What did we BUY?? - $1500 Gaming PC Secret Shopper Part 2
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
4,800 words · ~24 min read
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today's episode the moment has arrived
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not the moment per se but uh the systems
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have all arrived so we get to go through
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and look at exactly what came out of
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those cluster phone calls and evaluate both
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the packaging the shipping and of course
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the physical build unboxing experience
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so come along for the ride oh by the way alienware is going first
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this going good
1:32
with glasswire you can instantly see your current and past network activity
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Android device use offer code Linus to get 25 off at the link below
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okay have an iphone uh no i actually don't have a knife on me
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so first up is del alienware
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thanks
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all right so this
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is our alienware
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something or other ah here we go our alienware aurora system with
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one times m.2 NVMe
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clearly these guys are new to retail packaging that is going to mean so much
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to the average consumer so dell's total was 20 days from the time of ordering to
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the time of the system arriving and that is 20 real calendar days
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not 20 business days so about two-thirds of a month
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now the invoice they sent us was a really weird aspect of the aurora system
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because it was full of a bunch of like jargony things and there wasn't really
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we didn't have a clear idea of exactly what was coming or we wouldn't have if
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they hadn't walked us through it on the phone in terms of accessories
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did you know this thing comes with like nothing
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like look at this so we get a warranty safety and
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regulatory information pamphlet we get a quick start guide
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which basically says connect the keyboard and mouse
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which is not present as you can see connect the network cable optional
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connect the display connect the power cable and press the power button okay
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and we get a power cable
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is that really it well they did try selling us a 10
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keyboard and mouse i guess it's better to not include it and not have to pay
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for it than to pay for stuff you don't need
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in terms of the quality of the packaging job that they've done here there's
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already something that i've noticed it was lose in size yeah it is not a good
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thing to have a system loosely packed inside a box you want
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everything closed up as tightly as possible so there's still a fairly good
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chance that our system is just fine because at least dell is using a very
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high quality closed cell foam here so you can see that it's it's strong
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um but it's also not going to crumble and
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crack if the whole box gets impacted by anything so that allows it to stay
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strong and it has some it has some give to it which is really important when
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it's sitting you know vibrating on the back of a truck or whatever else
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i actually haven't seen an aurora system in a very long time
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it's got some heft to it that's probably as much to do with it
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being a steel case as anything else i guess we need a screwdriver hey
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screw me yeah
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that's good all right i don't really have any complaints about
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the plastics i mean dell's done a pretty good job of
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these kinds of things for a long time now get some of that peel action going on
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here
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oh interesting it's perforated it's perforated just in case you're like one
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of those horrible people who leaves the
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plastic on your electronics it still won't die
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that's awesome it's like
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actually an idiot proofing measure because it's
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the same thing here at the back too it's all cheese gratered
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that is freaking hilarious in terms of i
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o not bad usb 3 usb 3.1 type c another usb 3.
