Acer Predator 21 X
You might know Acer for cheap Windows laptops and Android tablets but the firm has gone and made arguably the most insane and powerful gaming laptops ever. Here's our full review of the Acer Predator 21X.
The first thing you notice about the Acer Predator 21 X is the size. Whether you’re seeing it for the first time as you take it out of the custom Pelican case it ships in, passing someone struggling to carry it on their way to a meeting, or sitting down to see it at a desk day after day, the sheer bulk of the 21-inch, almost 19-pound laptop will shock you almost every time. It’s a laptop that looks like it has grown strong dining on the blood of other, smaller laptops. The screen by itself is thicker than a MacBook Pro.
If it’s the end of the old-school gaming laptop era, the Acer Predator 21 X is the machine to mark it. Priced at a jaw-dropping $9000 (£9000, including VAT), this isn’t a mass-market device. It’s a Bugatti Chiron, but with better graphics. This beast packs dual GTX 1080 graphics cards and an high-end processor, a huge and quick SSD array along with 64GB of RAM.
Obviously, the Predator 21 X isn’t good value for money for the average consumer then, but at this end of the market, there’s far more to talk about than whether you’re simply making a good buying decision.
Of course, the first thing you'll notice about the Acer Predator 21X is the size. Pictures hardly do it justice and to say this laptop is huge feels like an understatement.
It's so big - 83mm thick at the back - that it comes with its own Pelican suitcase on wheels to help you transport it, not that you're likely to be taking it with you on holiday or anything.
At a bonkers 8.5kg in weight, the 21X is heaver than many desktop PC rigs out there. You can put it on your lap but you won't want it there for long, like when a child has become a little too heavy to be picked up.
The term laptop hardly seems appropriate for the 21X. Let's face it, this is a desktop replacement and an awesome one at that. It truly is a sight to behold once you've got it setup on a desk - get it just right, then call all your mates telling them you've got something amazing they need to see.
Open it up and you'll be presented with a huge 21in curved screen which almost feels intimidating at first. You won't be able to complain about a lack of real estate here.
As with other Predator products, the 21X has quite an angular and somewhat angry design, in a good way that is. Nothing is straight and clean, rather everything is angled such as the gigantic air vents, like someone from the Lamborghini design team got involved.
The laptop is made from plastic so doesn't particularly feel like it costs nearly £10k, but that said it is well-made. We'd just perhaps to expect some more exotic materials at this price such as carbon fibre and some metal.
The highlight of the design is the triangular window, through which you can see a glowing red fan cooling the two GTX 1080 graphics cards. Next to this is a huge panel with a dragon on it and the number out of 300 for the unit - this can be replaced easily by removing one screw if you want a different graphic.
Once we booted the laptop up, we felt like we was swaddled in vivid color. Watching Tears of Steel, we couldn't help but admire the dilapidated beauty of a war-battered building, including its dusty gold accents gleaming against powder-blue pillars. Details were clear enough that we could see just about every tightly coiled hair on the head of the sniper perched at his post.
The reason those colors are nearly bursting from the display is the panel's color reproduction, which we measured at 172 percent of the sRGB color gamut. That flat-out decimates the 121- percent average as well as the Titan (114 percent) and the Alienware 17 (113 percent). The Eon17 snatched the top spot with 177 percent.
The 21 X's screen registered a very accurate 0.24 on the Delta-E test (0 is optimal), beating the 1.4 desktop-replacement average. The Alienware 17 came the closest to matching the 21 X at 0.5, with the Eon17 and Titan hitting 1 and 2.
When we tested for brightness, the 21 X's display knocked it out the park, averaging 332 nits, besting the 291-nit average. The Titan was noticeably dimmer at 295, but the Eon17 and the Alienware 17 were just a bit brighter at 335 and 340 nits.
