so what could be more appropriate at a playground than an unboxing of the
latest gaming desktop from Acer the
Predator actually that's a totally inappropriate joke but whatever you guys
so this is the Predator G Series which is not quite like the original Predator
where it aimed to be sort of a super
extreme extreme Enthusiast machine with all the sort of crazy stuff going on
this is more like if someone sort of walked up to me and said hey for a
reasonable price what components would you put in a gaming rig and this is a
list that I could very conceivably come up with so in terms of specs we've got a
core I 73770 no that's not a k processor
it's not an unlocked processor it's not four overclocking this is not an
overclocking machine for the graphics card we've got an 8760 so it is a 2 gig
card however it should be noted that when it comes to to those more mid-range
cards the the actual vram the the the
memory buffer is less of a factor and it's more about the GPU itself now I've
never had the pleasure of testing an 8760 so I'm excited to kind of check
that out it's got 32 gigs of DDR3 memory
which makes it a rockar of a sort of
video editing or workstation platform which is really cool and then it's also
got a Blu-ray Drive making it a media Powerhouse and a 2 TB hard drive with a
16 gig solid state cache it is so rare
that we see Intel's smart response technology implemented on a desktop and
yet I don't understand why it makes a lot of sense it does make a difference
it does make the computer perform better and it's not that expensive so there you
go you got some little sort of how to use Windows 8 sort of documentation
included I'm going to ask broll my camera operator today to come over here
and check this out while we open up the box here so we've got an included
keyboard which quite frankly doesn't
really feel like anything special at the moment here let's go ahead and uh
there's a couple pieces of tape holding it on but I mean what do you really
expect from a tier one system chicklet
keyboard okay people like chicklet keyboards so there you have it just your
standard USB keyboard bit of a funny layout actually so there's a number pad
and then what they've done is they've rearranged these to make it a little bit of a shorter keyboard they've rearranged
the delete insert home end page up and page down and they've compressed
everything together a little bit it is a bilingual layout and person I prefer
monolingual layouts but it's a Canadian version so that explains it so there's a
short shift on the left and a short enter on the right and would prefer to
see a long shift and a long enter but for our American viewers or quite
frankly anyone in almost any other territory you probably won't get one
that looks like that so I wouldn't worry about it too much and inside oh hold on
first we've got more accessories I have no idea how we're going to put this back together we're in the middle of a
playground we actually are and uh I have created some work for myself here so
document M mentation wise we've got uh adding a hard dis oh cool they
include a little like uh little tutorials for how to upgrade your system
and do maintenance on it that's nice Optical Mouse Okay Your Standard
Optical mouse that you'd expect to be included with a tier one system DVI to
VGA adapter just in case you're still using a VGA monitor a couple of Wireless
antennas uh presumably for dual band
power cable also included and last but not least the system itself now the
original Predator had kind of an out there look to it it was pretty uh it was
pretty different from everything else and this one takes some cues from the
old Predator but keeps things a little bit more uh well a little bit less
polarizing in terms of the look sizewise The Predator G Series is about what
you'd expect from an matx Tower so you can tell from the back what the actual
form factor is so there's a standard matx motherboard for expansion slots I'm
going to open it up so we can check it out you've got a standard ATX power supply 92mm cooling fan there's your
video card it's nice to see a proper like dual slot like proper video card in
a you know an oem sort of tier one type machine that you'd actually buy at a big
box store because for the I mean not everyone is comfortable building their
own computer for all of those of you watching my videos yes I know this is a
pre-built machine yes you don't have to like it but at the end of the day most
people buy a pre-built computer okay and let that sink in for for a moment so
it's nice that they at least have an option that has a real video card in it because how many times have you had
people go oh I want to upgrade the graphics card in my yeah you can't so
yeah anyway so 3770 as we mentioned before 32 gigs RAM you know what we've
covered all this um BL Bluetooth is included so that's probably what that
secondary antenna is for I mentioned before that it took some styling cues
from the older Predator so you can see that's where this orange trim comes in
as well as the sort of nice stamped logo on the side other than that it kind of
looks like a classier version of what
you'd expect to see for a tier one box at a big box store so it's got a card
reader which is a nice inclusion I wish more uh I wish more aftermarket cases
included this kind of stuff it does XD micro well look at that it has a dedicated micro SD slot um Regular SD
memory stick Pro and then compact flash as well as front USB 3 front USB 2 and
front headphones and microphone ports power buttons got a nice Chrome sort of
finish on it here and then you've got kind of like a performance stripey
looking thing going on on the top as well as a handle here so you can carry
the thing around as a land box it actually wouldn't be that bad much like
any other sort of microatx system so I want to get you guys like sort of a nice
look at the G on the front as well as the orange trim here your drives are
