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both Linus tech tips these guys and acer

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these guys have aged nearly three years

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since we unboxed the predator g a normal acer desktop with an orange accent and a

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basic video card in it in a playground

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and while our sense of humor certainly hasn't gotten any more politically

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correct or sophisticated it's possible

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given the improvement in their monitor and laptop lineups that acer has managed

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to grow up a little in that time let's find out this

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is the predator g6

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the master case 5 by cooler master gives you the freedom to truly make your

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mid-tower pc case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories

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check out the link in the video description to learn more

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the first big improvement was immediately apparent when i opened the

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box i still remember back when i did a competitive analysis purchase of an

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alienware gaming machine back at ncix and the mouse it came with was so light

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i wasn't even sure there was anything inside it acer on the other hand blew me

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away here by including a steelseries sensei raw gaming mouse and an apex raw

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gaming keyboard i thought maybe it was a special reviewers package or something

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like that but it's not if you buy this model of predator g6 and a predator

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monitor you're going to be ready to go add headset and you are gaming which

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leads me perfectly i guess to the physical tour of the machine itself the

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overall appearance of the g6 is

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going to be a love it or hate it thing the side panels have their imo

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attractive predator logo with a really nice

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mesh texture to them that's solid on the right and mostly solid on the left but

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actually perforated above the GPU and CPU area a nice touch as far as the

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front and the top are concerned i think acer was going for like an overlapping

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armor plate thing but they ended up with more again imo of

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an armadillo look though your mileage may vary they've embedded some practical

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elements amidst the plates though from the bottom to the top we've got a

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retractable headphone holder front i o with two usb 3.0 ports front audio jacks

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and a usb 2 based sd card reader above

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that we can press on the right right here whoa look at that and we got

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ourselves a little quick drive upgrade bay that will work toollessly with a

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three and a half inch drive or accept a two and a half inch drive with screws

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then moving up further we've got on the two thousand dollar trim model a blu-ray

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reader with a dvd writer combo unit thing leaving only the power button

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above that oh wait

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maybe there's more this is what it looks like it's the return of

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the turbo button but this isn't your mom's turbo button this one is different

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instead of just being a boring button well it lights up and not just itself

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but the entire machine the front and side panels when you activate it the

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other difference is that it toggles the system between a stock all core four

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gigahertz turboed speed and an overclocked 4.6 gigahertz turboed speed

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rather than toggling between stock speed and a dramatic underclock to improve

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compatibility with older programs these one-touch overclocking tools can

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be a little bit flaky in my experience though especially if the manufacturer

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tries to do any more than a token couple percent overclock but in practice the

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predator g6 was stable with the overclock so i resolved at this point to

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keep it on for my testing so let's rip her open and talk guts now shall we with

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the plastic cover removed from the back and the side panels off the g6 chassis

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bears a lot more similarity to that last predator machine i mean this is a very

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basic steel chassis with a cool skin over it folks it has a rear 92

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millimeter fan two internal hard drive or SSD mounts one of which has a two

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terabyte seagate drive in it and so that's about it for expansion and no

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cable management to speak of but it does do a few things right it accepts a

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standard matx motherboard and atx power supply which by the way is a 750 watt

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fsp80 plus unit good show acer and has

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tons of room for any single graphics card that you could want in the bottom

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on the motherboard is a core i7 6700k

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quad core 16 gigs of dual channel ddr4 RAM the four slots allow this to be

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expanded to 64 gigs in the future a wi-fi module with antennas leading up to

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the front of the chassis a 256 gig msata

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SSD and two pci express 1x expansion

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slots with a very basic rear i o i'm

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actually disappointed by the lack of audio jacks here and then finally the

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centerpiece of the build the gtx 980

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graphics card that makes this machine NVIDIA vr ready certified

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so those are some pretty bad aspects right and if you were paying attention

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you probably noticed the same thing i noticed there's only one case fan that 92

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millimeter affair in the rear so let's direct our attention now to cooling

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performance here's a look at our baseline idle CPU

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temps and here's a look at whoa

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with ida 64 running a burn-in test it

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took only five minutes for my CPU to reach very uncomfortable temperatures

