Taiwanese computer maker Acer has decided to go after the lucrative high-end PC gamer market with the new Aspire Predator, sporting an armor-like orange-and-black casing and high-performance components designed to let gamers take their pixel-powered mayhem to new extremes. And we’ll try not to make any assumptions about the demographic Acer is targeting with the tagline “Faster. Deeper. Harder. Further.”
The Predator’s case can be raised up on cantilevered armed to reveal the optical drive and card reader; the unit also sports top-mounted USB and audio ports for easy access. Under the hood, the Aspire Predator sports a “highly overclocked” Intel Core 2 Extreme quad-core processor on a 1,333 MHz frontside bus, along with Nvidia nForce 780i SLI MCP, a 3-way SLI capable motherboard that can support two graphics cards and up to four GPUs, depending on configuration. The Aspire Predator also features four easy-swap Serial ATA 3 Gb/s drive bays that can be configured in RAID 0, 1, 5, and 1+0 modes with Nvidia MediaShield; on optional component will be 10,000 rpm hard drives available in a RAID 0 config. The system also sports dual LAN ports. Dolby Home Theater and EAX 4.0 support, and a “state-of-the-art” cooling system. The Predator supports up to 8 GB of RAM, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, eight USB 2.0 ports (four front, four rear), a 6-pin FireWire port, two eSATA ports, S/PDIF audio output, two DVI-D ports (expandable to six if you run with three graphics cards), and a Blu-ray writer available as an option. The system also packs 1000 Watt power supply, and will be available with an optional TV tuner.
Unfortunately, what Acer hasn’t revealed about the Predator is availability and pricing: although no one expects a system like this to be cheap, Acer is definitely catering to the high end of the gaming market: that small but willing-to-spend market would probably like to know when they can set hands on a Predator, and roughly how much one might cost.
