Acer Predator Orion 9000

Published on 20 Apr 2019 4 mins reading time Categories: DesktopComputers

Announced in the middle of last year, but only now becoming available to buy in the UK. Acer’s Predator Orion 9000 made headlines thanks to its eye-catching design coupled with ultra-high-end components including processors with up to eighteen cores.

You can buy the Predator Orion 9000 directly from Acer’s website (currently on a waiting list). There are two models available, starting from £2,999 for the 6-core version and rising to a whopping £4,999 for the ten-core version with dual graphics cards.

The Acer Predator Orion 9000 is a huge, imposing beast of a PC both inside and out. Housed in Acer’s ‘monolithic’ custom-designed system case, the Orion 9000 features an angular space-age design with customisable RGB lighting, easily removable side panels and plenty of space inside.

It’s so big and heavy that Acer has decided to fit it with a pair of wheels at the rear so you can lug it around behind you like a luggage trolley. It’s also fitted with two sturdy handles at the top to make it easier and safer to lift.

At the front, there’s a handy pull-out bar purpose-built as a place to hang your gaming headphones. Acer has also thrown in a DVD RAM drive for good measure.

As you’d expect from a PC at this price point, the build quality is excellent, and because it’s designed entirely by Acer rather than built from off-the-shelf components, everything fits together perfectly, including the Predator Orion 9000’s custom-designed Icetunnel 2.0 cooling system which forms an integral part of the case.

Icetunnel 2.0 maintains four distinct thermal zones within the case, separating off the power supply from the GPU, CPU and storage areas, each of which is delivered its own carefully controlled share of cool air.

Five RGB-illuminated 120mm fans are installed: one at the rear, two at the top and two more at the front of the case. The top two are fitted to the dual 120mm radiator forming part of a Predator-branded Cooler Master liquid processor cooler. There’s plenty of additional RGB lighting throughout the case which can easily be configured to your own preferred colours.

At launch, the Predator Orion 9000’s headline-grabbing specs included support for Core i7 and Core i9 Processors, including Intel’s Extreme Edition 18-core Core i9-7980XE chip. However, only two versions of the PC are being made available in the UK, neither of which supports this flagship CPU.

Instead, you can opt for the 6-core 3.5GHz Core i7-7800X in the entry-level system or the 10-core 3.30 GHz Core i9-7900X in the high-end version. Don’t worry, though, both of these processors are quite bonkers enough for a gaming PC, as you can see in our performance evaluation below. Storage

The less expensive model comes with a 2TB hard drive and a 256GB SSD preinstalled, which increases to 4TB and 512GB respectively if you opt for the pricier system. There’s plenty of room for additional storage in the case too, with room for up to six drives in total. Motherboard

Custom-designed for the Predator Orion 9000, the Acer PO9-900 motherboard isn’t one you can buy off-the-shelf, and no detailed list of specs is provided either. However, the key features are an Intel X299 Express chipset to handle the Skylake-X processors and eight RAM slots, supporting up to 128GB of DDR4 in total (of which 16GB or 32GB is installed at purchase time).

It also includes three M.2 slots, Gigabit ethernet, Wireless-AC Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 Sound is provided by on-board Sound BlasterX Pro surround gaming audio engine. You also get four x16 PCI Express slots, which brings us on to… Graphics

In the UK the entry-level model comes fitted with a GTX 1080 TI, although there’s plenty of room to double up to a multi-card configuration as found in the high-end version which comes with dual GTX 1080 TI cards as standard. At launch, the PC was shown with up to four Radeon Vega 64 cards installed but, like the 18-core version, this configuration doesn’t look likely to appear in the UK. Performance

Before we dive into the test results, you should note that our review sample was built to a different specification than either of the models available in the UK. Our test configuration included the more expensive Core i9-7900X processor but with a single GTX 1080 Ti graphics card rather than the twin cards found in the pricier model on Acer’s website.

We would, therefore, expect gaming performance to be at a similar level to the lower-end £2,999 system combined with general computing benchmark scores closer to the £4,999 system.

The Predator Orion 9000 includes some super-high-end hardware which, as you might imagine, delivers excellent performance for gaming.

However, it’s the extreme multi-tasking capability of the Core-i9 7900X which makes it so expensive, and this is of little real-world benefit when it comes to gaming. Even general- purpose benchmarks show minimal advantages outside of specialist applications.

If you like to play games while rendering 4K video at the same time, then that might be a different matter, but for the vast majority of gamers, this PC is an expensive luxury.