both Linus tech tips these guys and acer
these guys have aged nearly three years
since we unboxed the predator g a normal acer desktop with an orange accent and a
basic video card in it in a playground
and while our sense of humor certainly hasn't gotten any more politically
correct or sophisticated it's possible
given the improvement in their monitor and laptop lineups that acer has managed
to grow up a little in that time let's find out this
is the predator g6
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the first big improvement was immediately apparent when i opened the
box i still remember back when i did a competitive analysis purchase of an
alienware gaming machine back at ncix and the mouse it came with was so light
i wasn't even sure there was anything inside it acer on the other hand blew me
away here by including a steelseries sensei raw gaming mouse and an apex raw
gaming keyboard i thought maybe it was a special reviewers package or something
like that but it's not if you buy this model of predator g6 and a predator
monitor you're going to be ready to go add headset and you are gaming which
leads me perfectly i guess to the physical tour of the machine itself the
overall appearance of the g6 is
going to be a love it or hate it thing the side panels have their imo
attractive predator logo with a really nice
mesh texture to them that's solid on the right and mostly solid on the left but
actually perforated above the GPU and CPU area a nice touch as far as the
front and the top are concerned i think acer was going for like an overlapping
armor plate thing but they ended up with more again imo of
an armadillo look though your mileage may vary they've embedded some practical
elements amidst the plates though from the bottom to the top we've got a
retractable headphone holder front i o with two usb 3.0 ports front audio jacks
and a usb 2 based sd card reader above
that we can press on the right right here whoa look at that and we got
ourselves a little quick drive upgrade bay that will work toollessly with a
three and a half inch drive or accept a two and a half inch drive with screws
then moving up further we've got on the two thousand dollar trim model a blu-ray
reader with a dvd writer combo unit thing leaving only the power button
above that oh wait
maybe there's more this is what it looks like it's the return of
the turbo button but this isn't your mom's turbo button this one is different
instead of just being a boring button well it lights up and not just itself
but the entire machine the front and side panels when you activate it the
other difference is that it toggles the system between a stock all core four
gigahertz turboed speed and an overclocked 4.6 gigahertz turboed speed
rather than toggling between stock speed and a dramatic underclock to improve
compatibility with older programs these one-touch overclocking tools can
be a little bit flaky in my experience though especially if the manufacturer
tries to do any more than a token couple percent overclock but in practice the
predator g6 was stable with the overclock so i resolved at this point to
keep it on for my testing so let's rip her open and talk guts now shall we with
the plastic cover removed from the back and the side panels off the g6 chassis
bears a lot more similarity to that last predator machine i mean this is a very
basic steel chassis with a cool skin over it folks it has a rear 92
millimeter fan two internal hard drive or SSD mounts one of which has a two
terabyte seagate drive in it and so that's about it for expansion and no
cable management to speak of but it does do a few things right it accepts a
standard matx motherboard and atx power supply which by the way is a 750 watt
fsp80 plus unit good show acer and has
tons of room for any single graphics card that you could want in the bottom
on the motherboard is a core i7 6700k
quad core 16 gigs of dual channel ddr4 RAM the four slots allow this to be
expanded to 64 gigs in the future a wi-fi module with antennas leading up to
the front of the chassis a 256 gig msata
SSD and two pci express 1x expansion
slots with a very basic rear i o i'm
actually disappointed by the lack of audio jacks here and then finally the
centerpiece of the build the gtx 980
graphics card that makes this machine NVIDIA vr ready certified
so those are some pretty bad aspects right and if you were paying attention
you probably noticed the same thing i noticed there's only one case fan that 92
millimeter affair in the rear so let's direct our attention now to cooling
performance here's a look at our baseline idle CPU
temps and here's a look at whoa
with ida 64 running a burn-in test it
took only five minutes for my CPU to reach very uncomfortable temperatures
and this is in our unheated warehouse and while i understand that acer is
expecting this feature to be used for gaming which is not going to pin the CPU
at 100 the way this artificial workload does many gamers interested in a core i7
might also be interested in heavy workloads like video creation and they
may not want their CPU touching 80 to 90
degree temperatures under load so i pressed the button again to disable the
overclock which brought things right back into comfortable territory and you
can make the argument that the management utility that comes pre-loaded
does include an option to crank the fans to max which works by the way to tame
the beast the problem is that it makes the machine unpleasantly loud and i'm a
little disappointed then in acer's validation process for this feature and
i hope that they can find a better middle ground between thermal throttling
and sounding like a hair dryer with some kind of a software update with all that
griping about thermals aside though it's not like they screwed up anything
royally in terms of performance i mean when i'm not using an artificial
workload to make it throttle it performs exactly like you'd expect from a machine
of this specification and they did a good job i think of putting together a
package that makes sense an SSD boot drive and a hard drive for mass storage
is a great solution but since my job is to give constructive
criticism while the pre-installed software was almost entirely unoffensive
with some notable good inclusions like acer's surprisingly useful system
toolbox steam and firefox i feel like
for everyday joe users the two drive solution could be a bit more seamless i
mean here's an idea how about having Windows storage folders and a steam
library on the hard drive out of the factory i mean the number of times that
i have gotten service calls from people who are out of hard drive space but have
an empty drive or worse a partition is
staggering which leads us to the conclusion the g6 strikes me as a
reflection of overall improvements to the pre-built pc industry that were
mostly borrowed from diy casemakers and
enthusiasts better upgradeability solid
power supply included rubber grommets on the hard drive mounts legitimately
high-end video card options etc as opposed to some sort of
forward thinking product i mean lenovo king of exciting computers right has a
similar spec machine for a little bit cheaper which gives you a few bucks then
to pick up some equivalent peripherals making it pretty darn similar i mean if
you're willing to go to a boutique builder like can i buy power rather than
a tier one then there are definitely better values out there and i'm ignoring
the diy market here as well intentionally since they aren't really
the target for a product like this so does that mean that the g6 is bad
no it's not it just looked really cool from the outside and
then failed to really excite me once i lifted
up the hood so now with that out of the way we can
take a moment to talk about curiosity stream the world's first ad-free
non-fiction streaming service founded by john hendricks the founder of discovery
communications i checked it out recently and it's got actually tons of videos
they've got over 1200 videos with a wide variety of science and technology
content so they've got exclusive interviews and lectures they've got
documentaries they've got just kind of
they've got some kid-friendly stuff as well they support a variety of platforms
including a web app roku Android which
is where i've been using it on my phone iOS chromecast
amazon fire amazon kindle apple tv is on
the way but of course that is subject to a change
some of their content includes next world which features mishiyukaku talking
about the future of technology so virtual reality artificial intelligence
you know these kinds of big questions as well as the human face of big data which
is currently exclusively streaming on curiosity stream and just premiered in
late february i checked out a really cool one on this like submersible craft
that was found rusting away in a shipyard actually here
in vancouver which i thought was really neat that was the first
manned 30-day voyage where these guys were like sealed into this capsule for a
full 30 days and actually led to and i didn't realize this either a lot of the
uh best practices that are followed for things like space missions even today so
really cool stuff and anyone can sign up for a free 30-day trial all you got to
do is use promo code Linus then to save 15
on your first three months after that so check out the link in the video
description all right so thanks for watching guys if
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help you with your tech stuff now that you're done doing all that stuff you're
probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top
right corner to check out the video where i
have like a four thousand dollar server that can accept eight graphics cards
it's freaking sick it's sick i tell you