- Our friends over at Best Buy
have a wide selection of tech at sometimes good pricing.
However, we're gonna go one layer deeper
by buying some open-box tech
to see exactly if it's a great deal
or if it's a fancy way of saying
you're gonna get scammed, boy.
One of the things that makes the most sense for Open Box,
in my opinion, are PC components.
Now, that might sound like a weird choice on the face of it
but think about something like a graphics card.
If this was returned within a few days
or maybe a week or two,
odds are still in pretty much light new condition
but they could be slashing serious money off of it.
So for this, I've got three options.
Open-Box Satisfactory is the cheapest at 298,
but it's unavailable.
But Open-Box Excellent is,
and it "Looks brand new.
Includes all original parts and accessories.
And typically contains packaging."
And that is a $50 discount on the GPU.
Now mind you, that's still not an amazing deal for a 3050
but because this is the overclocked version of the card
I am probably saving 40, 50 bucks.
I have two questions for today's video.
First of all is,
can I get a good deal buying Open-Box on Best Buy?
But the second question is,
is it even worth buying these in the first place
when they say "fair" or "satisfactory"
or "excellent" condition?
If you do see a good deal on Best Buy and you wanna buy it,
what exactly kind of quality levels should you be expecting?
How about a console?
So this is an Xbox Series S.
If I want this open-box...
So $300 new, excellent condition in Open-Box is 287.99
so is $12 off, Open-Box satisfactory is 285.
Who doesn't pay $3 more
to get the brand new looking console
compared to the moderate signs of cosmetic use?
Here's a deal that actually might be worth it.
So this is a Victus 15.6 inch gaming laptop.
So 1650 is a totally reasonable GPU, 144 hertz display.
New is 580, but Open-Box excellent knocks off a $100.
Or Open-Box satisfactory knocks even more off.
Time to get my Geek Squad mobile.
I am right now outside of the first of the two Best Buys
that I'm supposed to be picking up orders from.
The problem I think
is that Best Buy doesn't really keep great track
of their open-box items.
So I have gotten, no lie, about 15 calls from Best Buy
due to my two orders.
Interestingly, while I was inside,
there were a ton of open box items
kind of spread throughout.
They had a cage up front, they had some Apple products,
they had some stuff over in the PC area.
There were some legitimately good deals.
I'm quickly coming to the conclusion
that if you want to buy Best Buy open-box,
online's just not the move.
It's kind of annoying.
And plus, if you do go in stores
you actually can look at the physical items themselves.
Not only do some of them just not straight have boxes at all
but even if they do,
supposedly you actually can look at the quality of each one.
So when I wanted an open-box item
I did hope at least to get a box.
All right, let's take a look.
Now, as a refresher, this was listed as good condition
which meant some minor cosmetic issues
but generally pretty much all complete.
However, it obviously didn't come
with the original packaging,
but more importantly,
it didn't come with a power adapter.
Let's take a look at our gaming laptop.
Okay, good condition I would definitely say on the lid.
Some very minor like scuff here, but that's nothing.
Ooh, nope, nevermind. It's dusty.
Yes, this is totally a floor unit.
So if you can see a bit right in here,
there's clearly a bunch of dust.
This is probably sitting on for a few weeks
or a month or whatever.
Let's see what's inside.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're good with this. We're good with this.
There's some fingerprints on the display
but the finish is fine.
It's not dirty.
Yeah, yeah, this is okay.
This is okay.
Alright, so I have now got this up and running
and I have a few initial thoughts.
So, I have to kind of separate this
because on one side
I'm not really reviewing the laptop, right?
I'm much more so reviewing the open-box experience
from Best Buy.
And just at a base level,
the fact that I did not get a power adapter is bad.
So this device was just a little bit over $490.
It does seem like it was correctly reset.
I think there are two, maybe three dead pixels over here.
I can't tell this is placebo or not.
It's a little laggy.
Dude, this thing's not good.
This is a fresh copy of Windows.
Oh, it finally showed up.
There we go.
Oh it took, 30 seconds.
Not a fan. Not feeling it right now, not feeling Mr. Krabs.
- Are you feeling it now Mr. Krabs?
- Let's see what we've got inside our open-box laptop.
First impression is just that this is fine.
It is not massively dirty
the way that it kinda looked like from the outside.
So yesterday when we unboxed the Victus,
I noticed some weird performance issues.
So today we're actually using this laptop
in a comparison with some other devices
and we found massive issues.
The CPU on this device ping pongs between full speed
and basically idle.
