The gaming industry, everyone wants to be part of this booming market and Walmart decided it is time to join as well by launching their own line-up of pre-built gaming PCs. The OP (OverPowered) line-up feature both desktop gaming PCs: the DTW1, DTW2 and DTW3, as well as three laptops the OP Gaming Laptop 15”, the OP Gaming Laptop 15”+ and the OP Gaming Laptop 17”+.
These systems are targeting all budget sizes from tight budget up to generous pockets but the question is: are these systems really worth looking into when shopping for your next build?
Let’s take a quick look on the spec sheets of all the OP builds and after we will discuss more in-depth the DTW1 system aimed to be a mid-range gaming desktop PC as we think this system is the sweet spot for all pockets when it comes to gaming.
OverPowered DTW1:
CPU: Intel I7-8700
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070
RAM: 16GB DDR4 2400Mhz
STORAGE: 256GB SSD + 2TB HDD
OS: Windows 10 Preinstalled
PRICE: $1,199.00
OverPowered DTW2:
CPU: Intel I7-8700
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
RAM: 32GB DDR4 2400Mhz
STORAGE: 512GB SSD + 2TB HDD
OS: Windows 10 Preinstalled
PRICE: $1,699.00
OverPowered DTW3:
CPU: Intel I7-8700
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080Ti
RAM: 32GB DDR4 2400Mhz
STORAGE: 512GB SSD + 2TB HDD
OS: Windows 10 Preinstalled
PRICE: $1,899.00
At first glance these specs are pretty generous but the prices seem a little bit over the top. Let’s have a deeper look at the DTW1 system to see what is really under the hood.
When looking from the outside of the case the DTW1 seems pretty solid. It comes with a nice looking case, tempered glass on both the front and the side of the case as well as with a full black paint in the interior.
The chosen parts though are not as great. The chosen base for the build is a GigaByte H310 S2 motherboard (retailing at around $70) which is the very low end of motherboards. At first you might think, yeah I don’t really care since you have a 8700 non-K CPU, but if you dig dipper you will see that it does matter.
The H310 chipset runs at a bus speed of around 5GT/s over DMI2, “castrating” both memory and CPU bandwith to around 30% than any other low-end chipset (something like a B360 chipset runs at around 8GT/s over DMI3). While yes, we have an i7-8700 you will see a good hit on CPU performance because of the H310 chipset over other similar systems. Even Intel deemed it weak enough to not even need 14nm production, and elected to save dwindling 14nm fab space by pushing some of the H310 production back to 22nm.
This motherboard can only use 6 lanes for PCIe, can’t host as many USB ports especially Gen3/3.1 and even worse it can only host 1xDIMM per channel, limiting the board of using just 2 DIMM slots. But guess what: the DTW1 only has 1 stick of 16GB 2400Mhz memory which makes the support of the i7-8700 for dual channel pointless as the system will run in single channel mode. Oh boy this is not going well so far!
Let’s talk about the power supply. The PSU comes unbranded from the supplier which in this particular case it comes from Great Wall. The PSU does not bear the 80 Plus certification and no efficiency rating although we managed to find it on their website as a 80 Plus bronze PSU. The DTW1 carries a 500W rated PSU from the mentioned manufacturer. Looks wise it it plain old ugly, something that gamers don’t really appreciate. We want to see sleeved cables, not ketchup and mustard ones, as for us it is important both the look and performance.
Until now we see that the name Overpowered is not quite suitable for the DTW1 when considering the choosing parts until now but maybe the cooling potential can save its name.
The enclosure allows for a 2mm gap between the fans and the front panel, between which the void is left unfilled with thanks to a lack of dust filtration. The fans are unbranded and plug into the same proprietary, obnoxious header that Lian Li used to use for its older Bora fans.
This eliminates the option of PWM control via the motherboard, reinforced by the fact that Walmart rerouted the RESET_SW FPC header to instead jury-rig a power solution for the fan hub. It does not speak to the motherboard. That’s probably a good thing, as it forces the fans to run at 100% and provide the static pressure required to fight that glass panel being able to brute force some air to the tiny CPU cooler which is really, really unfit for a so called gaming PC.
Unlike the older more experienced system builders, Walmart opted to use a mini-tower cooler into the socket equipped with a 80mm fan. While it is enough to keep de 8700 cool within throttling margins, as the system ages dust and other debris will fill the system due to the lack of air filtration, the system will require more maintenance than usual.
The DTW1 comes with a 2TB Toshiba HDD pre-partitioned into 4x250GB partitions. While this is something we haven’t seen before as these partitions make absolutely no sense. The SSD is an ADATA 256GB which is an ok ssd for normal usage.
The GPU is a GigaByte GTX 1070 WinForce OC2 8GB, and there is nothing more we can say about the card under these circumstances as it can handle gaming pretty well on 1080p and 1444p but we must do some benchmarks to see how will the chosen parts will perform with the other chosen parts.
The OS is clean, no bloatware as far as we saw which is a good thing, as many other manufacturers do like to load the OS with proprietary software that in most of the cases are plain useless.
So conclusion time then
Should you even consider these systems for your next build? We say no. Or at least not for these generation anyway. With time I am sure they will learn from these mistakes and come with better solutions. If you really want to buy a system right now I created a PC parts list with PCpartpicker.com that you can get right now and I am sure it will serve you better than the Walmart DTW1.
