Acer Predator Orion 9000 heats up with Core i9 Review

An 18-core Intel Core i9 Extreme, four-way Radeon RX Vega or dual GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPUs, up to 128GB quad-channel DDR4, liquid cooling.

Forget specs: Acer's Predator Orion 9000 gaming desktop gets a complete redesign from the current G series models and it looks awesome. At least from the front, with its squashed Darth Vader-helmet facade and Decepticon-esque glowing fans.

It has LEDs on the fans. It has LEDs on the motherboard. It has wheels. It's all vents and mesh, with easy open sides. And big handles. I want this thing huffing and puffing atop my desk, driving two Dell 8K monitors.

The above is the maxed-out configuration, of course. Announced at IFA in Berlin, it will actually start at $2,000 (roughly £1,550 or AU$2,500), though it's not clear what that configuration consists of or how many cat-sitting jobs it will take to pay for the top-end kits. And those RGB-lit fans cost extra. It has 10 USB Type-A ports, among other connections, enough for all your VR gear. Europe will get it in November, and we won't see it in the US until December.

See Recommended: Acer's new Orion 3000 gaming desktops run on Gamut Review

Acer's Predator Orion 9000 PC goes all out, new accessories
The Predator Cestus 500 mouse comes with an eminently practical feature, at least for me: mouse buttons with two different levels of resistance. I routinely waste ammo and spoil stealth attacks in first person shooters because of a lazy right forefinger that drops onto the firing button when I'm not paying attention. This potential lifesaver will cost $80 (roughly £60 or AU$100) when it comes out in November.

There's also a new gaming headset called the Predator Galea 500, with supposedly better sound and surround directionality. I hope so for $300 (roughly £230 or AU$370). The big draw is something Acer calls 3D sound, which means the headset recognizes when you move your head and seamlessly adjusts the sound accordingly. For example, if you hear a noise in the right channel, a conventional headset will play that noise in your right ear no matter which way you're facing. But with the Galea's 3D sound, you can turn towards the source of the sound and hear it differently.

I somehow missed it during Computex, but Nvidia announced the Predator X35 35-inch curved HDR quantum-dot VA monitor with 200Hz refresh, G-Sync compatibility and 512 (!) local dimming zones. The news is that it's been bumped from 2017 to early 2018. As far as I can tell, none of the HDR gaming monitors announced this year have actually shipped thus far.

Specifications:

• Windows 10 Home 64-bit
• Intel Core i9 Extreme Edition 18-core processor
• Quad-channel DDR4 RAM with eight DIMM slots, supports up to 128 GB
• Up to four-way AMD RadeonTM RX Vega 64 or two-way NVDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SLI
• 702x300x643 mm
• 15 kg chassis
• Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7265 
• IceTunnel 2.0 Liquid cooling system
• Up to 16.7M RGB colors
• EMI compliant side window
• Expansion: 8x U-DIMM slot DDR4, 4x x16 PCIe slots, 2x M.2 2280 (key M, PCIe x4), M.2 2230 (key E, PCIe & USB 2.0)
• Two wheels