The Herd Mentality PC - 2020
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2021-05-05
·
3,015 words · ~15 min read
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- You wanna build your own DIY computer and you find yourself on newegg.com,
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who sponsored this video, by the way. Overwhelmed by all the choices and all the acronyms.
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You got your NVMEs, you got your LGAs, your PCIs.
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What does it all even mean? Do you painstakingly research?
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Which parts are the best? No my friends, not today.
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Today you let the fates decide.
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Or more accurately the sort by Best Rating feature.
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Yes my friends, for today's machine, we are gonna be flying absolutely blindfolded,
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simply ordering whatever it is on newegg.com
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that has the highest egg rating, throwing it all together and seeing
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what kind of computer we end up with. And I can tell you some of the choices are probably not ones
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that I would have defaulted to.
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(upbeat music)
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First up, we've got the Ryzen 7 3700 X from AMD.
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It's an eight core, 16 thread processor, and its just $300.
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This puppy is a multitasking powerhouse
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able to plow through the latest games and your renders
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or animations or whatever else it is that you like to do
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on the side. It has five out of five eggs with 3,300 reviews on Newegg
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with some of the highlights being good performance and the stock cooler is good.
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And if this chip doesn't convince you to dump Intel,
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you must be dead. What does that even mean?
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We won't actually be using the stock cooler though. So let's focus on the bottom line here.
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Pros: just what I wanted, even more. Cons: Just too much power.
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Overall review: Perfect product.
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All right. Fair enough. We'll have to see what Ryzen 5000 has to say about
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the perfect Ryzen 3000. On that subject one of the best things
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about AMD's platform right now is the forward and backwards compatibility
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of their chip sets. So this motherboard right here, the MSI Meg X570 ACE,
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not only has features that are useful today, like 2.5 Gig Ethernet and Wi-Fi 6 as well as solid VRMs
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for overclocking but the capability to upgrade it
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with a Ryzen 5000 series CPU down the line.
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Now motherboards tend to be a little bit more
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on the finicky side than CPUs. So our highest rated motherboard was actually
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just four eggs out of five with 176 reviews.
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In spite of the fact that this is a $360 board.
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Let's go ahead and throw our CPU in there. A little something like that.
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That's customer satisfaction right there. That's what it looks like.
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The herd mentality PC is going really well here so far.
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For memory we ended up with a 16 Gig kit of 3200 MHZ,
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CL 16 RGB memory from none other than G skill.
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The general consensus here with four out of five eggs
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and 2,494 reviews
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was that the pros are that they are highly compatible with most boards out there.
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And one of the few 3,200 MHZ kits that happens to be on the QBL or the Qualified Vendor List
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for lots of boards with the cons being that it has ignored my advances, will not make me a sandwich
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and does not run hot enough to warm my coffee.
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Those are some pretty small downsides.
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The highlighted overall review was, has run continuously and flawlessly in my system
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for about half a year now. And also the RGB works and looks great.
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Here's what I didn't see coming. When I think boot SSD, maybe I bought into the hype.
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I tend to think more like, you know, the guys that market cutting edge features
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like PCI express gen four, like Corsair or the guys that focus almost exclusively on SSDs,
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like a Samsung or a micron, but Intel actually came out on top with their 660P.
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This right here is a 1TB drive that boasts 1800MHZ per second reads and writes
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with QLC NAND. So not exactly a top performer, but at 130 bucks,
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it's reasonably priced for a terabyte of reasonably fast storage
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and it's got five eggs out of five with almost 900 reviews.
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Advantages for this product include things like, fast, reliable, and easy to install.
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While one of the biggest complaints about it was that the user no longer had enough time
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to go get a glass of water while their system booted leading to dehydration.
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So it could be dangerous to use one of these SSDs,
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but your computer will run just fine.
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Maybe the cooler I'll end up being something I don't agree with, I'm just kidding.
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The community knows not Noctua knows what's up.
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So highlights of the NH-U12S are just that it is,
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a no-nonsense cooler that gets the job done. It has good enough performance
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while being absolutely silent.
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If you can figure your BIOS to a silent mode.
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And of course it comes with not to as legendary
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Sekou firm mounting system, which I am personally a big old fan of.
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While we work on updating the compatibility of this older unit of this cooler,
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seems like a good time to talk about one of the patterns that I've noticed emerging
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in the hardware choices that we've looked at today. The SSD had a five-year warranty,
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the cooler has a six-year warranty and Noctua has an outstanding reputation
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for providing a mounting brackets and adapters
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that customers need down the line for their products. And this Seasonic Power Supply has a 10-year warranty.
