so I get asked all the time which system should I buy where should I buy it from
uh what graphics card would you recommend for this game and uh this
video is sort of meant to be a couple of things it's going to be the answer to a
lot of those questions and it's also going to be a bit of an introduction to
a to a gaming system that NC as probably
most of you know I work at NC the computer store here in Canada and uh
this is a gaming system that NC is going to be releasing for back to school
because as you know uh students only
focus on their studies when they go off to University that's the only thing they
do they never use their computers for gaming never happens okay so what I have
running here is a firmar so this is just
a test um and I've done a lot of features on the MSI Cyclone series of
coolers but we're just going to okay first I want the cameraman to come over
here and just get close to this computer just get close with we're listening to
it so you don't have to worry about what you're pointing it at I have a novice cameraman today so
uh the point is this computer is very very quiet even under a full gaming load
so it's using a fractal design toine R3 case that means you've got a front door
on the case here which has a nice kind of a a brushed matte finish on it inside
we've got a DVD writer we've got room for another optical drive the R3 is
slightly revised so it has kind of these cool 5 and a/4 inch Bay covers that have
a little uh a little hinge here so you can just lock them in just like that
you've got a couple of removable fan filters on the front so it's populated
by default with with one 120 mm fan and when we open up the inside you'll see
that uh NC installs the 3 and 1/2 in Drive behind the fan so that it gets
optimal cooling you've got all your sound dampening materials here behind
the door just want to have a quick look at that so the Define R3 is basically
like the Define R2 which I unboxed quite some time ago when it was first released
in North America so let's run around here and have a look at the back of the
system so it has a 550 W power supply
it's powered by an MSI Motherboard which features USB 3.0 and you can't see it
but on the inside it actually has SATA 6 gbit per second too so not two as well
so that means that you've got all of the latest Technologies on this particular
system and uh why don't we open it up
and uh have a look at the inside so the Target price of this
system is going to be about $8.99 Canadian and uh what that means is that
you get a dual core processor it's only
going to be a core I3 but as most people
know when you're gaming at High resolution HD resolutions usually the
CPU is not the bottleneck and it usually comes down to the GPU so that's why we
focused more on putting a very very powerful graphics card in here and
building the system around that now this is an SLI ready motherboard so it's
going to be also available in a higher-end configuration where you're going to add one more GTX 460 upgrade
the power supply a little bit to make sure that it's SLI compliant as well as
uh throwing in a quad core so that'll be kind of like a deluxe package anyway so
on the inside you see we've got a standard ATX motherboard 4 gigs of
Kingston RAM we've got the dual core I3 processor even come close even with the
side panel off I want you to listen to the system it's still quite quiet so even
when you're gaming you don't have to worry about excess noise and you can see
the GPU runs at a cool 62° uh peaking at 66 even with the case
closed and never goes over about 76% fan
speed so even if we turn off After Burner so let's do that
and the cameraman's phone is going off here so there he turned it off good work
okay so when we turn off After Burner you're going to see it's actually going to get quite a bit quieter still and as
I mentioned before we have the hard drive so it's a one tbte hard no I
believe it's a 500 gig hard drive no it is a 1 terab hard drive by default
installed down here at the bottom you can actually install up to eight hard
drives in this case so with all of the expansion options on the board you've
got six SATA 2 ports two SATA 3 6 GB per
second ports so you're probably going to use one of those for your DVD or Blu-ray
Drive and then you can have up to six hard drives supported directly off the
motherboard go ahead and look at the uh motherboard don't worry about looking at me all the time so you can see now that
we've turned off of we've turned off the 3D application the system is darn near
silent even with the side panel off and you can actually get the NCI technicians
to make some changes for you too you can get additional fans installed cuz the
Define R3 does support an additional 120
mm or 140 mil fan on the side blowing onto your graphics card
you can see that it's covered with a noise dampening material by default but
you can just take that right out you can actually put an additional two 120 or
140s in the top and then um you can put
an additional 120 mm fan in the front so
if you don't care about the silent aspect you can actually make this case
all about the cooling performance instead now speaking of uh fan filters
you've got an additional 120 mm on the bottom that one's filtered and then the
power supply uses a 20 mm fan on the
bottom of the power supply and you can see that's pulling air through a
filtered fan hole right on the bottom of the case again more fan filters more
case air flow and it makes sure your power supply stays nice and cool so this
is a system that uh we're pretty proud of for 8.99 so uh check it out I think
this is the first time I've ever really done a video on something that NC does
on PCS even though that's been a big part of my job for about 2 years I get a
lot of questions too on my blog about what exactly is my job
uh well that's one of the things I do I am responsible for making sure our PC
configurations are up to date well engineered and well thought out and that
you get sort of the right config for the money so thanks for checking out my
video blog and I hope you've enjoyed this little feature on the silent
aspects of this particular NC
PC one other thing I wanted to mention really quick I talked about the noise
dampening material inside the case but I want the cameraman to kind of
demonstrate just how much of an impact it has so this is is at idle so this is
if you're just editing Word documents or actually doing school work you know on
the Internet or whatever so hopefully the camera's
microphone is close enough to the back here that you can hear some noise coming
out the back of the case and then I want the hold on don't
move yet but on my Mark I want the cameraman to move the camera away and
just kind of sit it next to the side panel where there's noise dampening
material so what I'm hoping is that on the YouTube video you'll be able to tell
that that's quite a bit quieter and we might as well have a look at the front panel uh connectors too which we didn't
look at before so you got headphones microphone USB E power and then inside
here hidden is a little reset switch