Acer's Predator Gaming PC takes aim at the competition

A hybrid spawn of Alien and Michael Bay’s Transformers – this 4TB, Quad Core predator from Acer shows no gaming fear.

In what is shaping up to be the coolest gaming machine since Alienware visited our humble planet and dropped off the M15x gaming laptop; we were fortunate enough to get our oversized man paws on the new Acer Predator gaming PC and boy did it rock our week-old socks off.

Looks
It’s got the sleek curves of a transforming autobot and the flaming orange of well....director Michael Bay’s favourite, Bumblebee. While some may associate hot orange with high tech, it just makes us think redneck.

Besides, when was the last time you saw a hot orange predator stalking its prey? Sure, it’s just a slight distraction, but the Predator does seem to cry, ‘Look at me, I’m hot, new and have a slight fashion problem'.

And at $4500, its priced to draw blood from your bank account - but in a good way.

Thankfully, there’s whole lotta geek love under the hood of this flaming beast. As a nice touch, Acer claims they’ll even custom build and turn around these rigs within 24 hours, which could be perfect if you’ve got a few clams to spend and you're dying to get hold of one quickly.

Demonstration & Performance
During the demonstration, where computer lovin’ journalists became sappy, salivating geeks at the very thought of using this gaming monster, we played a few rounds of Call of Duty 4 just to get a feel for the creature.

It quickly became evident that the Predator was one serious gaming desktop, which is not surprising really, considering the full power of the Predator’s hulk sized processor is fuelled by an awsome Intel Core2 Extreme quad-core with 1333MHz FSB, allowing for some gaming madness.

Call of Duty 4 played extremely quick, and the graphics (1.5GB of dedicated GDDR3 VRAM) looked outstanding. Gameplay was deathly fast as teams battled it out on the six predators to be crowned the LAN hero of the day.

The rig is set up to harness the power of two independent NVIDIA GPUs (via SLI technology), operating simultaneously.

Did we forget to mention this machine has 8GB of DDR2 800/1066 Mhz SDRAM? Slap me silly, but that’s a stunning load of memory on board.

Even better, Acer have continued with their Hotswap desktop solutions, but made it even more useful by allowing the four SATA hard disks (upto 4TB) on the Predator that are removable even when the PC is turned on and being used.

In other words, you can always have a backup drive of games and music ready to go. Nice work, Acer.

A liquid cooling system ensures this Predator doesn’t lose its cool, which is great because we all know with a rig like this, you’ll most likely try to overclock it – which luckily enough for you and me, is designed to do just that.

Acer also told us that the overclocking feature will be covered by warranty too (I'm sure with terms and conditions of some sort), which is a big plus for a manufacturer in our books.

A handy CMOS reset button is located on the outer chasis, just in case you push your Predator a little too hard, returning all previous overclocking settings to default (in case you get a little too excited).

Overall
We think the Predator could be the perfect gaming rig, particularly if you’re new to the gaming arena and aren’t confident building your own. Or if your searching for a good warranty to look after your investment, that can often be the difference between the confidence of a purchased build and the quality of your own.

It is expensive though. Remember, you can choose any colour, as long as it's hot orange.Take your pick.

Acer has more details in case you're already dreaming of the big spend.