple drop in preset will greatly improve playability on all games.  For example, dropping Ultra to High or High to Medium and reduce many of those needless settings and greatly improve performance.

My preferred resolution is 1440P, for even the highest end card, is the comfortable spot for gaming.  Mind you 4K is nice to, if anything just to say you can, but over 60 frames per second is the sweet spot.  In the forums I frequent, a greater percent of the team runs their games at 1080P, but 1440P is my sweet spot.  It seems to be the 2070’s sweet spot as well for half of the line up above a 1 setting change can change the performance for the other 2 games to achieve 60fps or above.

Now, not everyone reading this is a gamer and that’s OK, you might prefer some video encoding, writing, ripping some music or just browsing the web, so let’s check out some Drive benchmarks and afterwards some CPU Benchmarks.

Continue: Drive Benchmarks

[nextpage title=”Drive Benchmarks”]

For the operating system drive, iBUYPOWER provided an SSD, the WD Green 240GB SSD.  Let’s see how she performs.

We can see that the Read here was 492.1MB/s (MegaBytes Per second), while the write was 364.4MB/s.  By far, nothing to write home about but now let’s see the speeds the 1TB Blue Drive achieves, a mechanical drive.

The numbers may not mean a lot to you yet, but the SSD reached 492 on write versus the mechanical drives 180.8.  What this means is that the SSD reads data 172.17% faster than the mechanical drives and then with that, the SSD wrote information at 364.4MB/s while the mechanical drive wrote it at 174.3MB/s.  So again, the SSD writes it faster, 109.06% faster in fact than the mechanical drive.

Many of us know that an SSD is much faster than a mechanical drive, but I am writing this for those of us that may not know this, I want to help everyone else out.  This also though it to remind you that even though this is not the fastest drive, it is ALWAYS faster than a mechanical drive.   Many OEM’s still include mechanical drives in their systems as boot drives, sometimes they are even 5400RPM’s drive which are much slower.

Something I will focus on more a bit later, but relevant to this portion of the review is that MSI on their website for the motherboard, provides a piece of software called Dragon Center.

Dragon Center allows you to improve the performance of your drives as well just flicking a switch, so I figured to try it.

We can see here the boosted drive, boosted using Dragon Center’s switch for the most part performs better than the standard drive.  I didn’t want to get into each of these, since this is an overall performance score, but I think I should let you know what each of the sections are listed above in the legend.

  • 4KIB Q1T1 is the random read or write of a 4KB block with single queue and thread
  • 4KiB Q8T8 is the random read or write of a 4KB block with multi queues (8) and threads (8)
  • Seq Q32T1 is Sequential Read or Write of multi queues and threads
  • 4KiB Q32T1 is the random read or write of a 4KB block with multi queues (32) and threads (1)

Windows assumes that files and memory are handled in 4 kilobyte chucks, meaning that all transfers from a drive to memory are 4 kilobytes in size.

A queue, is a set of instructions, 1 queue is one set of instructions and multi queue or multiple queues are multiple sets of instructions or data and they are processed in order.  A thread, manages the queues processing their data, a thread handles 1 queue, multiple threads handle multiple queues to process data efficiently.

The one most pay attention to is the Seq Q32T1, as this is the reading that drive manufactures publish and are usually held accountable for.  You can see that the sequential data is read 5% faster on the boosted results than it is on the standard results and is written 18.85% faster in the boosted results over the standard results.  That’s pretty impressive considering it’s a free and easy overclock.

This software is actually pretty good, but is not included in the install from iBUYPOWER as some may consider this bloatware, but actually is a bit handy.  I recommend downloading this off of the MSI’s Z390-A Pro with WiFi support site, along with a few other important things I will mention later in this review.  It comes on the media included but I always recommend downloading the latest version, regardless since there is no optical drive, you cannot read it and it also saves a few dollars it not being included.

I would like to reiterate, the operating system is installed on the SSD, not the mechanical drive so this lends itself to the system running so smoothly.  When you have a powerful system, you want things to run well, you also want the system to boot quickly, so I will test the boot speeds using BootRacer from Greatis Software.

