Acer Predator G Series Gaming Desktop PC Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,499 words · ~12 min read
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so what could be more appropriate at a playground than an unboxing of the
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latest gaming desktop from Acer the
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Predator actually that's a totally inappropriate joke but whatever you guys
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so this is the Predator G Series which is not quite like the original Predator
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where it aimed to be sort of a super
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extreme extreme Enthusiast machine with all the sort of crazy stuff going on
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this is more like if someone sort of walked up to me and said hey for a
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reasonable price what components would you put in a gaming rig and this is a
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list that I could very conceivably come up with so in terms of specs we've got a
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core I 73770 no that's not a k processor
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it's not an unlocked processor it's not four overclocking this is not an
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overclocking machine for the graphics card we've got an 8760 so it is a 2 gig
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card however it should be noted that when it comes to to those more mid-range
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cards the the actual vram the the the
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memory buffer is less of a factor and it's more about the GPU itself now I've
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never had the pleasure of testing an 8760 so I'm excited to kind of check
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that out it's got 32 gigs of DDR3 memory
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which makes it a rockar of a sort of
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video editing or workstation platform which is really cool and then it's also
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got a Blu-ray Drive making it a media Powerhouse and a 2 TB hard drive with a
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16 gig solid state cache it is so rare
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that we see Intel's smart response technology implemented on a desktop and
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yet I don't understand why it makes a lot of sense it does make a difference
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it does make the computer perform better and it's not that expensive so there you
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go you got some little sort of how to use Windows 8 sort of documentation
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included I'm going to ask broll my camera operator today to come over here
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and check this out while we open up the box here so we've got an included
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keyboard which quite frankly doesn't
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really feel like anything special at the moment here let's go ahead and uh
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there's a couple pieces of tape holding it on but I mean what do you really
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expect from a tier one system chicklet
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keyboard okay people like chicklet keyboards so there you have it just your
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standard USB keyboard bit of a funny layout actually so there's a number pad
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and then what they've done is they've rearranged these to make it a little bit of a shorter keyboard they've rearranged
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the delete insert home end page up and page down and they've compressed
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everything together a little bit it is a bilingual layout and person I prefer
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monolingual layouts but it's a Canadian version so that explains it so there's a
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short shift on the left and a short enter on the right and would prefer to
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see a long shift and a long enter but for our American viewers or quite
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frankly anyone in almost any other territory you probably won't get one
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that looks like that so I wouldn't worry about it too much and inside oh hold on
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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
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playground we actually are and uh I have created some work for myself here so
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document M mentation wise we've got uh adding a hard dis oh cool they
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include a little like uh little tutorials for how to upgrade your system
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and do maintenance on it that's nice Optical Mouse Okay Your Standard
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Optical mouse that you'd expect to be included with a tier one system DVI to
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VGA adapter just in case you're still using a VGA monitor a couple of Wireless
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antennas uh presumably for dual band
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power cable also included and last but not least the system itself now the
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original Predator had kind of an out there look to it it was pretty uh it was
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pretty different from everything else and this one takes some cues from the
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old Predator but keeps things a little bit more uh well a little bit less
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polarizing in terms of the look sizewise The Predator G Series is about what
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you'd expect from an matx Tower so you can tell from the back what the actual
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form factor is so there's a standard matx motherboard for expansion slots I'm
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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
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video card it's nice to see a proper like dual slot like proper video card in
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a you know an oem sort of tier one type machine that you'd actually buy at a big
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box store because for the I mean not everyone is comfortable building their
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own computer for all of those of you watching my videos yes I know this is a
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pre-built machine yes you don't have to like it but at the end of the day most
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people buy a pre-built computer okay and let that sink in for for a moment so
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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
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people go oh I want to upgrade the graphics card in my yeah you can't so
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yeah anyway so 3770 as we mentioned before 32 gigs RAM you know what we've
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covered all this um BL Bluetooth is included so that's probably what that
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secondary antenna is for I mentioned before that it took some styling cues
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from the older Predator so you can see that's where this orange trim comes in
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as well as the sort of nice stamped logo on the side other than that it kind of
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looks like a classier version of what
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you'd expect to see for a tier one box at a big box store so it's got a card
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reader which is a nice inclusion I wish more uh I wish more aftermarket cases
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included this kind of stuff it does XD micro well look at that it has a dedicated micro SD slot um Regular SD
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memory stick Pro and then compact flash as well as front USB 3 front USB 2 and
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front headphones and microphone ports power buttons got a nice Chrome sort of
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finish on it here and then you've got kind of like a performance stripey
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looking thing going on on the top as well as a handle here so you can carry
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the thing around as a land box it actually wouldn't be that bad much like
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any other sort of microatx system so I want to get you guys like sort of a nice
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look at the G on the front as well as the orange trim here your drives are
