Gosh darn it, prebuilt gaming PC’s have gotten really good over the last few years. And the new Acer Predator Orion 7000 is certainly one of the most powerful, rainbow spewing gaming PC I’ve ever tested. The Orion 7000 is the second highest tier in the Orion family of gaming PC’s. It’s an ATX size desktop PC housing a water-cooled 12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900K, 16GB of DDR5 RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 or 3090 GPU.
$6500 is the asking price for my particular review unit which is silly money that will give you serious pause. But then again, given the history of PC parts pricing and availability, this really shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone. You do also get one year of mail in warranty which is something, I guess?
I’ve lived with the Orion 7000 for a month now, playing a ton of ray-traced games in glorious, eye-popping 4K, done lots of short form video and photo editing, watched more YouTube than I care to admit as well as most of my daily work. And I’ve loved every minute with it. It’s big, powerful and surprisingly quiet. Nothing lags or stutters which is exactly what you want. But at the end of the day, with all it’s positives, I really can’t recommend it and I’ll tell you why.
Acer Predator Orion 7000 Review
The Acer Predator Orion 7000 is no small machine, towering almost half a meter in height and as much in depth. It will swallow up a good chunk of your desk and it weighs a ton so if you have a motorised desk, you might want to keep the Orion 7000 on the floor. Aesthetically, I think its a very good looking machine and a close second to the uber stylish Alienware Aurora’s.
The all black chassis is a combination of metal, glass and mesh with an extruded front panel that shows off the giant ARGB Frostblade 2.0 front fans. To me it looks like the engine exhaust ports of a spaceship. Marvellous. A darkened tempered glass side panel lets you gaze at the glowing Predator logo on the AIO liquid cooler and the mighty three-fan RTX 3080. There are additional LED’s and another ARGB exhaust fan on the back — all of which are customisable in the preloaded Predator Sense software.
The top of chassis has a large, removable mesh cover to help with air flow in the case. And if you do have to keep your Orion 7000 on the floor, there’s a generous selection of USB ports on top. You get USB Type-C, three USB 3.2 Gen 1 and a unique swappable 2.5-inch SATA3 hot swap drive bay that pops out at a press of an unmistakeable eject button. This essentially gives you an external drive to quickly transfer files. Pretty cool.
On the inside is a large cavernous space big enough for a full ATX motherboards and BFGPU’s like the mighty GeForce RTX 3090. The GPU is vertically mounted with plenty of room to breath. There’s also a hard drive bay that can take up to two additional 3.5-inch drives. Our unit came with a 512GB SSD and a 2TB 7200RPM drive though at this price, I’d have expected a SATA drive at least. Accessing the internals is but even though Acer says it’s a Tool-less design, you still need a Philips head screwdriver to remove the side panel.
Speaking of price, I wasn’t impressed with the paltry 16GB of naked, no-name RAM chips. I expected some classy RGB RAM sticks and it really stands out at odds with the rest of the components. Moving on to the back, the Orion 7000 has several high speed USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, Ethernet port, audio, three DisplayPort and one HDMI 2.1 port. The motherboard comes with built-in Wi-Fi 6E as well as Bluetooth for all your wireless peripheral connections.
As I already alluded to in the beginning of this review, performance of the Orion 7000 is without question. Any machine with the combination of an i9-12900K, RTX 3080, DDR5 memory and a fast SSD system drive will perform like a champ. Check out our benchmark results in the charts below.
The Orion 7000 easily hits over 80 fps in 4K ultra settings in most of the games I was playing on a day to day. That included Destiny 2, Assassins Creed Origins and Red Dead Redemption 2 – all of which are fairly demanding titles. Turn resolution down to 1440p and you’ll be well over 100fps while still looking absolutely gorgeous. Even with ray-tracing turned on, you can still expect over 60fps in many games with Cyberpunk 2077 being an exception. The fluidity and smoothness is fantastic and if you are into eSports titles like CS:GO or Valorant, you can expect over 250 fps.
But what really strikes me about the performance of the Orion 7000 is how quietly it goes about all this. Even with my 4 hour binges, the machine kept at a cool 70 degrees with almost no deviation from standard fan noise. Its a remarkable contrast to the Alienware Aurora R14 that was absurdly loud when under load — something that was a big negative for me. With the Orion 7000, I’m able to comfortably game in the middle of the night without worrying about keeping my wife and kids up.
The massive fans and AIO keep the GPU and CPU cool as a cucumber and I never noticed even a hint of throttling or degradation in performance. Those with the desire can play around with fan curves and undervolting to get even better performance. There’s so much headroom to play with here. Just don’t use the Predator Sense for that though. It’s locked to some predefined overclock profiles which you can’t adjust. You can however, create custom fan profiles.
Should you buy it?
Any complaints about the new Acer Predator Orion 7000 in terms of performance, ports and upgradeability are basically nit-picking. Acer has built a very solid gaming PC that will surely last you for another two or three generations of 1440p and 4K gaming. It runs beautifully, looks beautiful and sounds beautiful.
But the problem is that it’s way too expensive to make sense for most people, especially in the skyrocketing inflation pummelling us at the moment. Every dollar needs to make sense and $6500 doesn’t quite cut it. You can get a similarly performing system from smaller brands like Aftershock PC for almost $2000 less which is huge. I really like the Orion 7000 — it’s a fantastic machine and a stellar gaming experience that I’ve really enjoyed. But it’s just too expensive to recommend.