From here, we can see that rebooting a machine took in total 25.093 seconds to boot.  Now this does not mean it takes 25 seconds from the second you see the black screen till the point you enter windows.  The boot test starts once the BIOS P.O.S.T. screen appears till the point it enters windows, that was 10 seconds.  The other 15 seconds is the point that windows finishes loading all of the programs and everything is loaded into the system tray, that is how it gets to 25.093 seconds.

10 seconds into windows at 15 seconds more for everything to load.  This means that after 10 seconds you can start using the PC and things will work just fine, but things will run a little more smoothly if you waited those additional 10 seconds.

Since the operating system was only on the SSD I could only test on the SSD, but if it were on the mechanical drive booting into windows will take anywhere between 30 seconds to 1 minute longer.  Booting into an idle state in windows, throw in another at least 30 seconds.  SSD’s are amazing.

So let’s move on to the CPU performance with CPU Benchmarks.

Continue: CPU Benchmarks

[nextpage title=”CPU Benchmarks”]

Testing the CPU involves speed testing but it also involves heat, heat dissipation and power.  For these benchmarks we will be testing using MAXON’s Cinebench and FinalWire’s AIDA64.

With a pass of Cinebench, we can see the Intel Core i7-9700K bests an Intel Xeon X5650.  The Xeon has 12 cores and 24threads and the 9700K has 8 cores and 8 threads, no hyperthreading.  You might ask, then how did Core i7 9700K perform better than a Xeon, simply put speed.

While the Xeon did have more cores and threads, the Core i7 has almost 1 gigahertz on each core more than the Xeon.  It’s like comparing 8 experienced fast employees working on a task vs 24 newer workers on a task.  Both will get the job done, but the experienced workers are faster and can do more than the newer workers because they are faster.

Cinebench measures the CPU performance using the processors processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene.  As the program runs, you can see each core (physical and hyper-threaded) load individual frames.

During this test, the hottest the CPU reach was 69° on the package and the hottest core was 68°C.  I have below how these looked in HWMonitor.

You can see during these tests, the CPU hit 100% utilization.

This shows just a bit on the cooling power of the custom liquid cooling unit the iBUYPOWER comes packed with, let’s go into a bit deeper using AIDA64 stability test.

I ran AIDA64’s Stability test for 15 minutes stressing the CPU and each of it cores 100%.  You can see on the bottom screen where the yellow line reads CPU utilization at 100% and the green line all the way at the bottom reads 0% that shows CPU Throttling.  CPU Throttling occurs when the CPU reaches its TJunction or Junction Temperature which is 100°C and then slows itself down to protect itself from burning up or melting.  This is not an issue now a days because of it, but not too long-ago CPU’s would burn up if not cooled correctly.

While throttling is a good mechanism to protect the CPU, it slows you down because the cores cannot work at their full potential.  The tests show here that during those 15 minutes the CPU would only reach its highest temperature of 83°C (it shows 81°C, but I watched it and saw the highest spike was 83°C) so it did not come close to throttling under full load.  Keeping your CPU nice and cool is very important and this unit can take care of any work load you throw at it under regular use.

As the CPU heated up, the liquid cooling unit got louder, which is a great thing.  While the system is idle or performing minimal tasks the liquid cooling unit quiets down, the fans slow down a bit as they are not truly needed.  As the temperatures begin to spike, the fans start reving up working to cool the CPU back down to a comfortable temperature.

The liquid cooling unit is decent, but not recommended if you are planning on overclocking this CPU to its limits.  I will get more into the liquid cooling unit and an issue I found later in the review.

The 2 tests performed here are considered synthetic and while it comes close to recreating real-world use, sometimes overly exaggerating real word use, is not real-world use.  So let’s get it to some gameplay and see how the overall system performs and keeps itself cool.

Continue: Realworld Gameplay

[nextpage title=”Realworld Gameplay”]

Games, Games, Games, it’s what you do on a gaming PC but really you can do anything on a gaming PC that you could do on another PC, just A LOT FASTER because it’s a powerful PC.  At this point, I got off of the monitor that supported 4K UHD resolutions and started using the Viotek 35″ Curved Gaming Monitor that runs at 144Hz at 2560 x 1080 that is a FreeSync capable monitor but with NVIDIA’s latest driver, now also supported G-Sync.

So let’s start this session off with Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider played great at 2560 x 1080p, as well it should but of course everything was turned up, all the eye candy you could want.  What did you think?

