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Acer Predator Orion 7000 – Assessment 2023


Large? Verify. Flashy? Roger. Highly effective? Undoubtedly. That’s Acer’s flagship Predator Orion 7000 gaming desktop (begins at $3,799.99; $4,299.99 as examined) in a nutshell. Nothing is delicate about our all-out check unit, from its tempered-glass case to its liquid-cooled CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 card. As quick as it’s, nevertheless, this Predator does not fairly catch the Editors’ Selection-award-winning Corsair Vengeance i7400 or the MSI Infinite RS thirteenth, which stay our high decisions on this elite tier. Authentic model and options nonetheless make the Acer short-list-worthy, particularly if you could find it on sale.


The Design: Gamer All of the Manner

Tempered glass and RGB lighting are mainstays of high-end gaming desktops, and the Predator Orion 7000 has them to spare. The present begins with a dramatic entrance panel that extends proper out of the tower, housing two turbine-like 120mm consumption followers.

Perforations across the sides of the protrusion enable airflow. You may discover no detachable mud filters right here, however as an alternative a pull-out one below the tower for the ability provide.

At 19.1 by 8.6 by 19.9 inches (HWD), the Predator is bulkier than the Corsair Vengeance i7400 (18.4 by 9.1 by 17.8 inches) and the MSI Infinite RS thirteenth (18.7 by 8.5 by 16.5 inches). Its metallic and glass building feels strong and does not creak or flex. A devoted handhold on the rear is an actual asset for heaving it out of its transport field.

The Predator’s entrance ports embody 4 5Gbps USB connectors (one Sort-C, three Sort-A), an audio combo jack, and a microphone jack. The ability button sits alongside the highest of the protrusion. Concerning the audio jack, Acer notably features a DTS:X Headphone license, which tunes the sound to particular headphones.

Just a few inches again from the entrance ports is a hot-swap drive bay, one thing sometimes solely seen in workstations. Urgent its launch button pops out the two.5-inch caddy, toaster-fashion. Its USB-C connector permits it to be related to different PCs for quick information switch.

Round again, the motherboard comprises one 20Gbps USB-C port, three 5Gbps USB-A ports, two retro USB 2.0 ports, 2.5Gbps Killer Ethernet, and three audio jacks (microphone, line-in, and line-out). The GeForce RTX 4090 GPU has one HDMI 2.1 and three DisplayPort video outputs. You may additionally discover Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 courtesy of an Intel AX211 wi-fi card; its antennas are constructed into the case.

Acer bundles better-than-average peripherals with the Predator Orion 7000. The Predator USB keyboard’s membrane keys aren’t as exact as mechanical switches, however are quiet and lined in a pleasing soft-touch coating. The keyboard emits a number of ranges of backlighting, has flip-out toes for adjusting the typing angle, and options devoted media-playback keys at higher proper.

In the meantime, the right-handed Predator mouse has two left-side buttons, a sculpted thumb relaxation, and a DPI change behind the notched mouse wheel. It match my medium-size hand nicely, although I might have favored to see an ambidextrous mouse included as an alternative.


Case Lighting: How Brilliant Is Too Brilliant?

The Predator Orion 7000 has six lighting zones managed by the Acer PredatorSense app, three of that are the entrance and rear 120mm followers. The opposite three are the graphics card, a number of LED clusters on the motherboard, and the CPU-cooling waterblock.

Eight ARGB LEDs in every 120mm fan create dazzling results, particularly the “fluid magic” preset that concurrently illuminates the blades in a number of colours. The multi-LED waterblock is able to related results. In the meantime, the vertically mounted RTX 4090 card has two multi-LED gentle bars, plus light-up GeForce RTX lettering.

You may additionally discover motherboard LED clusters behind the VRM heatsinks, below the waterblock, and flanking the RAM slots, however they’re merely uncovered LEDs, and piercingly shiny ones at that. I ended up turning them off. (Doing so is achieved in a roundabout method by choosing a “no brightness” coloration.) Oddly, PredatorSense does not present brightness controls; whilst you’ll come throughout loads of preconfigured results, really customized LED configuration would have been higher. At the very least the app allows you to retailer your settings as profiles.


The Inside: Packing Critical Warmth

For servicing, the PC’s tempered-glass aspect door comes off by eradicating two Phillips screws (not thumbscrews) and sliding a latch. The door abruptly swings outward however does not fall flat; it must be lifted away.

A top-mounted 240mm radiator cools the Intel Core i9-13900KF CPU. Acer’s MicroATX (9.6-inch-square) motherboard relies on the Intel Z790 chipset to help CPU overclocking. That is the biggest board that matches on this tower, as you will discover no standoffs for something bigger. The board has one M.2 solid-state drive slot under the CPU waterblock (occupied, however not lined by a heatsink) and yet another extending off the motherboard to the precise of the 4 DIMM slots. The included RAM sticks have metallic Predator-branded heatsinks. (Given the quantity of RGB lighting on this tower, I discover it odd in addition they aren’t illuminated.)

The motherboard’s growth slots embody two PCI Categorical x16 slots and one x1 slot, although that is on paper; the vertically mounted graphics card takes the highest x16 slot through riser cable and blocks entry to the others. Apart from displaying off the GPU, vertical mounting eliminates the chance of stress {that a} heavy graphics card can placed on the motherboard. For further power, the cardboard’s metallic help bracket is screwed into the three.5-inch drive cage. Two slide-out caddies within the latter make drive swapping easy.

