Gadgetory

so what could be more appropriate at a playground than an unboxing of the latest gaming desktop from Acer the predator actually that's a totally inappropriate joke but whatever you guys so this is the predator G Series which is not quite like the original predator where it aimed to be sort of a super extreme extreme enthusiast machine with all the sort of crazy crazy stuff going on this is more like if someone sort of walked up to me and said hey for a reasonable price what components would you put in a gaming rig and this is a list that I could very conceivably come up with so in terms of specs we've got a core i7 3770 no that's not a Kei processor it's an unlocked processor it's not for overclocking this is not an overclocking machine for the graphics card we've got an 87 60 so it is a 2 gig card however it should be noted that when it comes to those more mid-range cards the the actual vram the the memory buffer is less of a factor and it's more about the GPU itself now I've never had the pleasure of testing in 8760 so I'm excited to kind of check that out it's got 32 gigs of ddr3 memory which makes it a rock star of a sort of video editing or workstation platform which is really cool and then it's also got a blu-ray drive making it a media powerhouse and a 2 terabyte hard drive with a 16 gig solid-state cache it is so rare that we see Intel's Smart Response technology implemented on a desktop and yet I don't understand why it makes a lot of sense it does make a difference it does make the computer perform better and it's not that expensive so there you go you got some little sort of how to use Windows 8 sort of documentation included I'm gonna ask B roll my camera operator today to come over here and check this out while we open up the box here so we've got an included keyboard which quite frankly doesn't really feel like anything special up a little bit here let's go ahead and there's a couple pieces of tape holding on but I mean what do you really expect from a tier one system keyboard okay people like chiclet keyboards so you have it just dust your standard USB keyboard bit of a funny layout actually so there's a number pad and then what they've done is they've rearranged these to make it a little bit of a shorter keyboard they've rearranged the delete insert home and end page up and page down and they've compressed everything together a little bit it is a bilingual layout and personally I prefer monolingual layouts but it's a Canadian version so that explains it so there's a short shift on the left is short enter on the right and would prefer to see a long shift in a long enter but for our American viewers or quite frankly anyone in almost any other territory you probably won't get one that looks like that so I wouldn't worry about it too much and inside Oh hold on first we've got more accessories I have no idea how we're gonna put this back together we're in the middle of a playground we actually are and I have created some work for myself here so documentation wise we've got adding a heart just oh cool they include a little like little tutorials for how to upgrade your system and do maintenance on it that's nice optical mouse okay your standard optical mouse that you'd expect to be included with a Tier one system DVI to VGA adapter just in case you're still using a VGA monitor a couple of wireless antennas Bob first presumably for a dual band power cable also included and last but not least the system itself now the original predator had kind of an out there and look to it it was pretty it was pretty different from everything else and this one takes some cues from the old predator but keeps things a little bit more well a little bit less polarizing in terms of the look size why is the predator g-series is about what you'd expect from an m-80 X tower so you can tell from the back what the actual form factor is so there's a standard m ATX motherboard for expansion slots I'm gonna open it up so we can check it out you've got a standard ATX power supply 92 millimeter cooling fan there's your video card it's nice to see a proper like dual slot like proper video card in a you know an OEM sort of tier one type machine that you'd actually buy at a big-box store because for the honey not everyone is comfortable building their own computer for all of those of you watching my videos yes I know this is a pre-built machine yes don't have to like it but at the end of the day most people buy a prebuilt computer okay let that sink in for a moment so it's nice that they at least have an option that has a real video card in it because how many times have you had people go upgrade the graphics card oh yeah you can't so yeah anyway so 3770 as we mentioned before 32 gigs ram you know what we've covered all this bluetooth is included so that's probably what that secondary antenna is for I mentioned before that it took some styling cues from the older predator so you can see that's where this orange trim comes in as well as the sort of nice stamped logo on the side other than that it kind of looks like a classier version of what you'd expect to see for a tier one box at a big-box store so it's got a card reader which is a nice inclusion I wish more I wish more aftermarket cases included this kind of stuff does XD micro sd well look at that has a dedicated micro SD slot regular SD memory stick Pro and then compact flash as well as front USB three front USB 2 and front headphone and microphone ports power buttons got a nice chrome sort of finish on it here and then you've got kind of like a performance stripy looking thing going on on the top as well as a handle here so you can carry the thing around as a land box it actually wouldn't be that bad much like any other sort of micro ATX system so I want to get you guys like sort of a nice look at the G on the front as well as the orange trim here your drives