accessed through these um guys right
here so it looks like oh cool look at that hot swapable hard drive
cage oh I guess if IID looked at the instructions that they included for how
to upgrade the hard drive I would would have already known about this but that's awesome um even just as like sort of
swappable storage it's got a toolless installation so you can just go ahead
and uh pop that bad boy in there and then shut it down and then this top one
has the Blu-ray Drive so the eject buttons are actually over
here on the other side we find ventilation which also has another sort
of gstyle logo as well as another Predator stamp on the side and then on
the bottom we find what looks like sort of your standard chassis so let's go
ahead and open it up and see what we see I guess there's one more thing we can cover here on the back dedicated PS2
keyboard and mouse ports the Onboard video is disabled because it does have a
dedicated graphics card four USB 2.0 ports two USB 3.0 ports 5.1 audio and
gigabit Ethernet if there was something I was going to complain about back here
it would be I wish they had dedicated 5.1 slots I've had people tell me that
this isn't 5.1 audio actually it is the ports are configurable so you can change
what they output to but I'd like to see the full Bank of six so we're going to
go back to the lab or we're going to go get a screwdriver and then we'll open it
up I guess this is the problem with sending your system to uh this is
actually I just realized as we were leaving the park where we unboxed the
Predator um I just realized that this was the first time that I've ever
unboxed and done a Showcase of like a tier one system before like a pre-built
system so anyway I guess this is the problem with sending it to someone like me is I'm going to open it up and have a
look at what they have done inside so
check this out so 80 plus bronze power supply which is nice to see you don't
have to implement an 80 plus bronze power supply in a system like this but
they have it is a 500 wat power supply
that has it looks like three 12volt rails capable of 14 16 and 18 amps I
don't have any clear indication of which
connectors are uh being supplied by which 12vt rails so unfortunately I
can't really give any guidance there it looks again like I said it's a standard
ATX power supply so it's non- modular
however what they've done in terms of cable management to keep things clean is
we've got one let's see what kind of fan is that in front let's go ahead and uh
let's pop this bad boy off take off the front bezel there we go see how this
comes apart here there we go so we've got oh look at
that okay so there's no cooling fan in the front there's just a vent so it
looks like we are relying on Cooling
from the power supply itself so there's an 80 mm fan in the power supply so
that's going to drw air up here and that 92mm fan in the back to do all the
cooling for the system so it's going to draw air in through the front here
that's the main intake presumably AC oh yeah more exhaust from the video card so
it'll be a negative air pressure situation inside the case and then all
of that will be exhausted here here and here the cooler for the CPU itself is an
oem Affair so it's looks like an 80 mm
cooler could also be 92 it looks like it looks like a 92mm fan with 80 mm holes
is what it actually looks like on a fairly standard looking Intel OEM dudad
here let's go ahead and pull the RAM and find out what we got here so these are 8
gig sticks of Kingston memory so you can tell from the Kingston branding on the
chips themselves so this is um
acr16 D3 so they've put two 16 gig kits
that look like a custom Acer skew from
Kingston um nice to see them shipping
this system a ton of memory especially given the way that memory prices have
been increasing lately this is a fairly unique little deal right here I've never
seen one of these before so it's a little tiny SSD that mounts on some kind
of I have no idea what standard that is
some kind of thing it's just a bare PCB so it's 16 gigs it looks like it's a
SanDisk yeah SanDisk and then it uses standard desktop SATA mounting hardware
so there you go you just plug that in right there the hard drive itself is a
Seagate barracuda to 2 terab which is a good choice um and then there's this
video card which 8760 what in the heck
is an 8760 uh in terms of additional expansion you've got one more PCI
Express 1X down there in the very bottom it's a custom Acer motherboard in here
although it kind of baffles me why they need to implement a uh a custom board it
really does look custom like sometimes you'll see a a branded board but you
kind of look at it and you go oh yeah that's an ASUS whatever the model is um
whereas this actually just doesn't look like anything that uh that I've seen
before so let's go ahead and pull this video card out maybe we should throw
this on our uh on our standard test bench and find out how it performs in
terms of expansion right this is the other thing I wanted to talk about because these OEM systems you got a 500
wat power supply which means you could conceivably Chuck a GTX 680 in here
you've got a 6 plus 6 plus 2 so that's six and8 pin PCI E power which is nice
to see you've got room for an additional two SATA connectors Al I think one of
those okay Rumble uh one of those is probably run up here as like a uh okay
so there's one going to the hot swap one going to Blu-ray one going to the hard
drive and one going to the SSD so you got two more available um what else in
terms of expans expansion Standard 24
pin not quite seated all the way give that a little push uh I think that's
pretty much it so here's this graphics card what the heck is this thing model
8762 gig so look like a it's a standard sort
of OEM looking radon part and I think that's pretty much it
so single six pin thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the
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