This case does not home the ability provide or the three.5-inch drive cage in a separate compartment, as an alternative placing each in plain sight. The 1,200-watt energy provide seems like a top-notch unit, with totally modular cables and an 80 Plus Platinum (92%) effectivity ranking.


Testing the Acer Predator Orion 7000: Benching With the Finest

Our $4,299.99 Predator Orion 7000 evaluate unit contains a Core i9-13900KF processor (eight Efficiency and 16 Environment friendly cores, as much as 5.8GHz turbo), 32GB of DDR5 RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, a 1TB SSD with Home windows 11 Professional, and a 2TB arduous drive. Acer’s customary guarantee is one yr. That is the highest mannequin; Acer additionally sells a step-down $3,799.99 configuration with a Core i7-13700K and a GeForce RTX 4080.

Acer costs a light premium for its flagship, as I comparison-shopped a Corsair Vengeance i7400 for $3,949.99 and an MSI Infinite RS thirteenth for $4,199, every with twice the RAM (64GB) and SSD storage (2TB). Even a ten% off sale might shift economics in Acer’s favor, although.

We pitted the Predator Orion 7000 in opposition to probably the most potent gaming towers we have examined, together with not solely the abovementioned MSI and Corsair however the monstrous Cooler Grasp Cosmos Infinity thirtieth Anniversary Version and the boutique-built Origin Millennium 5000D. All use a variant of the Core i9-13900K (in Origin’s case, the particular 6.0GHz Core i9-13900KS) and a GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, so this must be a battle of small percentages.

Productiveness and Content material Creation Checks

We run the identical common productiveness benchmarks throughout each cellular and desktop techniques. Our first check is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates quite a lot of real-world productiveness and workplace workflows to measure total system efficiency and likewise features a storage subtest for the first drive.

Our different three benchmarks deal with the CPU, utilizing all obtainable cores and threads, to charge a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 makes use of that firm’s Cinema 4D engine to render a posh scene, whereas Geekbench 5.4 Professional from Primate Labs simulates standard apps starting from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine studying. Lastly, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to transform a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p decision (decrease instances are higher).

Lastly, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Programs, which makes use of the Inventive Cloud model 22 of Adobe’s well-known picture editor to charge a PC’s efficiency for content material creation and multimedia functions. It is an automatic extension that executes quite a lot of common and GPU-accelerated Photoshop duties starting from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving a picture to making use of masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Predator began in the back of the pack in the primary PCMark 10 check. It is little question a quick machine—we contemplate something greater than 4,000 factors an indication {that a} PC is well-suited for on a regular basis productiveness apps like Phrase and Excel—however the Origin was extra 1,000 factors forward of the Acer.

The Predator additionally trailed within the CPU-specific checks, particularly Cinebench, and in Photoshop. The Core i9-13900K is a notoriously power-hungry and hot-running chip, nevertheless it’s as much as the system builder to take care of that; presumably Acer toned down the Orion’s energy profile so it does not get too scorching. Both method, it does not push the boundaries of the CPU like the opposite desktops.

Graphics and Gaming Checks

For gaming desktops, we run each artificial and real-world gaming benchmarks. The previous consists of two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, the extra modest Evening Raid (appropriate for techniques with built-in graphics) and extra demanding Time Spy (appropriate for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). We then run two OpenGL workouts, rendered offscreen by the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which permits for various native show resolutions; extra frames per second (fps) means larger efficiency.

Our actual gaming benchmarks are these constructed into F1 2021, Murderer’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, examined at larger resolutions and high quality settings to signify simulation, open-world action-adventure, and aggressive/esports shooter video games respectively. We run Valhalla and Siege twice every at Extremely high quality (at each 1080p and 4K), whereas F1 2021 is run at 4K with and with out AMD and Nvidia’s performance-boosting FSR and DLSS options turned on.

Echoing what we noticed within the CPU checks, the Acer’s scores within the largely CPU-limited 3DMark checks and our 1080p and 1440p sport benchmarks took a again seat, although issues evened out on the GPU-intensive 4K decision; the Predator even took first place in Murderer’s Creed. On that be aware, the rationale you’d pay the massive bucks for an RTX 4090 and even RTX 4080 desktop is to play video games at 4K, so in that sense the Orion’s lesser CPU efficiency is not a deal-breaker.

The Predator does have a approach to recoup a few of its efficiency shortcomings: through the CPU overclocking constructed into the PredatorSense app. Enabling the Turbo setting, I noticed the system’s Cinebench rating enhance by 4.6% (from 27,750 to 29,051 factors), whereas 3DMark Time Spy rose 2.6% (from 30,913 to 31,715). It is mainly getting one thing for nothing, however the minimal beneficial properties aren’t well worth the great roar from the cooling followers at full velocity. The Predator’s regular fan noise may be very nicely managed.


Verdict: Extra Vroom for the Bucks, Please

Acer’s Predator Orion 7000 is a good entry within the high-end gaming house. We like its tempered-glass case and intensive RGB lighting, and particularly its revolutionary hot-swap drive bay. Sadly, this large tower’s efficiency falls in need of the mark set by our class favorites the Corsair Vengeance i7400 and the MSI Infinite RS thirteenth. It is nonetheless greater than able to satisfying 4K gameplay, however each benchmark level counts at this degree. Nonetheless, this Predator might turn into a favourite with a value lower.



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