Gadgetory

hey guys and welcome back to hardware unbox today we've got you a review of the sous gr8 to which I can only assume is pronounced the great - this is a small form-factor gaming PC so I know that it won't interest to many of you guys because it is pre-built but there still seems to be a niche market for these sort of devices which is why companies like a soos and MSI produce them and be great - is just one example this bad boy here does cost one thousand US dollars before that price you get either an Intel Core i5 or Core i7 KB like CPU there's also an nvidia geforce gtx 1063 gigabyte GPU which is the same across all models of the great - there's also either 8 or 16 gigabytes of RAM and MDOT - SSD and 2.5 inch hard drive storage options in my review that I received a core i7 7700 CPUs that's the non K model as well as 16 gigabytes of RAM a 256 m dot 2 SSD and of course the GTX 1063 gigabyte GPU so it's a reasonably powerful system for something so compact but there are definitely some concerns of mine relating to some aspects of this device most notably the thing that I don't particularly like about the gi8 - is its design I just can't get behind this really odd gamer style design that as Susan's been using across most of their republic of gamers products there are some really strange angles around the body of the great - and some very odd patterns as well that don't make it nearly as great as the name would suggest first in my opinion it's a pretty ugly case that they've used here definitely not as attractive some have been more understated and more classy looking designs that you find on modern consoles like the Xbox one and PlayStation 4 pro and even competing small form-factor pieces like the msi trident 3 of course it wouldn't be a gamer orange and product without some RGB LED lighting and you will find it on the front of the GRA to hear through those we're lines and patterns or whatever a soos is decided to do here I don't think it looks too great in fact I think almost the RGB lighting detracts from the overall design and it can often clash with that actually quite nice copper strip that sort of goes through the center that adds a bit of highlight to the design but I think those RGB lights if you don't set it to sort of an appropriate color can clash a little bit there most of this chassis is made of plastic and doesn't look quite as nice of some of the more premium small form-factor designs or consoles that we've seen kind of it's a little bit cheaper in some regards but at least soos has been keeping the cost down with their choice of materials here one of the advantages to this design is that it is quite compact at just 7 litres it's only slightly larger than the 5 litre Playstation 4 pro and it's around the same size as the original Xbox one so any place that you could put those game consoles you will still be able to fit the gr8 2 although that said it is mostly designed to stand in a vertical orientation both as other consoles can go horizontal quite comfortably but with the gr8 2 it can look a little strange on the side thanks to that weird angular body so it's creative suits has only sort of made this device to sit in one orientation as far as I always concerned you get two USB 3.0 ports on the front as well as two 3.5 ml or no Jack's on the back you'll find another 3.5 mm audio jack and s/pdif optical audio output there's USB 3.1 type-a port a USB 3.1 type C port to further USB 3.0 type a ports as Ethernet as well and a proprietary power dongle because it does require an external power brick all the display connectivity is connected directly to the graphics card you get one DisplayPort and two HDMI ports so running triple screen setups is no problem on the GRA to diving inside the great - now and it's disappointing to discover that neither the CPU nor the GPU are user upgradeable so whatever you purchase from a seuss you're going to be stuck with for the lifetime of the great - and when we're talking about just a GTX 1063 gigabyte GPU there's definitely some room for upgrade ability there but you simply can't do it with this small form-factor PC and even accessing the side of the motherboard where you'll find the CPU and GPU requires significant disassembly so it's pretty clear that even if they were user upgradeable that MSI definitely doesn't want you to touch them there are some user upgradeable aspects to the great - you'll find an end to sd-6 there's also a single dim slot accessible of the two DIMM slots in this device so upgrading the RAM as well tends to be pretty straightforward and for those that purchase one of the great tools that does come with a 2.5 inch drive bay inside again it's swapping that out is pretty straightforward but for at least for me my model only came with an M naught 2 SSD and there was no 2.5 inch mounting Bay actually installed in this device so it's a bit disappointing for those that purchased the device it only comes with Android 2 SSDs that you can't add in a 2.5 inch drive after the fact while Seuss's thermal design seems to be reasonably clever on paper in that in takes air through the bottom and rear of the chassis and exhaustion at the top in practice it isn't as good as I would like to see this device runs pretty loud under load and if you don't have a pair of