NCIX PC Vesta i3 3050 $899.99 Value Gaming System First Look & Silence Evaluation Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,507 words · ~7 min read
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so I get asked all the time which system should I buy where should I buy it from
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uh what graphics card would you recommend for this game and uh this
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video is sort of meant to be a couple of things it's going to be the answer to a
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lot of those questions and it's also going to be a bit of an introduction to
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a to a gaming system that NC as probably
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most of you know I work at NC the computer store here in Canada and uh
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this is a gaming system that NC is going to be releasing for back to school
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because as you know uh students only
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focus on their studies when they go off to University that's the only thing they
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do they never use their computers for gaming never happens okay so what I have
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running here is a firmar so this is just
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a test um and I've done a lot of features on the MSI Cyclone series of
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coolers but we're just going to okay first I want the cameraman to come over
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here and just get close to this computer just get close with we're listening to
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it so you don't have to worry about what you're pointing it at I have a novice cameraman today so
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uh the point is this computer is very very quiet even under a full gaming load
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so it's using a fractal design toine R3 case that means you've got a front door
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on the case here which has a nice kind of a a brushed matte finish on it inside
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we've got a DVD writer we've got room for another optical drive the R3 is
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slightly revised so it has kind of these cool 5 and a/4 inch Bay covers that have
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a little uh a little hinge here so you can just lock them in just like that
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you've got a couple of removable fan filters on the front so it's populated
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by default with with one 120 mm fan and when we open up the inside you'll see
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that uh NC installs the 3 and 1/2 in Drive behind the fan so that it gets
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optimal cooling you've got all your sound dampening materials here behind
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the door just want to have a quick look at that so the Define R3 is basically
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like the Define R2 which I unboxed quite some time ago when it was first released
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in North America so let's run around here and have a look at the back of the
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system so it has a 550 W power supply
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it's powered by an MSI Motherboard which features USB 3.0 and you can't see it
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but on the inside it actually has SATA 6 gbit per second too so not two as well
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so that means that you've got all of the latest Technologies on this particular
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system and uh why don't we open it up
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and uh have a look at the inside so the Target price of this
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system is going to be about $8.99 Canadian and uh what that means is that
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you get a dual core processor it's only
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going to be a core I3 but as most people
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know when you're gaming at High resolution HD resolutions usually the
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CPU is not the bottleneck and it usually comes down to the GPU so that's why we
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focused more on putting a very very powerful graphics card in here and
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building the system around that now this is an SLI ready motherboard so it's
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going to be also available in a higher-end configuration where you're going to add one more GTX 460 upgrade
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the power supply a little bit to make sure that it's SLI compliant as well as
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uh throwing in a quad core so that'll be kind of like a deluxe package anyway so
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on the inside you see we've got a standard ATX motherboard 4 gigs of
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Kingston RAM we've got the dual core I3 processor even come close even with the
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side panel off I want you to listen to the system it's still quite quiet so even
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when you're gaming you don't have to worry about excess noise and you can see
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the GPU runs at a cool 62° uh peaking at 66 even with the case
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closed and never goes over about 76% fan
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speed so even if we turn off After Burner so let's do that
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and the cameraman's phone is going off here so there he turned it off good work
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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
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I mentioned before we have the hard drive so it's a one tbte hard no I
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believe it's a 500 gig hard drive no it is a 1 terab hard drive by default
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installed down here at the bottom you can actually install up to eight hard
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drives in this case so with all of the expansion options on the board you've
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got six SATA 2 ports two SATA 3 6 GB per
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second ports so you're probably going to use one of those for your DVD or Blu-ray
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Drive and then you can have up to six hard drives supported directly off the
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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
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we've turned off of we've turned off the 3D application the system is darn near
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silent even with the side panel off and you can actually get the NCI technicians
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to make some changes for you too you can get additional fans installed cuz the
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Define R3 does support an additional 120
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mm or 140 mil fan on the side blowing onto your graphics card
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you can see that it's covered with a noise dampening material by default but
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you can just take that right out you can actually put an additional two 120 or
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140s in the top and then um you can put
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an additional 120 mm fan in the front so
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if you don't care about the silent aspect you can actually make this case
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all about the cooling performance instead now speaking of uh fan filters
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you've got an additional 120 mm on the bottom that one's filtered and then the
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power supply uses a 20 mm fan on the
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bottom of the power supply and you can see that's pulling air through a
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filtered fan hole right on the bottom of the case again more fan filters more
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case air flow and it makes sure your power supply stays nice and cool so this
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is a system that uh we're pretty proud of for 8.99 so uh check it out I think
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this is the first time I've ever really done a video on something that NC does
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on PCS even though that's been a big part of my job for about 2 years I get a
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lot of questions too on my blog about what exactly is my job
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uh well that's one of the things I do I am responsible for making sure our PC
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configurations are up to date well engineered and well thought out and that
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you get sort of the right config for the money so thanks for checking out my
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video blog and I hope you've enjoyed this little feature on the silent
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aspects of this particular NC
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PC one other thing I wanted to mention really quick I talked about the noise
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dampening material inside the case but I want the cameraman to kind of
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demonstrate just how much of an impact it has so this is is at idle so this is
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if you're just editing Word documents or actually doing school work you know on
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the Internet or whatever so hopefully the camera's
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microphone is close enough to the back here that you can hear some noise coming
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out the back of the case and then I want the hold on don't
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move yet but on my Mark I want the cameraman to move the camera away and
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just kind of sit it next to the side panel where there's noise dampening
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material so what I'm hoping is that on the YouTube video you'll be able to tell
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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
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look at before so you got headphones microphone USB E power and then inside
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here hidden is a little reset switch