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It seems like, by large, the herd mentality computer
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is considering things that a hardware reviewer might not normally,
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like the long-term support that comes with the product, as opposed to just the price to performance ratio.
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For the finishing touch, we throw on our fan and plugged the fan cable into the CPU fan header
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right there on the motherboard. Back over to the Power Supply.
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We didn't strictly speaking need a 750 Watt Power Supply,
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but I also don't disagree with the Newegg Community's choice here.
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This is the Seasonic focused GX-750.
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It's got 80 plus gold certification, it's fully modular,
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it's quiet and even includes a hybrid mode, where the fan will turn off entirely under very light loads,
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and it's going to have a little bit of growing room for you in the future.
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The main pros were, Hey, well, I didn't need a 750 Watt Power Supply,
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but it was the same price as the 650, so why not?
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With one of the main cons being, an out-of-date user manual?
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Oh, we should have a look at that. That tells me not to use it in the bathtub in 20 languages,
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but not how the fan control button works. Oh, Lordy. Okay.
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Well, Oh yeah, no, it doesn't say which toggle is right.
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I think out is actually hybrid mode, which is weird.
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Don't quote me on that though. A separate manual for that now. Yes, yes, yes.
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Out an Audi belly button is hybrid build.
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Bringing us finally to probably the funkiest choice
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in our viewers choice PC here. This is the Cooler Master HAF XB Evo
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and it's advertised as like a land box
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slash I think they also say it's like good as a test bench or something.
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Do they actually say that? Or is that your thing? - [Nicholas] That in the marketing.
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- It's in the marketing for it. Huh? Okay.
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What's funny about this is that even though I don't recall
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ever having seen one of these out in the wild, like at a land party or anything,
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it has a five out of five egg rating with get this,
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8,562 reviews as of the time of recording this video.
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I mean, that is shocking. The main pros for this guy
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or that it is surprisingly spacious with a well thought out design in most regards.
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And that really is all you can ask for a case, Isn't it? Six thumbs screws at the back,
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give us pretty much all the access that we need to the inside of the chassis for building.
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And I can actually see how this would appeal to people
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even though I haven't set eyes on this thing in years and years.
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And that was probably a previous revision of the case.
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All the accessories are included in this little hard drive shaped-cardboard box.
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And natively has support for up to four hard drives with two of them being hot swaps
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really is pretty easy to work in. Get our front panel cables out of the way
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and plug in front USB three. You know what's another interesting trend
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is the fact that RGB lighting seems to be a complete non-factor when it comes
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to people's purchase satisfaction, all of the three items that do have any RGB lighting,
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only the RAM is available in an identical, but non RGB configuration.
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So it seems like for the most part, people are just picking whatever is great bang for the buck
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with a complete indifference towards whether it has RGB or not.
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Even the RAM. I wouldn't read too much into it because a lot of the time
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what memory people buy is more down to what on promo this week
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as opposed to what they actually think is the best.
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Although there were some complaints about not two as Brown and tan color scheme.
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People really wanted a different though, there is a black one for $10 more.
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So apparently it just doesn't matter that much. You know I made a couple offhand comments before
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about how old this case design is, but like this really dates it,
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it still has one of those AC97 offshoot dongle things
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on the front panel, audio connection. Who's putting a motherboard old enough
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with the cooler master, revise your is here. Hooking up the front panel connectors now,
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this is not my best cable and management, but whatever,
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whoever wins this thing can fix it for me.
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Oh yeah, I don't think I actually mentioned that part of the Newegg sponsorship for this video
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is that we going to be giving away this computer. Fun, right?
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That's one of the nicest things about modular Power Supply cables
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is you can kind of run them whenever and whichever direction you want.
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So I'm running them over to the motherboard first
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then I will plug in the Power Supply end once I put the PSU in down here.
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Got a couple of eight pins. Man, this is easy to get at compared to a typical tower case
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where all the cable management room is kind of like
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behind the motherboard tray in this tiny little channel.
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We are gonna have a hard drive so I'm gonna go ahead and grab a SATA cable here
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and then do what the, Hey,
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why don't we throw it in the old hot swap thing? So that's Oh, that's kind of a kludgy approach to that.
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They've just got this female connector, like soldered on to an exposed PCB there.
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Okay. The most amazing part is how much of a difference all these little conveniences make
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to how long it takes to complete a build. Like here we are, we are almost done ladies and gentlemen.
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We are wiring up the Power Supply. We're going to screw it back in, throw the graphics card in and we're close.
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We settled on the Western Digital 4TB, WD 405SZBX,
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because it's got four out of five eggs and 1500 reviews
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and 150 bucks is not a lot of money for a whack ton of storage space.
