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Gaming monsters coming for you
As eSports takes off professionally and gaming becomes more serious for young and old, new machines from Acer take performance to new levels, writes ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK.
Around May every year, Taipei-headquartered computer-maker Acer invades New York City with its latest machines. Every year, too, it raises the bar on its gaming machines, as it pursues market share in this high-margin sector.
At its next@acer global press conference in New York last week, it launched a series of specialist machines that can only be described as gaming monsters. Appropriately, they all came with branding of the Predator range, underlining their purpose as weapons of gaming war.
The new Predator Orion 5000 desktops offer both high performance and an adaptable chassis. The message? You can adapt and expand this machine as your need – and competitiveness – grows. The slogan Acer used for it at the launch left the audience in no doubt about the intention of the machine, both in the marketing war and in users’ own wars: “Win the battle”.
The Predator Orion range can be customised based on budget, which is just as well, since the 5000 starts at US$1500. That’s quite accessible for serious gamers in the USA, but in South Africa will translate into well over R20 000 when it arrives in the second half of the year. The top of the range version will cost around R30-40 000, and is expected to have niche appeal among serious gamers.
It comes with an 8th Gen Intel Core i7-8700K processor, along with the Intel Z370 chipset, and 2-way NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphic cards in SLI. This allows both exceptionally high-resolution graphics and a decent virtual reality experience.
According to Steve Long, vice president of client computing group sales and marketing at Intel, “The 8th Gen Intel Core i7-8700K is the best desktop gaming Intel has ever built and, when combined with the acceleration and responsiveness offered by Intel Optane memory, the result is incredible performance needed for the most demanding gaming experiences.”
He said that Intel collaborated closely with Acer to bring this performance to life on the Predator Orion 5000 and 3000 gaming desktops.
The monsters are designed for showing off too, thanks to transparent side panels on the chassis. The panels also open easily to allow users to swop out components and cables for quick upgrades.
One of the biggest challenges of high-end rigs, heat dissipation, is addressed with a technology called IceTunnel 2.0, an airflow management design that segments the system into separate thermal zones, each expelling heat through its own airflow tunnel. Another challenge, of dust being sucked in as the machine pulls in air, is warded off with a front mesh panel containing dust filters.
The hard-core gamer can also opt for Killer LAN high-speed Ethernet, cradles for audio headsets, and even a carry-handle for portability.
“Getting the specs right is just half the fight,” said Jeff Lee, general manager for stationary computing at Acer. “Predator Orion desktops provide a well-rounded choice for gamers with a striking chassis, built-in airflow management, expandability, and award-winning software that brings everything together.”
To this end, a slightly scaled-down series, the Predator Orion 3000, offers wider choice for the more budget conscious, starting at around US$1000. For the beginner, however, it will be hard to tell the difference in performance between the two. The 3000 also offers options that include 8th Gen Intel Core i7processors and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 GPUs. However, it is described as VR- ready rather than supporting VR out of the box.
Next: The Predator laptops (click on 2 below to read on)
