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last year's holiday buyers guide was a big success for us in between Black

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Friday and the holiday shopping season rolling around the release of hot games

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like Assassin's Creed Unity our performance guide for which is coming

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soon so make sure you're subscribed and the requests for me to do another one

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well all that added up to I guess it's time to drop another holiday buyers

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guide on

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y'all Corsair gaming RGB keyboards

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feature Precision Cherry MX RGB key switches for 16.8 million color per key

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backlighting for virtually unlimited customization click now to learn more

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just like last year I'll be addressing three different price points under 500

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around 1,000 and around 2,000 before the cost of Windows with three different

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sets of recommendations and rationale for the parts that I chose pricing is

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pulled from a combination of newegg.com and amazon.com with a sanity check at

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nc.com to make sure that it's not wildly more expensive at you know who knows

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some other place so we'll start with just game this system isn't powerful

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enough for heavy use outside of you know day-to-day General use and 1080p gaming

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and doesn't try to sell itself based on future proofness the CPU was the

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toughest decision here because AMD 750k

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quad core and Intel's g3258 dual core

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are both similarly priced overclockable and can run on cheap motherboards so it

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came down to the design Philosophy for the system the best performance right

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now and even though AMD's quad core design might give it the edge in future

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games the Intel chip gets the nod today thanks to its better single-threaded

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performance and lower heat output when overclocked which will allow us to turn

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its speed up a fair bit even with the basic included cooler the motherboard

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only had to meet a couple of key needs it had to support overclocking on the

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g3258 which it does with the latest BIOS and it needed a PCI Express 16x

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expansion slot Bingo my RAM choice of a

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single stick of the cheapest DDR3 that I could find probably looks a little funny

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since this CPU will benefit from a dual Channel configuration with two sticks

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but while 16 gigs may be useful in the future we don't really need it today and

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my choice of a single 8 gig stick allows me to upgrade to 16 gigs later without

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scrapping my existing memory since my board only has two RAM expansion slots

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the case and power supply Choice was dictated by the available options really

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at this price point case and power supply bundles tend to be available at

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lower prices but mostly junk so I went

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with the only aggressively priced bundle skew from a brand that I trust that I

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could find the video card is where this rig can be a bit flexible based on

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regular prices and our Target cost for the the total system the R7 260x is the

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clear winner given its similar performance to the 750 Ti at 1080p in

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titles that we've tested recently and it's much lower price storage is where

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just game gets the biggest upgrade since last year thanks to the plummeting

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prices of ssds in the last year and we went with a 120 gig Kingston v300 SSD

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man that thing is cheap and a wd 1 TB Green Drive for mass storage and games

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so in summary just game is very similar to last year's model with a couple of

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key differences it's got similar gaming performance but now it gets USB 3 albeit

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not in the front and a much better storage solution which I'd really

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recommend keeping in or even bumping up to a 2 terabyte drive if you have a big

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game library but you also have the option to take out the hard drive or go

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just hard drive rather than having an SSD as well and then dumping that money

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back into the graphics card where an r92 2 70 would be a worthy upgrade our

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second system is game now similarly to

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just game we didn't worry ourselves about performance tomorrow but unlike

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just game we really avoided skimping in areas where we felt like we were losing

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20% of the potential performance to save 10% of the cost this one is all about

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bang for the buck the CPU was another tough call here I wish Intel had

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something a lot more competitive in this price range because between the Pentium

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chip for 70 bucks and their entry level K series I5 for 240 bucks they have

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nothing that overclocks so for an Enthusiast oriented buyer guide like

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this one AMD wins at this price point for sure with their six core FX 6300 now

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my initial plan was to go with a motherboard that supported SLI but I

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scrapped that when I did my philosophy checked and realized that I was spending

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about another $40 on a feature that I wasn't using today and so we went with

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the m5a 97 a very well proven product

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for RAM I went with 16 gigs of hyperx Fury 1866 MHz DDR3 but I could easily

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swap that out with a comparable product from another trusted brand like Corsair

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or g-skill I added the extra capacity though because while strictly speaking

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games might not need more than 8 gigs today web browsers also need to run well

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on gaming machines and if you're a tab fiend like me you might enjoy the extra

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breathing room that a bit more system memory affords you the power supply was

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another component where I picked out something much more expensive than cut

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it down dramatically when I realized that I was spending too much this power

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supply might not really look like anything special but it will handle our

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CPU and GPU just fine as long as we don't plan to upgrade them an

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aftermarket cooler to give us more overclocking Headroom is a must on this

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chip thanks to its six processing cores and decidedly last gen efficiency but

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thankfully there are great choices for around 30 bucks and this one will take

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care of our chip nicely for the case we went with the same one that we used for

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our cavar build guide about 6 months ago it looks okay to my eyes it has

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ventilation over the graphics card area and it's reasonably easy to build in and

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cable manage so there you go the graphics card is where we blew most of

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our money on this machine but the GTX 970 is just a remarkable graphics card

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that single-handedly takes this from a budget box to a very competent gaming

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machine and thanks to its power efficiency it saves us a couple bucks on

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the PSU to boot for storage I feel like

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250 gigs is the sweet spot for SSD capacity where you can install programs

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and pictures but not necessarily lots of games and videos on your boot drive

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without worrying about it too much and this drive is well known to be reliable

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and is at a great price right now we also added the best bang for the buck