Alright, now that we are done there, let’s check out how the iBUYPOWER Gaming RDY VIG202 takes on Far Cry 5.

Super smooth gameplay there, it was more to show you how it ran with a lot going on within the game.  Like before, everything turned up.  OK, let’s check out Tom Clancy’s WildLands.

https://youtu.be/rOfP2a8L4q0

Beautiful graphics, sadly these are some of the only times I get to play, when I am reviewing product but it’s fun for those few minutes.  I think I will get into this game soon, but you can see just how well it ran with all of those plants swaying as the wind blows over them.  Blood flying everywhere while the bullets find their resting spots.

With all this performance, you may be asking what exactly is in the system and we will check this out now in the next chapter, Parts breakdown.

Continue: Parts breakdown

[nextpage title=”Parts breakdown”]

One of the things that comes with the system, taped onto the side of the system a very important note.

This note is to remind you to remove the foam they included inside of the machine to make sure nothing comes loose during shipping and destroys the inside of the machine.  I have seen this many times before, and it’s horrible what can happen, especially if the liquid cooling unit gets damaged.  You don’t want to turn on the system with that inside.

The system brings a Windows 10 reinstallation DVD, which is a bit awkward considering the system does not bring an optical drive.  In case you end up getting this system, click on the link so that you can check out an affordable LG 8X USB 2.0 DVDRW drive.

You have already seen the outside of this machine, but I will show you one more time just in case you forgot.

The case is a iBUYPOWER branded Thermaltake View 21 case, made just for iBuyPower.  It’s a nice case with a curved front face and the only thing that sets this aside from the regular View 21 is the logo on the power supply shroud and on the top portion of the case which we will see a bit later.

Without the glass side panel one, which each side has, you can see inside of the case.

Just above the power supply shroud, you can install 2 x 2.5’ drives, in this case there is already a drive installed.

The drive is a WD Green 240GB SSD, this is where Windows 10 Home gets installed onto, for a bit of a performance boost over standard slower mechanical drives.

Just above that, we find the system includes a WiFi card.  The card is held in a M.2 adapter card making it compatible with the system.  The card itself is an Intel Dual Band Wirelss-AC 3168 so not only does it have dual band WiFi but it also has Bluetooth.  The card not only takes up a x1 PCI-e slot, but it also uses up a USB 2.0 header.  While this may not seem like much for some, others don’t have an option and need Wi-Fi where their desks are and being that this comes with a pre-built machine that you don’t need to wait around to get built, this is a plus.

Above the Wi-Fi card, we find an MSI Ventus Geforce RTX 2070 8G, a great card for the price, on its own it is a good card which is kept pretty cool in this system.  The card provides 2 x HDMI, 2 x DisplayPort and a USB-C connection. Prior to running GPU-Z, I thought it was a higher end card, the ARMOR series, but I corrected the text afterwards… making the benchmarking results a little more enticing.

Just above that, we find an iBUYPOWER liquid cooling unit.  This unit does a great job on its own keeping the CPU cool, a slight overclock might even work, but you have to watch it.  Under the cold plate cooling the CPU we find an Intel Core i7 9700K processor.  A great CPU, 2nd from the top of its line sporting 8 cores running at 3.60Ghz with its max turbo frequency hitting 4.9Ghz with 12MB of cache.

To the right of the CPU, we find 16gigs of Adata XPG ram, model number AX4U300038G16-BSZ 3000Mhz DDR4 ram.

At the base of the system, next to the power supply, we find the RGB controller box.

At the top of the system, we can see the RGB LED strip.

Its colors are controlled by this little remote control included in the package.

The back of this system can be a little scary, with all the cables strung across shows 2 additional pieces of equipment.

Top left-hand corner shows a 1TB Western Digital Blue drive, this drive is used as the storage drive.  Not the fastest but it is a storage drive so it doesn’t need to be very fast, which is why it was left as the storage drive not the OS drive.

At the bottom right hand corner, we find the system is using a Thermaltake Smart Series 600Watt 80PLUS Gold power supply which does this system well.

The top front of the system, we can see the case has 2 x USB 3.0 ports as well as a microphone and headphone jack, activity light and power light.  The long strip to the right of the is the Reset and Power button.

