Newegg released its PC Builder ChatGPT Plugin yesterday, and former TPU writer—Francisco Pires—decided to put it through the proverbial ringer. His hands-on adventures with AI-assisted PC build suggestions were documented in a Tom's Hardware article. Initial impressions are a mixed bag—he brings in a metaphor to describe his experience: "it was akin to entering Alice in Wonderland (the Tim Burton version): everything's interesting and somewhat faithful, but laid out in just the wrong way." The beta version (released back in March) proved to be a confusing mess, according to Avram Piltch, Editor-in-Chief at Tom's Hardware.

Pires proposed that the tool is decent enough for fledgling PC build novices to utilize, but the chatbot was found to overvalue certain components: "the typical price for the Radeon RX 6700 XT hovers around the $330-$370 range so the $558.99 MSI card the bot recommends is overpriced by more than $230!" The assistant also struggled to keep a suggested system build within a specified $1000 budget, the total was stretched to $1123.09. He also discovered some quirks related to the assistant's (apparently) incomplete GPU model database: "why did ChatGPT suggest a GeForce RTX 4060 for the build, if its knowledge cut-off is set at September 2021?" The plugin seems to have scraped information about newer products from Newegg's store, but the bot's full text answer (see the attached screenshot) provides a comparison between older generations.He concludes that: "Newegg's ChatGPT plugin is a nice technical achievement, but it's not helpful enough right now to replace advice from expert humans or save you the trouble of doing your own research. Perhaps a future version will give better quality results, but as long as the advice is coming from a single retailer, you'll have to be wary of bias in favor of inventory that the vendor wants to move." The Tom's Hardware best PC builds guide gets a shout out earlier on in the article—perhaps their readers are best advised to head over there, since Newegg's ChatGPT Plugin is in need of further optimizations.