 Both Linus Tech Tips, these guys, and Acer, these guys, have aged nearly three years since we unboxed the Predator G, a normal Acer 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 Cooler Master 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 reviewer's 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. Add 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 love it or hate it thing. The side panels have their IMO 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, again, 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. Whoa, look at that! And we got ourselves a little quick drive upgrade bay that will work toollessly with a 3.5-inch drive or accept a 2.5-inch drive with screws. Then moving up further, we've got on the $2,000 trim model, a 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 isn't 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 GHz turboed speed and an overclocked 4.6 GHz turboed speed, rather than toggling between stock speed and a dramatic underclock to improve compatibility with older programs. These one-touch 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 resolved at this point to keep it on for my testing. So let's ripper 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 92mm fan, two internal hard drive or SSD mounts, one of which has a 2TB Seagate drive in it, 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 MATX motherboard and ATX power supply, which by the way is a 750W FSP80 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 6700K quad core, 16 gigs of dual channel DDR4 RAM, the four 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 M-SATA SSD, and two 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 NVIDIA VR Ready certified. So those are some pretty bad aspects, right? And if you were paying attention, you probably noticed the same thing I noticed. There's only one case fan, that 92mm 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 AIDA64 running a burn-in test, it took only five minutes for 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 pressed 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 preloaded 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 Acer's 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 Acer's surprisingly useful system toolbox, Steam and Firefox, I feel like for everyday Joe users, the two-drive solution could be a bit more seamless. I mean, here's an idea. How about having Windows storage folders and a Steam library on the hard drive out of the factory? I mean, the number of times that 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. I mean, if you're willing to go to a boutique builder like an iBuyPower rather than a Tier 1, 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 CuriosityStream, the world's first ad-free non-fiction streaming service founded by John Hendrix, 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, Amazon 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 Mishiyukaku talking about the future of technology, so virtual reality, artificial intelligence, you know, these kinds of big questions, as well as the human face of big data, which is currently exclusively streaming on CuriosityStream 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 gotta 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. Alright, so thanks for watching guys. If this video sucked, 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 $4,000 server that can accept eight graphics cards. It's freaking sick. It's sick, I tell you.