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audio can't take headphone jacks for granted these days
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oh okay yeah there's a button here and then
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there we go so our side panel does actually make use of
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the chassis intrusion detection so we're probably going to get a notification
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about that there's our RGB pcb for the
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um lighting in this sort of
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triangular doodad they got going on here we actually can't see a lot about the
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internals of this machine so we've got
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a 120 millimeter cooling fan sucking air in from the front here
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we've got a very oem grade looking gtx
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1060 that's with a rear blower design plastic shroud so it's not like a like a
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high quality like founders edition metal shroud or anything like that but at this
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price point i wouldn't have expected that this is nice to see so we've got
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card support so even though there was some extra space in the box the chances
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of this card coming out of that slot or breaking it off i've seen that very slim
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i get a kick out of this is it the swing out i think so so i
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think you unlock these and then yep
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oh that's kind of cool so all the cabling stays in place for our state of
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power our pci express all that good stuff
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and this gets us our first look
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at our motherboard so having reviewed a high-end alienware
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desktop a little while ago back when AMD launched their threadripper processor
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i'm not surprised by any of this but they are using a proprietary motherboard
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this is the ipcfl-sc
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got that little alien silkscreened on it so this is
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definitely specific to alienware it's got a mirror 4-pin power connector for
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what ended up being a this is an 8700k processor the one
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that's 10 times faster remember 10 times faster very important to remember that
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this is the auxiliary power to it and then this no this is GPU power
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oh so that's weird hey
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actually there's some weird stuff in here so look at this they use an adapter
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here instead of just plugging their 24-pin connector directly into the board
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and i have to assume that it's because they're actually using a proprietary
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wire layout for this and you can you can actually see they are so orange orange
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black red orange black wait no black red black black red black gray
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purple ah yes white white orange yeah but
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yellows might just be whites what is going on here what are we even
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doing that's so weird what so just so you can't use a normal
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power supply we should find out if this system runs without this plugged in
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because i'd be willing to bet that it does also notable down here
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is our nice robust thick cooling fan
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wow actually that's really nice on our aio cooler and uh our 120 millimeter
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radiators right up here in the top where it's got
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clean access to exhaust there's actually this is a lot more open than it actually
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looks like so i would expect cooling on this system to be quite strong
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but check it out these are not cooled
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that's true and then as usual dell's using just generic green pcb dimms like
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you would get from well direct from micron overall
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i am less disappointed than i was expecting as long as you have compatible
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components and right now the motherboard and the power supply are big question
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marks this is a standard atx-ish motherboard
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standard atx-ish power supply and it is
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easily user-serviceable if you wanted to add a hard drive or whatever the case
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may be so the hp ordering experience
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was a little bit unique
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the invoice still didn't have a full spec list
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it looks like yeah it looks like it is actually written on the side of the box
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though so we're gonna get a better idea of what we're dealing with here very shortly um but was what was really
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interesting is they put themselves at a disadvantage by canceling our order five
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days after we placed it um and letting us know that the issue was that we used
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hangouts to call and so the number didn't match our
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credit card um after we resolved it though
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the system was shipped the next day and so they still even with the five day
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head start that they gave everybody else still managed to deliver the gaming
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system to our door ready to be gamed on
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first all right we get a
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keyboard the mouse high quality the packing job they did
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definitely gets extra points versus dell because while the quality of this
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material is slightly lower like it's still a nice flexible foam
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rather than the brittle kind it's packed in tight so once you close the flaps
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there's no room for it to move around one
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plug two push button
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so our final spec 8th gen core i7 8700 non-k so it's going
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to be about 1 10 the speed of the dell then 16 gigs RAM 256 gig NVMe SSD
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a 2 terabyte hard drive uh
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2x2 wi-fi and
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holy crap hp
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is putting themselves in a pretty good position here
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to run away with this this is equipped with a gtx 1070
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now the 1060 versus the 1070 is not a
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small step up that k series processor that dell upsold
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is going to have to have some serious performance benefits in order to
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outweigh the improvement in GPU that we get with
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our omen here oh that's nice
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carbon fiber replica actually i'm liking their industrial design a little bit
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better as well too so i don't know what the deal is with
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the oh it's an optical drive includes an optical drive did the dell even include
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an optical drive nope if we're not making other compromises
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it's better to have it than to not have it this is a really interesting window
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too they've got like this really dark tinting on the window
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and i can actually just see through it i think we're going to get some nice illumination effects there
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you can also see there's a couple of little extra steps they've taken with the chassis here