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capacity of WD green for secondary storage to go with it the 3 terb Model

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costs twice as much as the one tbyte and stores three times as much stuff

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yay and then finally we chucked in an optical drive because it's only 20 bucks

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and like YOLO right all in all game now

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actually has less raw CPU performance than last year's model so if you had a

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few more bucks to spend uh power supply with some more room for upgrades or a

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better CPU might not be a terrible bet but given the size of modern games I

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stand behind the upgraded storage and I felt like the better GPU was also a

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worthwhile trade-off for gamers too and that's where that extra money went which

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leads us to game on our 4K capable

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gaming machine where we stressed less about saving a few bucks and focused

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more on having the best possible experience well but without completely

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losing track of the value proposition of the parts we were using CPU was an easy

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choice this time the Intel 4690k quadcore overclocks like a bat out of

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hell and unless you torture it on purpose features enough processing

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course for any game and even medium intensity content creation for the

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motherboard we went with a Z87 a because

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z97 doesn't actually offer a tangible performance benefit and the only thing

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we were really after here was support for CPU overclocking and support for SLI

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stepping up to a pro model will give you more Creature Comforts like Wi-Fi but we

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decided to allocate our budget a little bit differently this year for RAM I

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didn't change anything from game now 16 gigs is still enough for most people

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today and you can Chuck another kid in tomorrow if you feel like you need 32 at

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said time and then for our power supply we actually decided to splurge a little

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bit here since we went with two graphics cards and a windowed but fairly small

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case so we grabbed a fully modular power supply which provides the benefit of

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helping things look tidy since it's windowed and even though it's not all

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about the bling bling um you know

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doesn't hurt to have an expensive Gadget look expensive rather than shoddy

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speaking of expensive I blew over a hundred bucks on the cooler this time

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around and there are a couple couple of reasons for that one this is an

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excellent cooler and we'll keep our CPU safe while overclocking and two is that

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in spite of its power this is shaping up to be a pretty quiet machine so I wanted

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something that wouldn't ramp up too hard even when gaming and would stay quite

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quiet the case was an easy one the fantex enu pro has the features and

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build quality of cases that cost much more and it's compatible with all the

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hardware we need with ample Cooling and I think it looks

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fantastic and and then where are we spent again all the

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budget the Dual GTX 970 graphics cards

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that I squeezed into our 2000ish price point now I know what

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you're going to say lonus you always say single better GPU versus SLI lesser gpus

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and that's actually not what I always say I always add except sometimes the

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970 is one of those sometimes it's so similar in

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performance to its bigger brother the 980 and is so much less expensive that

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two of them costs only about 20% more

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than a single 980 but will absolutely

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wreck the single card solution in any games that scale basically at all in

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SLI for storage we basically yoed out and doubled the capacity of our previous

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choices even though a 730 series SSD's performance benefit over the older 520

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isn't that huge in the real world and the 6 TB green cost more than twice as

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much as the 3 terab green I mean you got to have some you got to have somewhere

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to store your stuff though right you know so storage is very flexible you

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could decide how you wanted to spend that money but there you go and then

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finally morolo we threw in a DVD burner again just in case you want one which

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makes our game on machine not only by far the fastest gaming rig in our

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buyer's guide which of course I would hope it would be since it's the most

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expensive but also the most versatile there are a couple things you could add

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like stepping up to a core i7 and doubling up on on RAM if you really need

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the extra multi-threading and multitasking performance but other than

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that this is about as much as I'd recommend spending on a mostly for

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gaming tower that will deliver a great user experience across the board for a

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very long time speaking of great user

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experiences for years to come 54 Club is

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giving our viewers that's you guys a chance to participate in one of their

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most epic giveaways ever they're offering 60 months that's 5 years of

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their membership absolutely free to one lucky winner in the continental US or

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Canada if we're talking dollar values that's

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$3600 worth of 54 club membership as

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their service cost 60 bucks per month uh for

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$120 worth of retail value of clothing

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or more so that's up to $7,200 of clothes which is probably more

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than I've spent on clothing in my my entire life but I'm sure my wife would

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love it if I had that many clothing options especially stuff that

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legitimately looks good like what 54 sends out the winner will be sent an

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assortment of clothes every month based on the info that they give to 54 they

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take your way size top size and style profile type and then one of their style

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experts will pick out the new additions that suit your existing wardrobe and

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showcase new Styles entry for the contest is pretty simple just visit the

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link in the video description and prove that you're a human being by answering a

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pretty basic question and then you can also get three more entries for each

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friend you refer through social media so pile up those entries and get yourself a

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bunch of free clothes and head to the link in the video description that's

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bit. lefc giveaway to enter And even if you

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don't win the contest you should check out five for anyway it's a great service deliver stylish closed to your door on a

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monthly basis it's everything I just described except you actually have to pay for it all right guys thank you for

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checking out our holiday PC buyers guide 2014 I hope you enjoyed it like like it

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and share it with your friends if you thought it was helpful leave a comment if you have any feedback on our Hardware

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choices would love to hear from you guys and as always check out the link in the

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video description if you want to help us out by contributing monthly or buying a

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cool t-shirt like the one I have or the 541 either of those is okay they both

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help us and then what was the other thing right we're changing your Amazon

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bookmark to one with our affiliate code so we get a small Kickback whenever you buy say for example PC

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components thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe

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he