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It's super easy to install with tool less Mount. You just got to line up the thing in Boober
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and then you put the pokies and the Holies there
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and just kind of do like that kind of thing
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until it's kind of in there, like it should be
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and then you take the whole sled, slide it in there.
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Oh, Oh, it's falling apart. Can you go in there?
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What the, Oh, stop. Why are these getting caught?
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They're not even sticking out. Oh, it's under the drive now just go in.
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It's caught again. What the heck is it caught on?
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Okay, well it's there now. This is a perfect example
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of how going by whatever has the best,
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and or the most reviews can be a great strategy,
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but it can also mean that you're stuck with sorta out of date information,
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because the thing about the RTX 2000 series is awkward.
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It's kind of been replaced at this point, but because the RTX 3000 series is so supply constrained,
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well, nobody has them to leave a bunch of positive reviews about it.
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So it's not like we're getting a bad product here in the form of the RTX 2070 super twin frozen Gaming X
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from MSI. It's just that we're not getting the most current one.
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Removed before gaming, zero froze or fan not spinning,
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don't worry this card runs in silent mode,
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under low load situations. Nice. That's fun.
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One of the cons of this card is that it is big, real big,
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but one of the pros is that MSI actually went out of their way to include a support bracket with it.
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How fun is that? Got a whole like bracket experience to help with that sag.
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Nothing against them assign Nicholas, but I'm a little curious as to how exactly we got
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so many of their products. What did you use as a tie breaker
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if you had two five-eggs products?
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- [Nicholas] Basically the number of reviews. - Got it. So we took whatever was the bigger seller
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and said, okay, well this is a greater sample size. So it's more statistically significant.
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I have never installed a graphics card with a support bracket like that before
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and it's totally unnecessary in this chassis because the graphics card actually just sits like this.
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There is no sag, but I kind of want to do it anyway.
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So we're gonna do it. Come on, sometimes you just got to do stuff for fun,
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you know? - [Girl] Hey daddy. - Yes. My darling girl.
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- [Girl] Can I have Apples please? - You would like apples.
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Well, we're more of a PC house.
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- [Girl] What are you playing? - What am I playing? I'm not playing anything my love
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I'm building a computer. - [Girl] Can I help please?
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- Actually. Yes. you can help if you'd like, would you like to help?
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- Yes. - Okay, come here.
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Fun. This is something I didn't actually notice before. These handles are super handy
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if you want to move the system around, all right, go ahead. One there and one there, my darling,
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(instrumental music) This might take a while.
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Let's go get our peripherals so we can fire up some games on here.
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It posted immediately. Let's go ahead and try XMP and it's only 3800MHZ.
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It should be okay. Don't read too much into the monitor or peripherals.
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These were just things you grabbed from the office, not the top rated ones or anything like that.
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Now this game is violent, you can't watch this Tylan. All right, We're running some dual maternal at 1080P
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at what? Just shy of 300 FPS,
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which actually makes more sense than you might think with this 360 Hertz monitor.
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Nice and clean obviously coz it's like little butter smooth.
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I mean, that doesn't change that I missed a lot of the shots I take, but minor details.
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Right, right, right, right. See you later. Oh, I'm gonna die.
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Oh, I died. That's okay. The main point was, does the system work?
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Yes it does and does the review system work?
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Actually it kind of seems like it does
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without any knowledge of parts, other than making sure that our CPU and motherboard
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were compatible. All we had to do is take the top reviewed products
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and we ended up with what is not only a very competent gaming rig,
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but even one with great cooling and silent operation,
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and it's a pretty great value. And the best part is, thanks to Newegg sponsorship.
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You don't even have to pay for it at all if you win it. We're back at the office and guess what?
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Instead of the last gen RTX 2000 series card,
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Newegg asked us to upgrade our system with a new EVGA 3080X3
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that they sent over. I think Newegg must be going for a five-egg rating here,
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because check this out. They also sent another card and EVGA 3090 FTW3
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for us to give away.
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No, not for you. So enter below for a chance to win this PC with a 3080,
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or a 3090 FTW3 and afterwards,
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go check out Newegg's PC Builder which helps you choose compatible parts for your next build
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and upload your builds to Newegg showcase to show them off.
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It's that time of year guys Newegg is having Black Friday deals all month long,
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including a Black Friday price protection program from November 1st to November 22nd.
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So you can find links to all of this in the video description.
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If you guys enjoyed this video and you weren't lucky enough to win this, maybe check out the ruthless economy build,
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cause you don't have to spend this much to get a,
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well functional gaming MIG, gaming MIG?
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Gaming, PC gaming machine rig.
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Whatever just close the video.