Zooming out a bit, we can see the curve at the front of the case and the iBUYPOWER Chimera trademark.

At the rear of the system, we can find the I/O. The motherboard has 2 x USB 2.0 ports as well as an old school PS/2 port a DVI and VGA connection as well as a Display Port connection.  We can also see a USB  type C connection as well as a USB C type A connection.  We find 2 additional USB 3.0 ports as well as an ethernet port, which is an Intel i219-V connection the finally the Realtek ALC892 5.1 audio jacks.

Below that we find the MSI Ventus Geforce RTX 2070 as well as the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3168, both of which we already mention before and the power supply.

Holding the system together we find an MSI Z390-A PRO Gaming Motherboard.  The board supports 8th and 9th Gen Intel 1151 socket processors and supports DDR4 RAM up to 4400Mhz.  The board has support for a single M.2 drive, 2 x16 PCE-e Gen 3 slots supporting Crossfire, 4 x1 PCI-e slots, 6 SATA 3 ports, 4 x DIMM slots supporting up to 64Gigs of RAM, a TPM header and support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.

The system also comes with this keyboard.  It is not a mechanical keyboard, it is a membrane type keyboard, cushy soft keyboard presses which I actually kind of miss, although I do love the clickies.  This is a modified Gamdias keyboard, a combo keyboard that also comes with a mouse.

This is the mouse, it is actually very comfortable, a little on the small side but it offers a clickable scroll wheel, forward and back side buttons, a DPI selector switch and sides that are textured as to not slip from your hands up to a 3200 DPI.  The keyboard shows it is an Aeres E1 and the mouse a Zeus E2.

OK, now that we have gone through all the pieces in the system, lets get to our final chapter in this review, Is it worth it, Final Thoughts.

Continue: Is it worth it, Final Thoughts

[nextpage title=”Is it worth it, Final Thoughts”]

We have gone throughout all the parts in the system, though I have not mentioned the price, I know it sounds like it will be expensive.  The system with all of these parts is $1599.99 so I will itemize each piece with its cost on Amazon below finding its closest match keeping quality in mind.

  • Video Card

MSI Geforce RTX 2070 Ventus 8G: $499.99

  • CPU

Intel Core i7-9700K: $409.99

  • Memory

16GB (2x8GB) XPG Z1 DDR4 3000MHz (AX4U300038G16-DSZ1): $109.99

  • Liquid Cooling

EVGA CLC 120 Liquid (Not the exact one, but this was the closest I could find) $84.99

  • Power Supply

Thermaltake Smart 600W 80+: $44.99

  • SSD

240 GB Western Digital Green SSD: $40.50

  • Mechanical Hard Drive

WD Blue 1TB SATA 6 Gb/s 7200 RPM: $47.79

  • Communications

Intel 3160 Dual Band Wireless AC + Bluetooth: $29.99

fenvi Desktop Wireless Network M.2(NGFF) Wireless Card to PCI-e 1X: $15.99

  • Operating System

Windows 10 Home: 119.00

  • Motherboard

MSI Z390-A PRO: $129.99

  • Case

Thermaltake View 21: $69.99

  • Case Lighting

RGB LED Light Strip $29.99

  • Mouse

iBuyPower Zeus E2 3200 DPI Optical Gaming Mouse: $35.00

  • Keyboard

iBuyPower Ares E1 Gaming Keyboard: $14.99

Recalculating it a bit after the videos were filmed, it did come out cheaper, it came out to $1,683.18 and being that the system is $1599.99, it’s a deal.  It is a bargain because someone is building it for you, some don’t either have the time or the knowledge to build them.  Not to mention, you don’t have to pay shipping for each individual item, as well as have to deal with separately warranties.  Working previously for 2 boutique builders and then the largest OEM as a Product Development engineer I have heard it all, I helped the Salesguys as well.

Lawyers, Doctors then people that are handicapped or elderly that cannot actually move the components around.  On the other side, there are those that don’t know how to build them and maybe intimidated in building them, this is the perfect system for them.

Ontop of having someone else build it for you, you have to think that these guys are paying mortgage for the building they do business is in which factors itself into the cost of the machine.  Above all else, this machine has life time phone support and includes 3 years of support for the system overall, these are costs that many times are not factored in.  If you build it yourself, you have to know how to fix it yourself too or spend countless hours googling or asking in public forums for help, and that can be murder.