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accessed through these um guys right
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here so it looks like oh cool look at that hot swapable hard drive
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cage oh I guess if IID looked at the instructions that they included for how
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to upgrade the hard drive I would would have already known about this but that's awesome um even just as like sort of
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swappable storage it's got a toolless installation so you can just go ahead
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and uh pop that bad boy in there and then shut it down and then this top one
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has the Blu-ray Drive so the eject buttons are actually over
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here on the other side we find ventilation which also has another sort
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of gstyle logo as well as another Predator stamp on the side and then on
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the bottom we find what looks like sort of your standard chassis so let's go
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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
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keyboard and mouse ports the Onboard video is disabled because it does have a
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dedicated graphics card four USB 2.0 ports two USB 3.0 ports 5.1 audio and
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gigabit Ethernet if there was something I was going to complain about back here
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it would be I wish they had dedicated 5.1 slots I've had people tell me that
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this isn't 5.1 audio actually it is the ports are configurable so you can change
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what they output to but I'd like to see the full Bank of six so we're going to
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go back to the lab or we're going to go get a screwdriver and then we'll open it
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up I guess this is the problem with sending your system to uh this is
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actually I just realized as we were leaving the park where we unboxed the
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Predator um I just realized that this was the first time that I've ever
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unboxed and done a Showcase of like a tier one system before like a pre-built
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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
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look at what they have done inside so
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check this out so 80 plus bronze power supply which is nice to see you don't
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have to implement an 80 plus bronze power supply in a system like this but
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they have it is a 500 wat power supply
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that has it looks like three 12volt rails capable of 14 16 and 18 amps I
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don't have any clear indication of which
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connectors are uh being supplied by which 12vt rails so unfortunately I
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can't really give any guidance there it looks again like I said it's a standard
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ATX power supply so it's non- modular
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however what they've done in terms of cable management to keep things clean is
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we've got one let's see what kind of fan is that in front let's go ahead and uh
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let's pop this bad boy off take off the front bezel there we go see how this
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comes apart here there we go so we've got oh look at
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that okay so there's no cooling fan in the front there's just a vent so it
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looks like we are relying on Cooling
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from the power supply itself so there's an 80 mm fan in the power supply so
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that's going to drw air up here and that 92mm fan in the back to do all the
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cooling for the system so it's going to draw air in through the front here
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that's the main intake presumably AC oh yeah more exhaust from the video card so
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it'll be a negative air pressure situation inside the case and then all
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of that will be exhausted here here and here the cooler for the CPU itself is an
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oem Affair so it's looks like an 80 mm
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cooler could also be 92 it looks like it looks like a 92mm fan with 80 mm holes
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is what it actually looks like on a fairly standard looking Intel OEM dudad
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here let's go ahead and pull the RAM and find out what we got here so these are 8
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gig sticks of Kingston memory so you can tell from the Kingston branding on the
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chips themselves so this is um
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acr16 D3 so they've put two 16 gig kits
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that look like a custom Acer skew from
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Kingston um nice to see them shipping
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this system a ton of memory especially given the way that memory prices have
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been increasing lately this is a fairly unique little deal right here I've never
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seen one of these before so it's a little tiny SSD that mounts on some kind
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of I have no idea what standard that is
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some kind of thing it's just a bare PCB so it's 16 gigs it looks like it's a
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SanDisk yeah SanDisk and then it uses standard desktop SATA mounting hardware
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so there you go you just plug that in right there the hard drive itself is a
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Seagate barracuda to 2 terab which is a good choice um and then there's this
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video card which 8760 what in the heck
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is an 8760 uh in terms of additional expansion you've got one more PCI
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Express 1X down there in the very bottom it's a custom Acer motherboard in here
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although it kind of baffles me why they need to implement a uh a custom board it
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really does look custom like sometimes you'll see a a branded board but you
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kind of look at it and you go oh yeah that's an ASUS whatever the model is um
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whereas this actually just doesn't look like anything that uh that I've seen
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before so let's go ahead and pull this video card out maybe we should throw
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this on our uh on our standard test bench and find out how it performs in
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terms of expansion right this is the other thing I wanted to talk about because these OEM systems you got a 500
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wat power supply which means you could conceivably Chuck a GTX 680 in here
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you've got a 6 plus 6 plus 2 so that's six and8 pin PCI E power which is nice
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to see you've got room for an additional two SATA connectors Al I think one of
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those okay Rumble uh one of those is probably run up here as like a uh okay
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so there's one going to the hot swap one going to Blu-ray one going to the hard
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drive and one going to the SSD so you got two more available um what else in
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terms of expans expansion Standard 24
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pin not quite seated all the way give that a little push uh I think that's
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pretty much it so here's this graphics card what the heck is this thing model
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8762 gig so look like a it's a standard sort
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of OEM looking radon part and I think that's pretty much it
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so single six pin thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the
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