- We doing this David?
- [David] Yeah.
- Cause I don't know what's in the box.
- [David] What's in the box?
- I actually don't know what's in the box.
There's a sponsored a sponsored unboxing
from VRLA which I have never heard of before now.
This is my first time ever hearing of them.
And inside here is what they call the Centaur PC.
I don't know what kind of PC it is,
but I know it's got some bubble wrap.
And it's got some spare parts.
Some of the EVGA stuff, so there's a graphics card in there.
Ooh goodies.
So they make servers and the workstations,
I thought this was gonna be yet another gaming computer.
Alright, what is this thing?
Got a power cable.
I don't know if I have enough clearance
for this box to come out.
Good luck everybody.
(David and Linus shouting)
Got it.
Please remove packing material
from inside the computer before use, that's a good strategy.
I just about punched myself in the face.
That was so close, the plastic like whipped me
right under the eye.
I was wrong by the way, this is a gaming PC.
So they were founded in 2016 doing like workstations
for VFX and like, you know, Hollywood and that shiz
hence the, you know, LA based location.
And then last year they branched into gaming systems.
So we've got a tempered glass side panel on this puppy.
(paper rustling)
Oh and that would be quite the gaming system
that we've got ourselves in here.
They managed to get an RTX 3080.
- [David] Wow.
- Okay, all right man, these guys are legit then.
You know, I'm actually pretty impressed right off the bat.
They haven't made any critical mistakes that jump out to me.
Like you might see someone who's not that experienced
with gaming machines, you know,
misconfigure the airflow for the system.
So in this case,
we've got three 120 millimeters in the front,
two in the top, one in the back.
So they're clearly going for kind of like a balance
between intake and exhaust, which has been shown
time and time again is well, the correct way to go about it.
In terms of cable management, man,
it's hard to find flaw with any of this.
It's pretty freaking clean
to the point where we're gonna have to take the side
back panel off,
and see if we can find any problems.
That's not bad.
Everything is neatly tucked away
but also not to the point where I look at it
and I go yeah, obviously
they knew who they were sending it to.
So they went and, you know, put, you know,
special fancy cable ties and spritzed some,
you know new car smell in it or anything like that.
(sniffs deeply)
Just smells like a normal computer
but everything's out of the way of the fans.
And we basically can't see the cables
through the windowed side panel.
See that? Can you see me though?
- [David] Yeah.
- Hi David. - [David] Hi.
- How's it going? - [David] So good.
- In terms of spec, they've gone with a 750 watt
B5 Series power supply from EVGA.
I actually don't know what kind of CPU is in there
but we've got 32 gigs of Ram from G.Skill.
Let's see, 3,200 CL16,
and so I would say reasonable high-end.
So without overspending on anything,
this is a very potent basically
top of the line gaming machine.
The one question I have is with respect to thermals.
So they've chosen a case that does have three
120 millimeter fans in the front,
but also has a tempered glass front panel.
Now this is a lot better
than one we checked out recently over on Linus Tech Tips
that had almost no space along the side for intake
and had these front fans getting suffocated
but I'll be interested to see what kind
of thermals we get when we fire this puppy up.
Interestingly, they've configured
the fans to run it very different RPMs.
The front ones are,
(fans whirring)
they're ripping
and these top ones,
(fans whirring)
they are barely spinning.
We are on the desktop in terms of bloat.
There's pretty much nothing GeForce experience
which I would install anyway, RGB Fusion
which is a Gigabyte's RGB controller software
which I'm gonna fire up and see if I can figure out
how to light this puppy up and then Microsoft edge.
And yes, I did count Microsoft Edge.
That's probably not fair, but probably not fair.
I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
- [David] It's chromium now isn't it?
- I'm kidding.
I'm just, I'm just I'm just teasing Microsoft
and there's your problem, it's not too bad.
(both David and Linus shouting)
There we go.
- [David] Oh wow.
- Had a connector come loose in shipping
happens to the best of us.
Well, that is, I am actually kind of super into that cooler.
That that looks not bad at all.
And hold on a second.
You're definitely right.
That's definitely worse.
There you go.
So that is how it is intended to be operated
that looks awesome.
They went in there, put their logo on there and everything.
How's that?
- [David] That's pretty good. - All right.
Looking good? - [David] Yeah.
- The one thing we don't have synced
is our poor EVGA graphics card.
Well, yeah, rip indeed.
I'll live with it.
It is time to close up the panel
and see how much she cook a looks.
Let's see if what they learned about workstations
and servers applies to gaming thermals.
I mean, they are very similar principles,
but as everyone knows,
a principle is not necessarily the same as a teacher.