are accessed through these guys right here so it looks like oh cool look at hard drive cage oh I guess if I'd looked at the instructions that they included for how to upgrade the hard drive I would have already known about this but that's awesome even just as like sort of swappable storage it's got a toolless installation so you can just go ahead and pop that bad boy in there and then shut it down and then this top one has the blu-ray drive so the eject buttons are actually over here on the other side we find ventilation which also has another sort of G style logo as well as another predator stamp on the side and then on the bottom we find what looks like sort of your standard chassis so let's go ahead and open it up and see what we see I guess there's one more thing we can cover here on the back dedicated ps2 keyboard and mouse ports the onboard video is to say because it does have a dedicated graphics card four USB 2.0 ports two USB 3.0 ports 5.1 audio and Gigabit Ethernet if there was something I was gonna complain about back here it would be I wish they had dedicated 5.1 slots I've had people tell me that this isn't 5.1 audio actually it is the ports are configurable so you can change what they output to but I'd like to see the full Bank of six so we're gonna go back to the lab or we're gonna go get a screwdriver and then we'll open it up I guess this is the problem with sending your system to this is actually I just realized as we were leaving the park where we unbox the prisoner I just realized that this was the first time that I've ever unboxed and done a showcase of like a Tier one system before like if you build system so anyway I guess this is the problem with sending it to someone like me because I'm gonna open it up and have a look at what they have done inside so check this out 80 plus bronze power supply which is nice to see you don't have to implement an 80 plus bronze power supply in the system like this but they have it is a 500 watt power supply that has it looks like three 12-volt rails capable of 14 16 and 18 amps I don't have any clear indication of which connectors are being supplied by which 12-volt rails so unfortunately I can't really give any guidance there it looks again like I said it's a standard ATX power supply so it's non modular however what they've done in terms of cable management to keep things clean is we've got one let's go ahead and let's pop this bad boy off take off the front bezel there we go see how this comes apart here yeah there we go so we've got oh look at that okay so there's no cooling fan in the front there's just a vent so it looks like we are relying on cooling from the power supply itself so there's an 80 millimeter fan in the power supply so that's gonna dry air up here and that 92 millimeter fed in the back to do all the cooling for the system so it's gonna draw air in through the front here that's the main intake presumably across more exhaust from the video card so it'll be a negative air pressure situation inside the case and then all of that will be exhausted here here and here the cooler for the CPU itself is an OEM affair so it's looks like an 80 millimeter cooler could also be 92 it looks like it looks like a 92 millimeter fan with 80 millimeter holes is what it actually looks like on a fairly standard looking until om doodad here let's go ahead and pull the rim and find out what we got here so these are eight gig sticks of kingston memory so you can tell from the kingston branding on the chips themselves so this is AC R 16 D 3 so they put 2 16 gig kits that look like a custom Acer skew from Kingston nice to see them shipping the system with a ton of memory especially given the way that memory prices have been increasing lately this is a fairly unique little deal right here I've never seen one of these before so it's a little tiny SSD that mounts on some kind of I have no idea what standard that is some kind of thing it's just a bare PCB so it's 16 gigs it looks like it's a SanDisk yeah SanDisk and then it uses standard desktop SATA amounting hardware so there you go you just plug that in right there the hard drive itself is a Seagate Barracuda 2 terabyte which is a good choice and then there's this video card which 8760 what the heck is in 8760 in terms of additional expansion you've got one more PCI Express 1x down there in the very bottom it's a custom Acer motherboard in here although it kind of baffles me why they need to implement a custom board it really does look custom like sometimes you'll see a a branded board but you kind of look at it you go oh yeah that's an Asus whatever the model is whereas this actually just doesn't look like anything that that I've seen before let's go ahead and pull this video card out maybe we should throw this on our on our standard test bench and find out how it performs in terms of expansion right this is the other thing I wanted to talk about because these OEM systems you got a 500 watt power supply which means you could conceivably check a gtx 680 in here you've got a 6 plus 6 plus 2 so that's 6 and 8 pin PCIe power which is nice to see you've got room for an additional 2 SATA connectors although I think one of those okay Rumble one of those has probably run up here is like hey okay so there's one going to the hot-swap one going to blu-ray one going to the harddrive and one going to the SSD so you got two more available what else in terms of extension expansion standard 24-pin it's not quite seated all the way give that a little push I think that's pretty much it so here's this graphics card I guess this thing model 87 62 gig so it's like it's a standard sort of OEM looking radio on part and I think that's pretty much it so single six pin thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Acer predator G Series don't forget to subscribe to is tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos