Gadgetory

both - tech tips these guys and a sir these guys have aged nearly three years since we unboxed the predator gee a normally sir desktop with an orange accent and a basic video card in it in a playground and while our sense of humor certainly hasn't gotten any more politically correct or sophisticated it's possible given the improvement in their monitor and laptop lineups that acer has managed to grow up a little in that time let's find out this is the predator g6 the mastercase 5 by Coolermaster gives you the freedom to truly make your mid-tower pc case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories check out the link in the video description to learn more the first big improvement was immediately apparent when I opened the box I still remember back when I did a competitive analysis purchase of an alienware gaming machine back at NCIX and the mouse it came with was so light I wasn't even sure there was anything inside it Acer on the other hand blew me away here by including a SteelSeries sensei raw gaming mouse and an apex Raw gaming keyboard I thought maybe it was a special reviewers package or something like that but it's not if you buy this model of predator g6 and a predator monitor you're going to be ready to go ad headset and you are gaming which leads me perfectly I guess to the physical tour of the machine itself the overall appearance of the g6 is going to be a leavener hated thing the side panels have their I am OH attractive predator logo with a really nice mesh texture to them that's solid on the right and mostly solid on the left but actually perforated above the GPU and CPU area a nice touch as far as the front and the top are concerned I think Acer was going for like an overlapping armor plate thing but they ended up with more yen IMO of an armadillo look though your mileage may vary they've embedded some practical elements amidst the plates though from the bottom to the top we've got a retractable headphone holder front i/o with two USB 3.0 ports front audio jacks and a USB 2 based SD card reader above that we can press on the right right here oh man and we got ourselves a little quick drive upgrade bay that will work coolest thing with a three and a half inch drive or except a tuna 1/2 inch drive with screws then moving up further we've got on the $2000 trim model on blu-ray reader with a DVD writer combo unit thing leaving only the power button above that oh wait maybe there's more this is what it looks like it's the return of the turbo button but this is your mom's turbo button this one is different instead of just being a boring button well it lights up and not just itself but the entire machine the front and side panels when you activate it the other difference is that it toggles the system between a stock all Core 4 gigahertz turbo speed and an overclocked 4.6 gigahertz turbo speed rather than toggling between stock speed and a dramatic underclock to improve compatibility with older programs these OneTouch overclocking tools can be a little bit flaky in my experience though especially if the manufacturer tries to do any more than a token couple percent overclock but in practice the predator g6 was stable with the overclock so I've resolved at this point to keep it on for my testing so let's rip or open and talk guts now shall we with the plastic cover removed from the back and the side panels off the g6 chassis bears a lot more similarity to that last predator machine I mean this is a very basic steel chassis with a cool skin over it folks it has a rear 92 millimeter fan 2 internal hard drive or SSD mounts one of which has a 2 terabyte Seagate Drive in it and so that's about it for expansion and no cable management to speak of but it does do a few things right it accepts a standard and ATX motherboard and ATX power supply which by the way is a 750 watt FSP 80-plus unit good show Acer and has tons of room for any single graphics card that you could want in the bottom on the motherboard is a core i7 6700 K quad core 16 gigs of dual-channel ddr2 ram the 4 slots allow this to be expanded to 64 gigs in the future a Wi-Fi module with antennas leading up to the front of the chassis a 256 gig em SATA SSD and 2 PCI Express 1x expansion slots with a very basic rear i/o I'm actually disappointed by the lack of audio jacks here and then finally the centerpiece of the build the GTX 980 graphics card that makes this machine and Vidya VR ready certified so those are some pretty badass right and if you were paying attention you probably noticed the same thing I noticed there's only one case fan that 92 millimeter affair in the rear so let's direct our attention now to cooling performance here's a look at our baseline idle CPU temps and here's a look at whoa with i-264 running a burnin test it took only five minutes from my CPU to reach very uncomfortable temperatures and this is in our unheated warehouse and while I understand that acer is expecting this feature to be used for gaming which is not going to pin the cpu at 100% the way this artificial workload does many gamers interested in a core i7 might also be interested in heavy workloads like video creation and they may not want their cpu touching 80 to 90 degree temperatures under load so I press the button again to disable the overclock which brought things right back into comfortable territory and you can make the argument that the management utility that comes pre-loaded does include an option to crank the fans to max which works by the way to tame the beast the problem is that it makes the machine unpleasantly loud and I'm a little disappointed then in a search validation process for this feature and I hope that they can find a better middle ground between thermal throttling and sounding like a hairdryer with some kind of a software update with all that griping about thermals aside though it's not like they screwed up anything royally in terms of performance I mean when I'm not using an artificial workload to make it throttle it performs exactly like you'd expect from a machine of this specification and they did a good job I think of putting together a package that makes sense an SSD boot drive and a hard drive for mass storage is a great solution but since my job is to give constructive criticism while the pre-installed software was almost entirely unoffensive with some notable good inclusions like a surprisingly useful system toolbox steam and Firefox I feel like for everyday joe users the to drive solution could be a bit more seamless I mean here's an idea how about having Windows storage folders and Steam library on the hard drive out of the factory I mean the number of times but I have gotten service calls from people who are out of hard drive space but have an empty drive or worse a partition is staggering which leads us to the conclusion the g6 strikes me as a reflection of overall improvements to the pre-built PC industry that were mostly borrowed from DIY case makers and enthusiasts better upgradability solid power supply included rubber grommets on the hard drive mounts legitimately high-end video card options etc as opposed to some sort of forward-thinking product I mean Lenovo king of exciting computers right has a similar spec machine for a little bit cheaper which gives you a few bucks then to pick up some equivalent peripherals making it pretty darn similar and I mean if you're willing to go to a boutique builder like an I buy power rather than a tier one then there are definitely better values out there and I'm ignoring the DIY market here as well intentionally since they aren't really the target for a product like this so does that mean that the g6 is bad no it's not it just looked really cool from the outside and then failed to really excite me once I lifted up the hood so now with that out of the way we can take a moment to talk about curiosity stream the world's first ad-free nonfiction streaming service founded by John Hendricks the founder of Discovery Communications I checked it out recently and it's got actually tons of videos they've got over 1200 videos with a wide variety of Science and Technology content so they've got exclusive interviews and lectures they've got documentaries they've got just kind of they've got some kid-friendly stuff as well they support a variety of platforms including a web app roku android which is where i've been using it on my phone iOS chromecast amazon fire and thus on kindle apple TV is on the way but of course that is subject to a change some of their content includes next world which features miss you Kaku talking about the future of technology so virtual reality artificial intelligence you know the kinds of big questions as well as the human face of big data which is currently exclusively streaming on curiosity stream and just premiered in late February I checked out a really cool one on this like submersible craft that was found rusting away in a shipyard actually here in Vancouver which I thought was really neat that was the first manned 30 day voyage where these guys were like sealed into this capsule for a full 30 days and actually led to and I didn't realize this either a lot of the best practices that are followed for things like space missions even today so really cool stuff and anyone can sign up for a free 30-day trial all you got to do is use promo code Linus then to save 15% on your first three months after that so check out the link in the video description all right so thanks for watching guys if this video suck do you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon instructions for which are up here buying a cool shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution through our community forum which by the way is full of all kinds of useful helpful awesome freaking people who can help you with your tech stuff now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out the video where I have like a four thousand dollar server that can accept eight graphics cards it's freaking sick it's sick I tell you