In my opinion, this system is totally worth it, factoring all the costs, they are giving this away.

Now, this system did not come at all without any flaws, I found a few that I mentioned above I would get back to, here’s the place.

When I first received the system, I did not look in the BIOS at all, I thought it would be perfect, so I started testing.  After a while I decided, “You know what, I think I should look in the BIOS” and that’s where it all fell apart, well kind of at least.

I found that XMP had not been enabled, which potentially robs the system of performance, but I also had issues with booting the system up when I had a mouse and keyboard attached, you know,.. non-essentials.  I decided to check on MSI’s website and found that the BIOS that the system had, was the initial BIOS, there had been about 3 newer BIOS’ which actually addressed USB issues when booting up,… go figure.  So I flashed the BIOS, enabled XMP and started testing, providing you with all of the benchmarks you saw above.

Being that this is not a Custom system, that you would build through their online configurator or something you called in to build, it had been sitting on the shelf for a while.  I found that the video drivers were older and Windows needed to be updated to support RTX. I completely understand all of this since I had come from this environment, this is a very common thing for a pre-built system.  Drivers and software get updated all the time, and as a system builder, you just can’t throw a new driver, BIOS, software in a machine without testing it, it takes time so they can usually be a revision or 2 behind.

Testing all of the USB ports, I found the USB type C connection was bad.  After talking with iBUYPOWER’s support we came to the conclusion that the motherboard was bad, so they sent me a new one, which is where another issue came to light.

Disassembling the system to replace the board, I found the liquid cooling units cold plate had 1 of the screws that was pretty loose, another one that was a little loose but the other 2 were fine so I had to find out what was happening, it wasn’t just 1 issue.  I decided to contact iBUYPOWER’s PR firm to see why I had all of these issues, if this was common and what they would do to address them.

I spoke to the Product Marketing Manager and gave him all of the feedback and things I found with the system and I was a bit surprised by the response.

The Marketing Manager stated that overall, they have done a lot of retraining on the systems quality control in the last couple of months, after the machine was already built.  Issues like XMP and MCE as well as the older BIOS versions had been addressed and mistakes like these are surely to be stopped if not minimized on future systems.  A newer type of automated benchmark/QC is being implemented which will catch a lot of these issues, aside from human eyes.

He went on to take the blame and say that the liquid cooling unit not being seated properly was something that had no excuse.  That missed the QC process and has been addressed.  It speaks volumes when a company fesses up to their own issues and doesn’t try to BS with you, that means a lot.

Like you, I have gone through process of receiving a machine, going through support and receiving bad product’s so I am reviewing this machine with all this in mind.  So lets see the pros and cons.

Pros

  • Fast system
  • Affordable
  • Very quiet for the performance it packs
  • Being a machine built with off of the shelf products, you can easily update it if you wanted too.
  • Nothing proprietary
  • Friendly Support
  • Comes with a Wi-Fi Adapter
  • Price includes and SSD and a Storage Drive

Cons

  • Cabling management is not pretty, more like non existent.

Nope, I did not mention the issues I had, because support helped me through all of them, these things happen, I can tell you first hand.  Though, I am grading the issues, I cannot count them as con’s, from a $500 PC up to a $10,000  PC, any and all can have issues, it’s all in how the issues are handled that make a PC and its experience.

If you have not seen it before, check out the overview of this system and we will go over more below it.

 

That video showed you all of the benchmarks you have already seen, as well as all of the components and features, I wanted to get that across.

So with all that said and done, I bring you my final score on this machine.

Congratulations iBUYPOWER, the RDY VIGB202 scored a 9.0 Editors Choice.  The machine was going to get a bit higher since it is such a great value and performed so well but the QC issues brought the score down a bit.  While they said it would be corrected, I can only speak for the system I reviewed.  The drop in ease of use, is for having to replace the motherboard, I could have shipped the system back, but that would have taken a lot longer and thankfully I know how to replace a board, so easy enough and it was great I was given the option.

[P_REVIEW post_id=1082796 visual=’full’]

 

 

 

We are influencers and brand affiliates.  This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.