PC Smaller than an SSD
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,228 words · ~11 min read
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oh do we ever have a spectacle for you guys today right here in my hands
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is a tiny computer
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and i do not mean this laptop we have actually jammed the entire tiny computer
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inside the laptop in its hard drive bay check this out
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check this out this is crazy
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that my friends is an entire computer
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it's not gonna light your world on fire or play the latest games at the highest
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frame rates but it will run Windows
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so uh let's try that shall we
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ltx for hosting the ltx 2018 live event
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on july 14th it's an interactive meetup tech out and pc gaming
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extravaganza get your ticket today at the link below
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so zotac is no stranger to the mini pc game in fact
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they've got it all over their packaging the original mini pc we made the
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original we made the original mini okay okay okay
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but even they have never done anything this
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small so this thing is not much bigger than a
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credit card i mean obviously it's thicker but it is not much larger than a
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credit card so inside this device you will find an
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Intel celeron n3350 processor
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four gigs of RAM uh that is ddr3 memory
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so low power ddr3 memory you'll find 32
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gigs of storage and surprisingly
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actually more expandability than
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some modern flagship smartphones like the iphone
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so you get your power button here as well as an indicator led you've got uh
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your dc 5 volt 3 amp input it's kind of
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a bummer that that's a usb micro beat it's not the most durable connector
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you've got a micro sd slot so that means
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that the 32 gigs of emmc storage that are already soldered on can be expanded
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Windows will just see that as a normal drive some tablets already do this like
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microsoft's own surface lineup for example and then over here you've got
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two usbcs that also serve as displayport
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outputs and it even includes some dongles so this is one of those situations where because what you're
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going to be able to do with it depends on the dongles that you've got for it uh
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an unboxing actually kind of makes sense so we've got one of those same power to
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i swear i've seen this before this is the same one that comes with
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the drop cam uh we've got a power cord
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we've got a little mount so you can throw this on the back of a monitor or
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something like that i guess you just put like one screw through the base of thing
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not the most amazing mount i've ever seen then you've got a few different prong options for the
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power thing here oh wow so you actually just
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fold that in and then do that oh that is a
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weird international adapter let's fire it up shall we
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all right so let's plug this in plug that in
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plug that baby in
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man it is amazing how tiny this thing is
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also fun fact the cooling is all taken care of by the
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ribbed metal chassis this thing is completely fanless and it's not even
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heavy like it's it's about the same weight as the SSD that we used for our
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size comparison a few minutes ago
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it's madness so with this single dongle that they
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include we actually get an HDMI output and we get two usb 3 ports so that'll be
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everything that we need to run this thing
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that's it that's the whole computer you know that
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you've reached full dongle when your dongle
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is the size of the computer
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this is so crazy like this is a computer wow it's getting warm
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already whoa interesting
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so i mean first order of business is obviously cinebench right
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oh man i don't know if you want to do that no
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how long does it take 30 minutes
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okay maybe i'll just take alex's word for it what's our score well do you want
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to guess sure wow it is a dual core
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without hyper threading clocked at a whopping
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1.1 gigahertz i'm gonna guess
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20. 45. 45. okay
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hey not bad oh yeah here it is you've already got the uh the score cash from
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last time so that is less than one tenth the speed of a five
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generation old mobile processor
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realistically something like this is intended more for
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digital signage applications or like the
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pos terminal in the local clothing store or whatever the case may
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be it's designed to be seen not heard and just perform basic functionalities
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so could it do something like play an hd youtube video because
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for better or for worse Intel has baked gpus onto the vast majority of their
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consumer cpus and that's annoying for those of us who
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just want more CPU performance and wish they'd use more die area for that but
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it's good for people who want to buy very low end stuff and rely on the GPU
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to accelerate applicable tasks so let's go ahead and ooh even
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scrolling's a little rough got that got that delay
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all right so let's look up a really cool channel like Linus tech tips
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does this thing support 4k output oh boy so yes we are running at 4k right
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now but only at up to 30 hertz so this is HDMI
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1.4 not HDMI 2.0 meaning that you're stuck
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with a couple of 1920x1080 displays
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running at 60 hertz or a single 4k running at 30hz oh wow the ncix
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bankruptcy auction is still the channel trailer so this is interesting
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it's not a great experience because even like full screening and then going back
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to windowed mode on the video is pretty choppy oh and we saw we saw a