It goes down to like three or 400 megahertz,
which massively stalls it out.
So we ran in Cinebench
and this should be a score of about 10,000
and it's less than 2,000.
So I'm not entirely sure what's wrong with it,
especially 'cause it's a fresh copy of Windows.
But yeah, this is actually really bad.
(thumping)
I shouldn't have did that.
So, as a refresher,
this Xbox Series S was listed in fair condition,
which is the lowest quality that Best Buy will offer.
Importantly, it does come with the box, which is nice.
Also, importantly, it was very expensive,
like more so than a new Series S on Amazon.
But we're gonna disregard that for a second
and let's see what a fair quality item looks like.
(thumping)
(grunting)
That's... They literally got nothing for the bottom.
So we've got ourselves the controller,
which is wow, yeah, that's pretty scuffed.
Mind you, some of these scuffs may have been
just because it was sitting in the box,
but oh no, no, that's like ear wax or something.
Yeah, I mean it feels fairly fresh
but it smells vaguely of gamer.
We also have the power adapter,
which, or sorry, power cable.
Let's take a look at this Series S.
(thudding)
That's fine.
Damaged, they say.
Little scuff right here, little dirty.
We'll say I'm not seeing damage anywhere.
It seems very minty on the inside.
I don't know where they come up with damaged.
Hey, hey wait a minute.
It didn't come with an HDMI cable.
Alright, we'll see if our Series S works.
Good sign. There we go.
Boom. Okay, I'm not surprised that it physically works.
The console itself looks to be in great shape.
If we just put the value aside for a second,
we just purely evaluate the way
that they judge these things,
you kind of can't listen to what Best Buy say
the quality level is.
You kind of need to go into a store
and actually put your eyes on them yourself.
Which neatly segues me into the items that I did not do so.
So both the laptop and the Series S I ordered online,
went into store and picked them up.
Every other item that I've got to take a look at today
was ordered site unseen purely by listening to
the quality level that they advertise on Bestbuy.com.
Let's see what we've got in here.
Man does, does Best Buy know how to package things.
(thudding)
This is my SSD.
So I've got this box which is empty,
and then I have a Best Buy refurb box.
So this says backed by our return
and exchange promise cover under warranty
verified to work properly.
And on the side here it does show one terabyte 970 EVO.
This is a lot of packaging
for what is quite literally the world's tiniest item
and it should be an M2 SSD and it is.
Wow. What a great way of packaging my SSD.
(chuckling)
I don't know if that's so, okay, all right.
Now I will say that
while I don't love the way that they shipped it
this was actually a pretty solid deal.
This is a little over $50 for one terabyte sampling SSD.
Assuming that it is mostly new
which I mean looking at it, it looks pretty minty.
I think it was probably installed like once
'cause I can see a tiny bit of wear
where you would screw it down
onto like a motherboard or something.
But other than that clearly has not been used a lot.
But that being said, it's an SSD.
Like the real test is gonna be actually plugging it in
and seeing what we've got here.
So we have installed our 970 EVO plus on the test bench
minus the bench part.
It's a computer, okay?
So, first thing I'm gonna do
is open up Samsung Magician.
Now this will give me the information on the drive,
like cycles, all that kind of stuff.
This SSD has been used
and this tells me how much data has been written to it.
The problem is it gives me a number of 1,953,764
which each one of those is a thousand blocks of 512 bytes.
Oh my god, I'm stupid.
I'm a big stupid idiot.
It says how many gigabytes are written
right on the damn front of the page, 932 gigabytes.
Wait, no, no.
This is not supposed to happen.
It's the same price as a new one. What happened?
(grunting)
I should not drop packages.
Actually, I just remembered
this is the Best Buy we're talking about.
They clearly don't pack it well.
Oh wait, this is the first package that doesn't rattle
like Matt's bones after a Thursday night.
- Bruh.
- Our Moto G power. Interesting.
There's a lot of stuff going on here.
So on the box we have...
This was in January of 2023,
the erasure was successful and diagnostic status was passed.
So this is an item that has clearly seen some level
of TLC from Best Buy.
This is one of the more promising deals
because this, in "excellent" condition
direct from Best Buy, costs $130,
but the new version of a Moto G Power is 250 bucks.
(beeping)
And look at that, that's actually...
Okay, this is what I'm talking about.
If this is what I'm getting for open-box
I'm absolutely out here for it.
Okay, so we've got ourselves the cables,
or the cable singular,
but we've got a USBC cable, which is lovely.
And we've got a phone
that's actually put in a box the right way.
Okay, so screen a little dusty, but screen looks terrific.
No scratches, scuffs or anything like that.
There's a little, like, little schmutz on it.
I didn't put the schmutz there.
It's quite an interesting finish.
I will say I think it looks a lot better on camera
than it does in person 'cause very plasticy.
But again, this is a $250 phone
but we got basically for half off an excellent condition.
Hi there. Hello.
How's it going? Hello there.
While I download 45 updates
that are gonna take about an hour on my Moto G,
why don't we take a look at our next item.
All right, inside we have our Beats.
All right, so we've got a Beats Studio Buds.
(chuckling)
A little nervous about these.
So these are Geek Squad refurbished,
which I hope means that they cleared out all the ear juice
from my new headphones.
And this was a good deal.
So this is a little over $80.
The MSRP on these is, I think, 150,
although they are typically on sale for like 120 bucks.
But even so we're saving some good money.
Before I actually open it up,
I have some good news.
This looks like original packaging,
so I don't think, these may not have even been used
if I'm being honest with you.
So we've had all of our paperwork here
including we've got the USBC to C cable
and the ear tips, which have not been used.
Those look pretty new, smell new.
And we've also got the package,
which looks like it's...
That looks actually like, has it been refurbished?
No, that adhesive is original.
Well here, actually, let me see.
I'm gonna peel it and see if I can resick it.
Okay, so can I resick it the same way?
Oh yeah, you can resick it.
Okay, so maybe they've been used, I'm not sure.
This looks pretty good.
The USBC port
also doesn't look like it's been really plugged in
and the earbuds don't have...
Oh, they don't have the,
okay they don't have the ear tips on.
- [Matt] So it's clearly been used.
- Wait, that's not good.
Yeah, so wait.
So, it comes with small and large ear tips.
The medium ones should have come on the earbuds
and they're just not there.
So, either they were used or they weren't used,
but regardless, I think they opened these up
took the medium ear tips, threw them away,
and then put them back in.
So, I used this medium ear tips.
Guess I'll go up to large today.
My ears are feeling a little bit big.
Okay. Yep, so everything does seem to work here.
So it all shows up well enough in the actual app.
Let's listen to some music, shall we?
Yeah. No, this is great.
Okay, so I can say with full certainty,
maybe for the first time in this video,
these Beats are solid.
80 bucks, I think, it's difficult to get a pair
of fully wireless Bluetooth headphones
that have active noise cancellation
and sound this good for that kind of money.
I'm actually pretty happy with these
in all honesty.
What I'm not as happy about is this Moto G.
I get it, like, obviously we saved a bunch of money.
The problem is though,
is that even at like 120 bucks, this is not great.
The performance is bad
and I waited a long time for all the updates
and everything to go in the background.
Phone itself is kind of slow
and feels very cheap.
But as far as my open-box experience on this device
I will say both the Beats and the Moto G get a thumbs up.
Just not a very big thumbs up.
You know, it's that like, it's not one of these.
It's like one of like, one of these.
(glass shattering)
(thudding)
Oh, ooh, no, I don't like that one.
Okay, let's see what we've got in package number,
whatever this is.
Oh, it's got a box. We have a box.
So this my friend is an RTX 3050.
Is it so hard to keep the original packaging?
All right. On the little sticker here
it does say that it is in condition "excellent"
with no comments.
Okay, this is the original inner box.
Inside we have the graphics card.
Okay, so it actually...
Wait, why is it?
Why is it so loose in here?
So this is our Gigabyte RTX 3050.
Now this is a hilariously large card.
You can see that this is the actual PCB where it ends.
I do notice there's a little bit of a scrape right here
on the the aluminum, which doesn't matter at all,
but clearly someone got a little too eager
when they were installing this probably.
They definitely removed all of the I/O shields,
which is fine.
Without actually plugging it in first impressions,
it's pretty good.
- Wait a minute.
- Every time I try to say something nice
about an open-box item on Best Buy
they turn around and they make my great deal a terrible one.
This $380 is now on sale for 300 bucks.
Aka, I could buy a new one
of these directly from Best Buy right now
for less than I got the open-box one from.
I'm not gonna use the Samsung.
I want my iPad.
I was trying to find a good deal, but no.
Oh no. Mr. Buy said, "Boy.".
You can put the camera down. We're done.
The video's already over. We're done.
- [Joanna] Oh you packaged it like Best Buy.
(chuckling)
(clattering)
- [Matt] So much for returning it.
(chuckling)