Man RTX 3080 is one impressive piece.
Isn't it?
- [David] Yeah.
- Got that 100% usage using up 70% of the GPU in code.
And I don't even see any complaints about dropped frames.
Got a filter on the top there.
Oh, look at that they put little stickers on,
so it won't come off during shipping.
You'd have put one of those on the RGB cable there.
I'm just teasing guys.
I know stuff like that happens.
It really does create a pain in the butt
for customer support when someone calls in
about something as trivial as that though,
some customers might not even realize
that half of their RGB isn't working.
So it is not about idea.
Hot glue, hot glue is there's a pro tip four a and a half
and you can get hot glues
that kinda like peel off really easy,
but like, hold on really nice.
We've got a 970 Evo, plus 500 gig for our boot drive.
A one terabyte hard drive, spinning storage
that's your mass storage right there.
Two and a half gig LAN, and for CPU,
they've gone with a Core i7 10700.
That is interesting.
It's a good balance again between like price
to performance ratio.
And I wouldn't expect it to be a huge bottleneck
for an RTX 3080.
But a lot of the time with the more traditional
you know, gaming system companies
you would see them put like a Core i9
top of the line in there,
even if they don't expect the customer to overclock,
which let's face it,
if you're the kind of person that's buying a prebuilt
I would say the odds of you tinkering in the BIOS
and overclocking probably slimmer.
The one thing that I would critique about this configuration
is that if I knew I was gonna go with a nonK CPU,
I might not go with a Z490 motherboard, except that well
they loaded it up with PC 3,200 megahertz memory,
which of course these days you need a Z series chip set for
which is like, it shouldn't be the case, but I guess it is.
So there's the rationale there
I guess I talked myself into the motherboard.
Kinda looks like it's not gonna,
I think we're settling in at a nice comfortable 75 degrees
Celsius might get up as high as 76, 77,
but given that we're still turboing up to 1530 megahertz,
that's looking pretty good.
Another good sign is that this particular
750 watt power supply must've been validated by them
because we've run into issues where even a power supply
that's rated for the amount of power
that an RTX 3080 technically calls for,
can still run into issues where the over current protection
will kick in because of a sudden spike
in draw from the RTX 3080, or for that matter RTX 3090.
So, so far, we're not seeing any of those symptoms.
They're even having their talking points,
I'm supposed to mention
that this is what all the PCs look like, not just mine.
So there you go, they actually did go out of their way
not to specially build one for me.
This is great.
Especially in the current market,
buying a prebuilt is a great choice.
Please demonstrate this somehow.
I can demonstrate that real easy.
You wanna know how?
- [David] How?
- How the hell else are you going to get an RTX 3080?
Nvidia has a long and proud history
of getting the boutique builders and the system integrators
way, way more stock relative to the size of their business
than the part sellers get.
And I remember this because at NCIX
even though we had a system building division
and I would go to Nvidia and I'd say
"Hey, we should probably get system builder allocation."
They wouldn't send it to us
because I think they assumed
we were just gonna send them out as individual cards.
I don't get it though, because obviously
it was in our best interest
to sell a whole system around it,
but that was always a point of contention.
So I know for a fact that there's an extra allocation
for system builders.
So that's a real easy one right there.
As long as it's reasonably priced,
I got nothing against a prebuilt system a hundred percent.
For lots of people it doesn't make sense.
Like it's easy for me to say,
yeah, I could build this system in,
I wouldn't even say half an hour.
I'd say cable managing to this level,
probably more like an hour,
but if you have no idea how to do it
and you have to like look up what parts to get
and look up how to put it together and then,
and then put it together and then double check
that everything's right.
I mean, we're talking for just like an average person.
It could be a five, six hour process.
So if you pay yourself like 20 bucks an hour,
yeah it's pretty easy to say, yeah, there's a 100
to $150 value in having everything built
and warrantied by someone who knows what they're doing.
All right.
You know what?
I'm convinced very reasonable gaming rig,
reasonable part selections,
totally happy with the build quality.
And of course the performance speaks for itself.
Or at least it would, if I had remembered to open
up the performance metrics, got'em.
I'm gonna keep doing the got'em thing forever.
I've already got complaints about it,
which makes me extremely happy.
So there's not much else to say VRLA, VRLA,
I don't really care how you pronounce it,
but you can check out their systems at the link
down in the video description.
And it's not just gaming systems.
They've got professional stuff as well
which I think is super, super cool.
Maybe next time they'll send a workstation over.
By the ways, subscribe to ShortCircuit.
- [David] Are you okay?
- I'm good, yeah, I'm fine.