Walmart is one of the biggest market chains of hypermarkets, discounted departmental stores, grocery stores in the US. They pretty much sell everything that you would need in your life. The network is so big and reliable that many people prefer products from Walmart than any other marketplace.
Another reason for their huge success is the prices of the products they offer. These prices are on such a lower scale that one may think that Wallmart sells products without profit. Now, profit is where things go steeply wrong. Like any other company Walmart too is driven by Profits in the margin which can be seen if we look at the nitty gritty of their products.
They have a custom lineup of gaming PCs called Over Powered Gaming PCs. These PCs are so cheap that I almost bought one just because of the insanely less price. The OP (Over Powered) DTW1 PC which is the cheapest in the lineup comes with six-core Intel’s Core i7-8700k processor and a GTX 1070 Graphics card. The price of the whole system is only $999. A similarly spec’d gaming PC from HP costs around $1500.
Specifications
Let’s talk about the specification of the system and see the relative prices of these parts. Starting with the processor, the Intel’s 8th gen Core i7-8700k is a six-core processor with hyperthreading. The coffee lake processor currently retails at $390 due to sale on Amazon. Next, we have the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Graphics cards.
Though it is now the previous gen Graphics card, it still has enough horsepower to play any game at 1440p high settings. The name of the board partner is not on the site. But one can verify just by seeing the image of the product that its the Gigabyte Windforce OC model.
Though the prices of the Graphics card are down now the Windforce OC model of the GTX 1070 is still retailing at $396 on Amazon. If you are interested in the product, you can click on the link here. Next up we have the memory, on the site they have mentioned 16GB of RAM clocked at 2440MHz. The catch here is no RAM that I know of comes with this speed. The unboxing video of Bitwit confirmed ADATA’s DDR4 memory of size 16GB single stick clocked at 2400MHz. I could not get the same memory they are using in the system. ADATA’s XPG Z1 DDR4 2400 MHz 16GB memory costs around $115 on Amazon. You can click the link here if you are interested.
They mentioned the specs of the motherboard but by the looks of it. The motherboard they opted for is where they supposedly got their margins. The motherboard is from Gigabyte with H310 chipset that does not allow overclocking and has fairly basic specs for a 2018 rig. Not to mention the motherboard only supports USB 2.0 ports. It has only two RAM slots so running a dual channel memory is out of proportion.
On top of that, the PCI-E connection is not the 16 line one, so the yield of the Graphics card is highly affected. The motherboard only costs $72. You can follow amazon’s link here.
The storage department is very basic. They have ADATA’s 256 GB SSD and Toshiba’s 2 TB mechanical hard drive. The SSD costs around $45 through this link on Amazon. The Toshiba’s HDD costs around $70 through the Amazon link here.
The power supply they are using is very basic 550 Watt PSU from great wall. You cannot get the PSU as they only make these for pre-built manufacturers. The price of the PSU is around $30. I do not know what case they are using and lastly, the 120mm fans in the case fully support RGB lighting. They have their 2-year warranty plans which are sweet.
Profit maximization
If we add the prices of all the components present above without including the price of the case, it comes out to be $1,120. While Wallmart is only asking $999 now for the product, earlier the DTW1 was retailing at $1399. It also comes with Windows 10 installed. We are not adding the price of windows too it will make our analysis way out of proportion.
The first thing that will come into your mind would be the Over Powered DTW1 would be the best PC to buy as it is pre-built. It costs less than the cost of the components. It has RGB fans (GAMERS APPROVED). BUT the story does not end here. We unboxed the PC and discovered a set of errors that we would like to share.
ERRORS
First of all the Case, they are using is outright gorgeous. It has a tempered glass front and the left panel followed by a steel panel on the right. So we are going to start our rant with the case. Though the case is amply built, it has literally no room for the air to flow out through the front fans. It can affect the performance of the system as these fans would not be able to take the heat out of the system and hence thermal throttling is inevitable.
When you remove the side panel, you are greeted with awful cable management and the components of the build — the first thing that you are going to notice that the power cable of the Graphics card is not connected.
We thought it might have come off during shipping but each model they ship has this issue which shows the negligence of the builders. These pre-built systems are for people who cannot build PCs for themselves, yet Wallmart is assuming that the buyers will open the side panel and the power supply of the Graphics card themselves.
The motherboard they are using here can also abridge the life of this PC. The H310 chipset does support 8th gen CPUs, but it cannot provide enough power to the CPU. It causes bottlenecks and performance hiccups that one is going to notice during the gaming hours.
The motherboard only supports single channel memory. Even a kid nowadays knows the benefits of the dual channel memory. Dual channel memory is not going to matter much here as it is primarily built for gaming but the gaming is not the sole purpose of every gaming PC.
Lastly, the power supply they are using is unrated. The rating of power supplies matters the most in the power-hungry systems. The ratings suggest how much load the power supply can manage and how efficiently it can deliver current to the respective components. One must have at the very least bronze rated power supply. It will make you sleep well at night because you would know the fact that your PC is not going to catch fire anytime soon.
Performance
I am going to end it with the performance that this Over Powered system delivers. You can game on it easily as the GTX 1070 is enough for most games out there. You may not want to have extreme sessions with this thermal solution and power supply. Lastly, if you want to make it better without spending too much just buy a bronze rated power supply so that your system remains safe.
For the detailed review of the PC head over to our review of the GeForce GTX 1070 as the output will more or less be the same.