The Predator 21 X's screen also has Nvidia's G-Sync technology. In a nutshell, the technology puts the laptop's display rate in sync with the graphics card, essentially placing a frame cap that matches the panel limit (in this case, it's 120Hz). That makes for near-instant rendering in both full-screen and windowed modes, thus eliminating any tears, and leaving smooth images and happy gamers.
A laptop that's more than 22" long and 3" thick has more than enough space for a tenkeyless mechanical keyboard . . . and probably a fully-stocked bar. The Predator 21X features Cherry MX Brown switches that are a pleasure to type with. You'll find metallic blue keycaps installed on the WASD keys and space bar by default, but you can easily switch these out for the included black keys if you prefer. Additionally, because the keyboard uses Cherry stems, you can customize the keyboard with any compatible keycap set you prefer.
Half of the function row is occupied with predetermined functions: F3 toggles Airplane Mode on and off, F4 puts the Predator to sleep, F5 opens up the display menu, F6 turns the display off, F7 mutes the volume, and F8 turns off keyboard backlighting. The arrow keys have predetermined functions as well. The up and down arrows adjust the volume, while the left and right arrows adjust the display brightness.
The touchpad is more than just a touchpad. It's also a number pad! Acer achieves this with the Slide Module, which features a number pad on one side and a touchpad on another. The number pad uses scissor switches rather than mechanical switches, and while they aren't as pleasing to type with as the keyboard, they still features an acceptable springiness, similar to that of your typical laptop keyboard. The other side is the touchpad, which offers responsive tracking and separate left and right click buttons with satisfying bumpy feedback. The Slide Module fits into the empty, velvet-lined compartment to the right of the keyboard and snaps in magnetically. For extra measure, it is diamond encrusted.
When the system is powered, the Slide Module is detected almost immediately, which is convenient when you need to whip out your mouse and use the number pad. RGB lighting can be adjusted for either side of the Slide Module, with either the number pad keys or the light strip surrounding the touchpad being illuminated. Our biggest gripe is that the placement feels a bit unnatural considering most touchpads are located beneath the keyboard. The number pad feels right at home, but tracking will take some getting used to; in all likelihood, you're going to be using a mouse when gaming anyway.
The Predator 21 X has a new three-way audio system comprised of tweeters, midrange and subwoofers. This new system does deliver some serious detail, which allowed me to hear Ralph Tresvant take a big swig of water before the beat dropped on New Edition's "If It Isn't Love."
However, I found that with the top-mounted tweeters and front-mounted midrange, the audio was loud, but hollow. As the track began, the vocals sounded pushed back with no real separation from the rest of the track.. And even though I listened to several bass-heavy tracks (Kendrick Lamar's "DNA.," Missy Elliot's "I'm Better") the pair of subwoofer consistently failed to bring the boom.
The problem persisted when I played Andromeda. While the various laser blasts and explosions sounded weighty, the accompanying music sounded distant, as did the dialogue. I tried to adjust the problem with the Dolby Audio Premium software, but didn't get a better result.
We was a bit shocked to learn that this almost $9,000-laptop only has a 1280 x 720 webcam. However, We can't argue with the results, since the camera delivered images that were color-accurate with passable detail. In a few test shots we took, the blue and pink in my shirt were spot-on as was the purple in my hair. Despite the overall graininess, we could make out a few flyaway hairs at the top of my head.
The Biggest, most Powerful, and most Expensive Gaming Laptop Ever Made
You might know Acer for cheap Windows laptops and Android tablets but the firm has gone and made arguably the most insane and powerful gaming laptops ever. Here's our full review of the Acer Predator 21X.
The first thing you notice about the Acer Predator 21 X is the size. Whether you’re seeing it for the first time as you take it out of the custom Pelican case it ships in, passing someone struggling to carry it on their way to a meeting, or sitting down to see it at a desk day after day, the sheer bulk of the 21-inch, almost 19-pound laptop will shock you almost every time. It’s a laptop that looks like it has grown strong dining on the blood of other, smaller laptops. The screen by itself is thicker than a MacBook Pro.
