CLX – SET Gaming Desktop – AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D – 32GB DDR5 5600 Memory – GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER – 2TB NVMe M.2 SSD – Black

Not a bad pc bad for the price overall cause of the fan controls and the ram but other then that pretty goody

I really want to give this PC 5 stars simply on aesthetics but there’s just too much corner cutting by CLX. First the good or mostly good things about this PC. Gigabyte RTX 4080 Super Windforce v2 GPU which is probably the plainest looking GPU built but its performance is phenomenal. AMD 9800X3D which is the best gaming CPU you can get right now and the main reason I purchased this PC. I can attest its phenomenal (temp and performance wise). ASrock X870 Pro RS wifi mother board. Good mother board with tons of connections most of which arent used by CLX for some strange reason! I’ll get to that in a bit! Good but cheap RGB fans which Ill get to later. Great Phanteks XT View case which might be my favorite thing about this PC besides the CPU and GPU. The case is so much nicer than the pics used on the BestBuy site. Tons of USB ports and other connections via the mother board and case and wifi 7 for this mother board is great. Now the bad and its mostly due to CLX decision making and corner cutting. For $3k they should not be using close to the cheapest RAM possible but they do. It came with Patriot Viper 5600mhz rgb ram. This ram is about as cheap as it gets so they are making an absolute killing on this prebuilt but the shortcuts are excessive on CLX’s part. Not to mention they ship this PC with the ram profile set to XMP (intel) and not EXPO (AMD) which would be the correct profile. Here’s the real problem. I downloaded ASrock’s motherboard utility to look at the fan profiles and that’s when the real surprise was found. CLX does not program/create or use ANY fan profiles for cooling. Instead they put in a cheap fan and RGB controller (Gamdias Aeolus M2) that comes with a remote control (LOL). So this means its up to you to keep an eye on temps while gaming and manually adjust the fan speeds with the provided remote or buttons on the case itself while you’re playing on your new $3k plus computer. Cause that’s fun for $3k. They daisy chain all the fans in the case except the AIO cooler to this cheap Gamdias controller and then run one cable to the motherboard for all the rgb fans and one cable to the AIO pump header on the mother board for the AIO pump but again there is no fan profile/curve so it runs high all the time which will greatly reduce its lifespan. Again this short cut means they didn’t want to bother creating a fan profile for the AIO pump/fans or the chassis fans so they run at the same higher speeds all day every day instead of adjusting with the temps thus extending the lifespan of all the fans and AIO cooler. This means more wear and tear on the fans and AIO cooler since they never slow down. Apparently CLX’s answer according to their customer support which I contacted to make sure I wasnt crazy which it ends up im not and they fully aware of what they are doing. Anyway their answer was most people who order these aren’t even aware there is software to control the fans automatically and asked me what the big deal was making the adjustment manually with a remote while playing games!!!! Really that was their answer. In other words they take advantage of their customers ignorance. They didn’t have an answer when I asked why would you run the fans higher than necessary all the time and stress the hardware for no reason and this seems to be just par for their course. I emailed the customer support to myself as proof these were their answers. It would seem its on the purchaser to go in and create fan profiles and rewire the fans to the motherboard directly and correctly all while they give you the this unfun unnecessary project for $3000.00! Theres a reason its called a “Pre-built”! Even Cyber Power creates a fan profile for all the fans they put in and they connect them to the mother board appropriately. I would recommend going with Cyber Power which sells comparable PCs for around $500-$600 less but come with a cheaper AIO cooler. OR spend and extra $200-$400 and go with a Corsair if you can find one with an AMD as I am avoiding the Intel CPUs and AMD’s 9800X3D is the best CPU you can get for gaming. For reference out of the box this PC scored a 22000 on Cinebench and the average for PCs running a 9800X3D is around 25000 plus. This is most likely a result of the cheap ram used by CLX on this $3k computer. Yet another disappointment. My previous Cyber Power with a 4080 super and 9700X CPU scored a 27000 on cinebench and was $600 cheaper than this but came with a terrible AIO cooler which caused issues but performed better than this PC by far out of the box for less money! Also I noticed that things like Youtube stutter while running HW monitor to monitor temps. CLX’s customer support recommended running HW monitor while gaming and doing other tasks to keep an eye on temps and verify there were no temp issues (Yes that was another of their ideas for $3000) which I did for giggles and found the stuttering issue which is most likely again due to the cheap ram used by CLX. That issue may simply be an issue between this machine and HWmonitor as HWinfo does cause the stuttering as far as I can tell when using HWinfo instead and doesnt happen on any of my other PC’s. Who wants all this extra work and all these processes running in the background and manual intervention for cooling while gaming instead of just having fun and using fan curve/profiles to adjust in real time as has been the case with EVERY OTHER PC I HAVE OWNED in the last decade? Its ridiculous. Sadly I will most likely be factory resetting this PC and returning it as I have an extended return window to run some more test but so far its a huge disappointment and lesson in why corner cutting hurts performance and why you should spend your hard earned money on another Prebuilt company. Total disappointment and its a shame because its an absolutely beautiful PC!

The system is advertised as 7.1 audio. It is a lie! There are not enough inputs for 7.1. The motherboard documentation talks about 2 inputs at the front of the case and two at the back. There is only one at the front; and if you use both at the back, you no longer have a microphone input. There is an optical input for sound; but of course my sound system does not use optical. Also, documentation of case setup is poor. I did call CLX and the tech admitted the audio was lacking as advertised.