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and this is in our unheated warehouse and while i understand that acer is

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expecting this feature to be used for gaming which is not going to pin the CPU

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at 100 the way this artificial workload does many gamers interested in a core i7

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might also be interested in heavy workloads like video creation and they

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may not want their CPU touching 80 to 90

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degree temperatures under load so i pressed the button again to disable the

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overclock which brought things right back into comfortable territory and you

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can make the argument that the management utility that comes pre-loaded

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does include an option to crank the fans to max which works by the way to tame

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the beast the problem is that it makes the machine unpleasantly loud and i'm a

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little disappointed then in acer's validation process for this feature and

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i hope that they can find a better middle ground between thermal throttling

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and sounding like a hair dryer with some kind of a software update with all that

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griping about thermals aside though it's not like they screwed up anything

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royally in terms of performance i mean when i'm not using an artificial

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workload to make it throttle it performs exactly like you'd expect from a machine

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of this specification and they did a good job i think of putting together a

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package that makes sense an SSD boot drive and a hard drive for mass storage

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is a great solution but since my job is to give constructive

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criticism while the pre-installed software was almost entirely unoffensive

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with some notable good inclusions like acer's surprisingly useful system

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toolbox steam and firefox i feel like

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for everyday joe users the two drive solution could be a bit more seamless i

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mean here's an idea how about having Windows storage folders and a steam

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library on the hard drive out of the factory i mean the number of times that

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i have gotten service calls from people who are out of hard drive space but have

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an empty drive or worse a partition is

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staggering which leads us to the conclusion the g6 strikes me as a

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reflection of overall improvements to the pre-built pc industry that were

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mostly borrowed from diy casemakers and

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enthusiasts better upgradeability solid

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power supply included rubber grommets on the hard drive mounts legitimately

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high-end video card options etc as opposed to some sort of

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forward thinking product i mean lenovo king of exciting computers right has a

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similar spec machine for a little bit cheaper which gives you a few bucks then

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to pick up some equivalent peripherals making it pretty darn similar i mean if

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you're willing to go to a boutique builder like can i buy power rather than

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a tier one then there are definitely better values out there and i'm ignoring

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the diy market here as well intentionally since they aren't really

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the target for a product like this so does that mean that the g6 is bad

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no it's not it just looked really cool from the outside and

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then failed to really excite me once i lifted

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up the hood so now with that out of the way we can

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take a moment to talk about curiosity stream the world's first ad-free

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non-fiction streaming service founded by john hendricks the founder of discovery

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communications i checked it out recently and it's got actually tons of videos

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they've got over 1200 videos with a wide variety of science and technology

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content so they've got exclusive interviews and lectures they've got

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documentaries they've got just kind of

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they've got some kid-friendly stuff as well they support a variety of platforms

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including a web app roku Android which

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is where i've been using it on my phone iOS chromecast

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amazon fire amazon kindle apple tv is on

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the way but of course that is subject to a change

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some of their content includes next world which features mishiyukaku talking

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about the future of technology so virtual reality artificial intelligence

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you know these kinds of big questions as well as the human face of big data which

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is currently exclusively streaming on curiosity stream and just premiered in

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late february i checked out a really cool one on this like submersible craft

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that was found rusting away in a shipyard actually here

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in vancouver which i thought was really neat that was the first

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manned 30-day voyage where these guys were like sealed into this capsule for a

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full 30 days and actually led to and i didn't realize this either a lot of the

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uh best practices that are followed for things like space missions even today so

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really cool stuff and anyone can sign up for a free 30-day trial all you got to

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do is use promo code Linus then to save 15

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on your first three months after that so check out the link in the video

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description all right so thanks for watching guys if

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this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit

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that like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at amazon

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instructions for which are up here buying a cool shirt like this one or

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with a direct monthly contribution through our community forum which by the

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way is full of all kinds of useful helpful awesome freaking people who can

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help you with your tech stuff now that you're done doing all that stuff you're

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probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top

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right corner to check out the video where i

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have like a four thousand dollar server that can accept eight graphics cards

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it's freaking sick it's sick i tell you