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hiccup there but
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youtube actually defaulted to 4k
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playback for us here and other than the fact that the audio
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is not coming through which could be any number of things i'm not going to blame it on this
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this is actually playing back pretty well
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i bet it's running warm though oh it is
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oh that's toasty it's working hard
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oh so the CPU's not struggling as much
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when we're full screened but it has a harder time when we're
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running in the browser now
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zotac is known for a couple of things one of them is mini pcs
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but one of them is overclocking so i wouldn't put it
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past them to put some overclocking capabilities
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into their BIOS turbo mode hey
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oh cool uh okay
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should we enable power limit one
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no right let's disable the power limit
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here we go all right we're firing up task manager let's see if we get uh
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so whoa
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this thing's running at 2.3 gigahertz
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now i'm sure we have no way of guaranteeing
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that it's not going to uh you know overheat without some additional cooling
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and to be clear it's still not super powerful microsoft account background
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task was consuming 40 of the CPU there
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but maybe this will give us
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a little bit more headroom for our youtube experience here
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oh
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did it just shut down it just oh yeah it shut down hard
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i bet we need a more powerful wall wart oh it's really hot you know if you need
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additional cooling though i bet you could just hold the thing like this it's
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like water cooling it with your blood you know
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cause it'll take the heat away and then your body will dissipate it as sweat
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so i found this huawei supercharge adapter down in the warehouse it claims
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to be 4.5 volts 5 amps
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plus 5 amps whatever that means but it's heavy
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well it's definitely not completely broken so that's good okay do you want
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to water cool it for me yeah like just hold your hand on it
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uh oh yeah i guess we could put a fan on it wait did it just shut down again
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oh the led is red well
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this is one of the risks
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of overclocking you don't usually break your hardware
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but you do occasionally corrupt your os i can feel it heating up right now as it
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tries to load Windows
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the light just went red
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damn it all right fine we can disable or enable
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the power safety thing
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all all right all right all right all right but i'm leaving on turbo mode
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num lock's not doing anything so the other thing i don't know is if this
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thing being rated for four and a half volts is affecting it in
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some way it was worth a shot if i had one of the old one plus dash chargers
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not scripted legitimately didn't realize that was there
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okay we're booted off the dash charger and we still have
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the uh turbo mode enabled
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1.88 one oh
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oh can we settle for our 100 overclock alex
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yeah we can settle for that even if microsoft account background
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crap is still 40 CPU utilization
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all right all right let's wait for that to settle down and then we'll go ahead and try out
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youtube again task manager is pulling 26
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of the CPU interesting
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so you know what i bet's going on here is there's only so much power for both
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the CPU and GPU and if we let the CPU turbo up
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there's not enough left to playback 4k video which would
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obviously be a priority for a device like this
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although yeah it does look like it's fine now doesn't it
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so if we want to run a game we're probably better off
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turning off that setting aren't we
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okay let's unoverclock
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and play some worms shall we i still remember playing worms 3d
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on like my buddies like pentium 2.
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so if this can't handle it i'm going to be pretty disappointed
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that's a logo i've not enjoyed on my screen in a while
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okay that's uh that is some pretty broken stuff right there
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and none of my hotkeys work oh that one works task manager will not come up
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though um
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all right so maybe this will let us at least get
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to the menus okay that's different here we go start a
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quick game it's only 720p but hey that's running
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pretty well oh it's still not actually perfect 60
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FPS how are you supposed to even control this this is stupid
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the right spot oh
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okay and i think we're done here
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anyone who thought that the mouse arrow changing its direction depending on
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which direction you were moving was a good idea i'm glad that those people are
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all out of game development now because that's awful okay so clearly some of the
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stuff we did today was not how the
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mini pc zbox pi 225 was intended to be used it's for
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industrial applications digital signage
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that kind of thing and honestly for that it's just fine if this was a
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review i guess that would be the conclusion it's not a gaming box
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and if you were expecting it to be then you were unreasonable like me
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but it would have been pretty cool if we could have overclocked it
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so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
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subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured in
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also linked in the video description is our merch store which has cool shirts
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