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so powder coating now powder coating doesn't cost a lot but you can tell hp
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spent the extra couple of bucks to make sure that even the back of their system
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which you wouldn't normally look at is all black including the power supply
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io's another strong point we've got an sd card reader uh two type c's
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and two type a's along with our audio
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the inside of the system looks a lot better too much more standard though so
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there's no swing out and gain access to key components for upgrades or anything
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like that and one place where hp is clearly behind
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dell here is the case cooling configuration and CPU cooling so rather
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than using a 120 millimeter exhaust to balance out the 120 millimeter intake at
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the front uh hp is just using a mere 92
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millimeter exhaust and what's really weird about that is
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that it looks like it actually has
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space for a 120 mil here they're using an adapter bracket
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so that's a case of kind of spending 30 cents to save a
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dollar from my experience because a 120 mil can doesn't cost that much more what
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if they are going for positive case pressure on purpose that's possible but they could also just
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order a case fan with a lower RPM that would solve the same problem
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not weird hey mounting the adapter and then mounting a 92 mil fan to it
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i've noticed that their graphics card while still an hp specific skew
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i had an hp sticker here hp part number there
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they've put a little bit of extra into making it more stylized so if you were
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to ever open up your case you've got this graphic on the shroud you've got
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this sort of like chromed GeForce gtx logo here and it uses a matte black pcb
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which i'm always in favor of another interesting note is that the vrms again
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have nice big heat sinks on them and in this case it's across all of them above
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and to the side of the CPU socket still 16 gigs of RAM and there's our
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NVMe SSD down there that looks like
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another hp specific model it starts with an m and i see sec somewhere in there so
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i'm guessing that's a samsung yeah it's a samsung model of some sort
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and then there's our hard drive right there oh
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yeah check that out damn we've got hot swap cages here
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so you just well somehow presumably
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really you guys ah there we go just slide it
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very cool that's nice here there's your easy upgrades this is
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just bonus dang hp
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this is a good omen get it for the videos to come
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okay so who's next ivan cyberpower yeah
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very funny okay yeah so cyber power they wouldn't recommend a system so they were
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booted from the running which means i know who's next it's going to be i buy power now this box
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looks like it went through hell to get here this side really does look like
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someone gave it a good quality side kick now did you notice that nobody asked us
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like what kind of case we wanted i
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don't think they actually had options though well normally isn't that kind of
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like i buy power and cyber power stick well in this case
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guy actually found the best system for
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the budget and he'd never really asked about style because she didn't specify
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either so the double-edged sword of having such
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a wide variety of configs to offer your customers is that you have selection
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but the disadvantage is that it's harder to
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make a cohesive package out of your systems so we've just got
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the box for the system in like a master carton that quite frankly
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probably isn't giving it a much better chance of arriving intact
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um than if it was just shipped without it because assuming that the shipper
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adheres to the this side up sticker which you can see is right there then
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yes this is actually quite a firm sort of eggshell carton style foam and it
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would help with impact significantly but there's so much room for it to bang
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around from side to side and i mean come on we've all seen the videos
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let's see how our system did so we got a zeus e2 gaming mouse
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and an aries e1 gaming keyboard with
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spill resistance structure we've got a customer service line we can call and a
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quick start guide well they already lied package includes
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desktop tower gaming keyboard gaming mouse
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nice high quality foam here though really soft but really strong
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so our modular clearly evga power supply
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that was included gets all the extra cables bundled up nicely for us in a
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handy resealable bag little touches like that make a difference when you're
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trying to upgrade your system three years down the line oh where did i
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put all that stuff so we've clearly got an ASUS graphics
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card MSI motherboard evga power supply they're all going to be brands that you
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recognize again this is one of the challenges with having
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any number of different case designs is you can't have custom packaging and you
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can't have custom brackets to hold everything together in shipping so what
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they've done is they've included this foam packaging material inside to
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prevent your system from getting damaged and shipping you'll also notice that
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these instructions are for this like ancient i think that's a raid max case
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from like 15 years ago yeah they don't correspond to the way that you would
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actually open this chassis it doesn't have screws at the back and you don't
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need a screwdriver that's something that i really think they could do a better
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job of for new users to their credit though we actually looked into using
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these at ncix in the past and i had wanted to do it like if i recall
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correctly these cost a couple bucks each about 450 450 there you go so that
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adds a significant amount to the cost of a system but it's all about getting it
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there in one piece for the buyer wow that is a very
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bare bones looking system compared to our
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our hp omen there so just like our alienware we've got better cooling for
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the CPU but we've compromised on our cooling for
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the CPU's vrm which may or may not matter because uh what CPU is actually
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even in here this is actually a 9600 a 9600.
