I bought this version of the refurbished MSI gaming desktop last week. It was supposed to arrive in 8 days but it arrived in three days. Nice (and rare) surprise for Amazon delivery. Aside from a dent in the side cover, the unit appears new. No parts or accessories were missing. Even the clear film was still in place on many parts including the clear case side panel. Setup was easy and without issues. No bloatware. Nearly silent even running games (granted, I don’t run many AAA games that would tax the 4070 graphics card). It’s a big upgrade from my i7-8750H 1080Ti and the refurb price was right. When I plugged all the components into pcpartpicker.com, the price was even less that a DIY build. So far, it looks great and runs great. Fingers crossed for the 180-day warranty.
So what are you doing that the i7-8750H 1080Ti couldn’t do?
If you wanna really verify the unit, you can download
HWMonitor - cool lightweight application that will check up on all kinds of diagnostic tidbits like temps of various components, clock speeds, etc which would be kept open during some tests from:
CineBench (free) on the Microsoft store. This will run a stress test on your CPU. Put it under load. Here you can verify the CPUs clock speeds and thermals to make sure you have adequate cooling (warning it will run it as far as it can go, without liquid cooling be prepared to see it pushed just beyond it’s thermal limit) you can see how high your CPU clock speeds will go before you’re thermal throttled.
3DMark Demo (Timespy) you can find this on steam, albeit a little tricky to get, i think it’s listed as free DLC on the game’s page. Running Timespy will stress the GPU and CPU (only for a short while, CPU testing is better done in cinebench) + score the system overall.
If you have RAM that is, say 3200 mhz, a ddr4 board will default to 2133 until it’s changed in the BIOS. If you don’t have an Intel XMP or AMD EXPO or similar profile in your BIOS, “Dram frequency” is the option to change your memory clockspeed. Check online to see what the max ram speed for your CPU is capable of.
(After checking, this build comes with 4800 mt/s RAM, which is the default clockspeed for DDR5, it should already be at the max clockspeed, 13700F can support 5800 mt/s RAM clockspeed)
If you want to check your SSD speeds, you can look at CrystalDiskMark, which will show your max read/write speeds.
After each test you can peek over at HWMonitor and see what the max temp has been since it opened (close and open HWMonitor before each test)
If you want to upgrade your cooler, I highly suggest the dual tower Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 for air cooling. You can also get an AIO, but they have many points of failure - eventually the coolant quits moving easily, the pump breaks, possible leaking of coolant, but the pump are also loud on AIOs, but there’s no better consumer grade cooling solution. I know some folks who have AIOs with back up air cooler in case the AIO gives out - or have a 2nd aio and an air cooler, because computer people are like that sometimes xD
Even repasting with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut could improve your current cooling - air cooler is a fun way to get into messing around in your PC. It’s relatively easy and you can watch a couple YouTube videos and do it quite easily.
You can also part out your old PC pretty easily and sell the parts on eBay - but eBay takes a hefty fee, and a lot of times it’s cool to just have a back up.