headphones to use while gaming or some loud external speakers and you place the grh to reasonably close to your monitor you will definitely be able to hear it over ingame audio and the GPU fan in particular is pretty loud and could definitely to put some quieting down in terms of actual temperatures inside this device while running something like item 64 stability test the CPU can achieve over ninety degree Celsius temperatures which is pretty hot but at least the GPU tends to be reasonably cool sitting more in the 70 degrees Celsius range and when you are playing games and not running your stress test the CPU temperatures are a bit more manageable in the 80 degree range as all models of CPU available for the great two are non K models meaning there cannot be overclocked I'm not too concerned about the lack of thermal Headroom available from this CPU cooler as for the GPU there's definitely enough thermal Headroom for overclocking as this is just a standard GTX 1063 gigabyte you can download pretty much any utility you like for overclocking and get to it straight away I was able to achieve around 9 to 13 percent more performance out of the GTX 260 in mind gr8 2 which falls in line with what we see from desktop gtx 1060 graphics card so it's a pretty good result from this mini PC and it's definitely something you should experiment with because it only raised temperatures of the GPU by around 3 degrees Celsius under load which is certainly manageable although it did make the unit a little bit louder which I guess isn't ideal but it's a pretty loud unit overall I'm not going to dive too deep into performance because this is a desktop PC and I found that the performance from the GTX 1063 gigabyte inside the grade 2 is almost identical to what we've seen from this graphics card in some of our previous coverage of it so it's definitely worth checking out all of our previous coverage of games graphics cards and the like to find out how the GTX 1063 gigabyte performs and you can pretty much just take those results and apply to the GRA - it's very similar in that regard what's interesting to note is that some models of this mini PC come with the core i5 7400 CPU inside and I tend to recommend this over the i7 7700 because it's a cheaper device to get just the Core i5 CPU and the performance difference in games is pretty negligible when we're talking about a GTX 1060 3 gigabytes that is almost certainly GPU bottlenecked in most gaming situations so it's worth definitely saving just a little bit of money in opting just with the Core i5 CPU inside what I will touch on briefly is that this console is well suited to gaming at 1080p and around 60fps on sort of the high to very high presets in most modern titles in Deus Ex mankind divider for example you can run it at the ultra preset but you'll be looking at more 30fps which I know isn't really acceptable for most of your PC gamers out there but if you reduce the quality seeing two sort of high or very high you'll be looking at more like 50 to 60 fps and it's a similar story in watchdogs 2 again running it sort of the high to very high preset at 1080p 2 is a very good quality experience in games and certainly better than you'll see on either the Xbox one or Playstation 4 which often run at resolutions below 1080p and frame rate swapped at 3 so on the GRA - it's definitely a pretty decent showing from the cable xcp us and the GTX 1063 gigabyte inside in terms of pricing the assist GRA - tends to run from around the 900 to 1100 US dollar range which is pretty decent for the hardware you get inside and that most of the price points this mini pcs available you actually get slightly better hardware than you'll find in the msi trident 3 which is a competing mini pc also with the gtx 1063 gigabyte inside as i mentioned earlier i don't think there's much point buying the core i7 cpu because in most situations you will be GPU bottleneck using the gtx 960 3 gigabyte so it makes more sense to get something like the core i5 7400 because it's cheaper and will give you roughly the same performance of course you can also upgrade the SSD the 2.5 inch drive and the ram so if you do get something on the lower end of the scale you can simply upgrade with your own hardware later but I think that the price point of the $1000 model is pretty reasonable for what you get in this device I do have some issues with the great 2 which mostly revolve around its design which i think is pretty unattractive it's cooling solution is quite loud under load and neither its CPU or GPU I use are upgradable I guess if you're not a fan of the design and you think it's too loud you can simply hide away this console during use and the hardware that you get inside is very competitive and quite good for the price that you're paying a little bit better than the msi try them free across the board I guess that's the most important part of you know the buying decision for a desktop small form-factor PC in that respect these suits gr8 2 is a decent buy at most of its price points anyway that's it for this review of the sushi r8 2 there is a written review on tech spot comm if you are interested in that don't forget we have our patreon it's set up now you can find links to that in the description below and we will catch you in the next one