 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, 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 K processor. It's not an unlocked processor. It's not for overclocking. This is not an overclocking machine. For the graphics card, we've got an 8760. So it is a 2Gig card. However, it should be noted that when it comes to those more mid-range cards, the actual VRAM, 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 an 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 2TB hard drive with a 16Gig 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 going to 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 at the moment here. Let's go ahead and there's a couple pieces of tape holding it on. I mean, what do you really expect from a tier 1 system? It's a chicklick keyboard. Oh, okay. People like chicklick keyboards. So there you have it. Just 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, 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 and a short enter on the right, and we'd prefer to see a long shift and 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 going to 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 hard disk. Oh, cool, they include a 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 1 system. DVI to VGA adapter, just in case you're still using a VGA monitor. A couple of wireless antennas, 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 look to it. 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-wise, the Predator G-Series is about what you'd expect from an MATX tower, so you can tell from the back what the actual form factor is. So there's a standard MATX motherboard, four expansion slots. I'm going to open it up so we can check it out. You've got a standard ATX power supply, 92mm cooling fan, there's your video card. It's nice to see a proper dual slot, like proper video card in an OEM, sort of tier 1 type machine that you'd actually buy at a big box store, because 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, you don't have to like it, but at the end of the day, most people buy a pre-built 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, oh, I want to upgrade the graphics card in my... Yeah, you can't. So, yeah, anyway. So 3770, as we mentioned before, 32 gigs of 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 1 box at a big box store. So it's got a card reader, which is a nice inclusion. I wish more aftermarket cases included, this kind of stuff. It does XD, microSD. Well, look at that, it has a dedicated microSD slot. Regular SD, memory stick Pro, and then compact flash, as well as front USB 3, front USB 2, and front headphone and microphone ports. Power button's got a nice chrome sort of finish on it here, and then you've got kind of like a performance, stripey looking thing going on on the top, as well as a handle here, so you can carry the thing around. As a LAN box, it actually wouldn't be that bad, much like any other sort of microATX 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 that. A swappable 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 tool-less installation, so you can just go ahead and pop that bad boy in there, and then shut her 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 disabled because it does have a dedicated graphics card for USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, 5.1 audio, and gigabit ethernet. If there was something I was going to 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 sticks. So we're going to go back to the lab, or we're going to 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 unboxed the Predator. I just realized that this was the first time that I've ever unboxed and done a showcase of a tier one system before, a pre-built system. So anyway, I guess this is the problem with sending it to someone like me, is I'm going to 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 a 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 see what kind of fan is that in the front. Let's go ahead and let's pop this bad boy off. Take off the front bezel. There we go. Let's see how this comes apart here. 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 going to draw air up here, and that 92 millimeter fan in the back to do all the cooling for the system. So it's going to draw air in through the front here. That's the main intake, presumably across, oh yeah, more exhaust from the video card. So it will 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 looks like an 80 millimeter cooler. Could also be 92. It looks like a 92 millimeter fan with 80 millimeter holes, is what it actually looks like, on a fairly standard looking Intel OEM doodad here. Let's go ahead and pull the RAM and find out what we got here. So these are 8 gig sticks of Kingston memory. So you can tell from the Kingston branding on the chips themselves. So this is ACR16D3. So they've put two 16 gig kits that look like a custom Acer SKU 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 mounting 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 is an 8760. What in the heck is an 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 branded board, but you kind of look at it and you go, oh yeah, that's an Asus whatever the model is. Whereas this actually just doesn't look like anything that I've seen before. Let's go ahead and pull this video card out. Maybe we should throw this 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've got a 500-watt power supply, which means you could conceivably chuck a GTX 680 in here. You've got a 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 is probably run up here as like a... Okay, so there's one going to the hot swap, one going to Blu-ray, one going to the hard drive, and one going to the SSD. So you've got two more available. What else in terms of expansion? Standard 24-pin. Well, 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. What the heck is this thing? Model 8762 gig. So it's like a standard sort of OEM-looking Radeon part. And I think that's pretty much it. So single 6-pin. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Acer Predator G Series. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.