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check whether it's kilo or not and remember they sold it to us before it
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was launched so we actually reordered it that would probably explain why even
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though this is a fairly simple build they still took what about 20 days to
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deliver the final system now the thing is what happened in the middle is that
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the psd were initially ordered was out of stock
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so they gave us a free upgrade to the 750 unit really yeah
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that's pretty good speaking of the power supply they've done a better job at the
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back of making sure that you use the correct video port so alienware had
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onboard video but didn't specify in their quick start guide where you should
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plug your monitor into these guys say hey don't plug it in here and they've
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got a sticker on the back to make sure that you don't plug in your system and
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run it before you remove the foam insert because i've talked to sis before it's
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like a big problem people just turning the system on and letting it cook
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foam taking up the entire inside in spite of the kind of
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bareness looking of it it's obviously modular and easily upgradable because it
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uses all standard off the shelf components and they're all from quality
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brands that i would trust so we've got MSI motherboard ASUS gtx 1070 graphics
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card to go with that 9 series CPU data RAM
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uh looks like 16 gigs of it Corsair liquid cooler evga power supply then
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we've got a toshiba one terabyte drive for the back this thing is going to
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shred when it comes to gaming performance and the processor is okay
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the only drawback here is going to be that this is a SATA SSD
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rather than an NVMe SSD and that might affect system responsiveness
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but from my experience not much
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okay i buy power's looking pretty good here
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yeah that's a pretty poor application of that sticker
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yeah i could have put a little more effort into that
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uh i think it was origin before main gear right yes it's origin okay
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so far the unboxing experience feels pretty special
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but based on what i'm expecting about the specs of this machine it had better
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be really special so they include what seems like a
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reasonable quality mouse mat that's kind of nice to see
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did they ask for shirt size yeah you get to pick you told them xl
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that was janice
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thanks janice so they actually benchmarked the system
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some watsons in the bench yeah so they're assembled on one day qa
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the next burning and ship on the third day interesting
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450 watt silverstone power supply again recognizable brand names MSI motherboard
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and this is interesting it's a core i5 8400 so what happened here was we've got
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an 8 400 which they up sold us telling us it would be a lot better which of
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course it would be but it didn't technically fit in our
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budget so we resolved to benchmark this system both ways with what they upsold
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us and with what they would have originally shipped and honestly given
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that it they did send it with a gtx 1050 ti i'm not expecting it to improve much
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remember this is a 1500 us dollar system
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and this poster and what else you got over there uh scum
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steam code a star trek vanguard starter pack
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and shroud of the avatar steam code
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along with call of duty black ops 4
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still these better be some amazing games on that 1050 ti
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very high quality foam credit to them for that and it was all
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packed tightly within the outer box and
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credit to origin their chronos is a sexy little machine
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a sexy little machine that probably should have had some plastic peel stuff
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on the front see that
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oh boy origin pc
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the thing with someone like origen is that we are paying a fair bit extra for
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the custom chassis and it has some cool features so the chronos which we've
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actually featured before has these magnetic feet so all you got to do is
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move them and then you can have it in a tower configuration or a desktop configuration
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and it is extremely compact so this is the smallest of the systems that we've
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looked at today it looks like it has managed to stay in
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position and because they're using a pci
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express riser to install the graphics card
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it doesn't seem to have come out yet
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but given enough time this would cause a problem please tell
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me we at least have 16 gigs of RAM all right
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so cooling we've got an 80 ml in the front that goes directly over these
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perforated two and a half inch cages for our solid state drive remember that is a
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mere 120 gig solid state drive
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quality components you got a silverstone sfx power supply here evga graphics MSI
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motherboard kingston or hyperx memory with origin co-branding on it so this is
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again your motherboard accessories your power cord your extra power supply
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cables and any documentation that came with your parts also they throw in a usb
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drive that's actually their recovery usb i believe okay that's a nice touch that
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is a nice touch and it's 16 gigs and then you've got their own aio cooler
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it's an asetek based unit though so it's just fine
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to me the big disappointment was
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that our unboxing experience was marred
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by these these hand prints on our system
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and that it seems like origin gave up a lot to have their custom chassis with
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their fancy motherboard and ended up with a bit of a misspect system
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like i would i wouldn't recommend this
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to someone who's purely after gaming performance
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this brings us finally to main gear pc
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these guys were also right in that 20-ish day range
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and they did a really excellent job of keeping us updated on the status of our
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order throughout so after placing the order they said hey uh you know we've
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got your order hey now your system's being kitted you know here's all the
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parts that are picked hey it's assembled
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hey it's shipped and bippity boppity here's our system so right now this is
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kind of main gears competition to lose
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because they definitely did the best job of the pre-sales experience and honestly
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so far the packaging i'm feeling pretty good about as well this is a nice high
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quality foam it's all packed nice and snugly within
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the outer carton and there's a second
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internal carton i think the odds of this getting damaged and shipping are quite
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slim okay more solid packing materials really nice
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foam wow these guys go all out
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so they have also invested the uh what do you say it was about four dollars
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into foaming up the inside of the system it's dangerous to go alone take this
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cube
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you can tell they actually used the actual system that i mean not the exact
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one but the same configuration for their startup guide
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also in here our invoice Windows recovery documents and accessories
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resealable very nice got some motherboard
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cables we've got case screws in case you ever want to upgrade then you've got a
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pen and some sticker the keychain
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coaster i'd say that's a b minus mouse pad it
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doesn't have a stitched edge so it's going to fray more than the other one
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abc plus they write you a little note on
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the inside of your box enjoy Yvonne
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all right before powering on you must first remove the packing foam inside
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your computer no real instructions on how to do it though that's something
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that i think i buy power for all the deficiencies in their instructions did a
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better job of making clear so this seems mostly
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designed to prevent the graphics card from moving around like clearly they
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don't think the radiator is going to come off or anything like that so our
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config in here is an interesting one we've got the best cooling for the CPU
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out of any of our systems here we've got an overclockable CPU so that's a ryzen 5
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2600x we've got 16 gigs of RAM non-expandable unfortunately but then
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we've got a gtx 1060. Intel SSD and then
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we've also got a seagate barracuda one terabyte drive for our games down in the
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bottom i'm expecting the system to perform decently but any points that
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main gear gained during the ordering process they are probably going to end
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up losing in gaming performance nothing against AMD but this CPU is not going to
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perform as well as our Intel based machines in that particular application
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and our gtx 1060 well let's just say we
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probably would have been better off spending our dual radiator money on a 1070 and
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putting a stock cooler on it maybe the benchmarks will tell the whole
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story so that's it then
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ordering process and initial impressions complete
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let us know in the comments below who you think is going to be coming out
27:46
ahead in our secret shopper showdown next up
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is going to be customer support how do they handle it if the system doesn't
27:54
work 100 right out of the box affordable and stylish the new force be
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live 2 checks these categories off while still offering a comfortable listening
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experience its bluetooth wireless keeps you wire free as you might expect and
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the magnets at the end of the earbuds clasp together while not in use to keep
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these babies on your neck they offer 10 hours of continuous listening on the go
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and can be fully charged within one and a half hours they're ipx 5 rated making
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them weather and sweat resistant and the inline microphone is compatible with
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both the google assistant and siri allowing you to pick up calls skip and
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pause tracks check out the link below to learn more and get a pair for yourself
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or for someone else tis the season so thanks for watching guys if you disliked
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this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to
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buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is
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our merch store which has cool shirts like the one that i'm wearing under this
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and our community forum which you should totally join