Obviously, the Predator 21 X isn’t good value for money for the average consumer then, but at this end of the market, there’s far more to talk about than whether you’re simply making a good buying decision.
Acer Predator 21 X Design
It's so big - 83mm thick at the back - that it comes with its own Pelican suitcase on wheels to help you transport it, not that you're likely to be taking it with you on holiday or anything.
At a bonkers 8.5kg in weight, the 21X is heaver than many desktop PC rigs out there. You can put it on your lap but you won't want it there for long, like when a child has become a little too heavy to be picked up.
The term laptop hardly seems appropriate for the 21X. Let's face it, this is a desktop replacement and an awesome one at that. It truly is a sight to behold once you've got it setup on a desk - get it just right, then call all your mates telling them you've got something amazing they need to see.
Open it up and you'll be presented with a huge 21in curved screen which almost feels intimidating at first. You won't be able to complain about a lack of real estate here.
As with other Predator products, the 21X has quite an angular and somewhat angry design, in a good way that is. Nothing is straight and clean, rather everything is angled such as the gigantic air vents, like someone from the Lamborghini design team got involved.
The laptop is made from plastic so doesn't particularly feel like it costs nearly £10k, but that said it is well-made. We'd just perhaps to expect some more exotic materials at this price such as carbon fibre and some metal.
Acer Predator 21 X Display
We didn't know we needed or wanted a curved display on a laptop until I laid eyes on the Predator 21 X. The curvature of the 21-inch, 2560 x 1080 matte display is tantalizing.
Once we booted the laptop up, we felt like we was swaddled in vivid color. Watching Tears of Steel, we couldn't help but admire the dilapidated beauty of a war-battered building, including its dusty gold accents gleaming against powder-blue pillars. Details were clear enough that we could see just about every tightly coiled hair on the head of the sniper perched at his post.
The reason those colors are nearly bursting from the display is the panel's color reproduction, which we measured at 172 percent of the sRGB color gamut. That flat-out decimates the 121- percent average as well as the Titan (114 percent) and the Alienware 17 (113 percent). The Eon17 snatched the top spot with 177 percent.
The 21 X's screen registered a very accurate 0.24 on the Delta-E test (0 is optimal), beating the 1.4 desktop-replacement average. The Alienware 17 came the closest to matching the 21 X at 0.5, with the Eon17 and Titan hitting 1 and 2.
When we tested for brightness, the 21 X's display knocked it out the park, averaging 332 nits, besting the 291-nit average. The Titan was noticeably dimmer at 295, but the Eon17 and the Alienware 17 were just a bit brighter at 335 and 340 nits.
Acer Predator 21 X Keyboard and Trackpad
Half of the function row is occupied with predetermined functions: F3 toggles Airplane Mode on and off, F4 puts the Predator to sleep, F5 opens up the display menu, F6 turns the display off, F7 mutes the volume, and F8 turns off keyboard backlighting. The arrow keys have predetermined functions as well. The up and down arrows adjust the volume, while the left and right arrows adjust the display brightness.
The touchpad is more than just a touchpad. It's also a number pad! Acer achieves this with the Slide Module, which features a number pad on one side and a touchpad on another. The number pad uses scissor switches rather than mechanical switches, and while they aren't as pleasing to type with as the keyboard, they still features an acceptable springiness, similar to that of your typical laptop keyboard. The other side is the touchpad, which offers responsive tracking and separate left and right click buttons with satisfying bumpy feedback. The Slide Module fits into the empty, velvet-lined compartment to the right of the keyboard and snaps in magnetically. For extra measure, it is diamond encrusted.
When the system is powered, the Slide Module is detected almost immediately, which is convenient when you need to whip out your mouse and use the number pad. RGB lighting can be adjusted for either side of the Slide Module, with either the number pad keys or the light strip surrounding the touchpad being illuminated. Our biggest gripe is that the placement feels a bit unnatural considering most touchpads are located beneath the keyboard. The number pad feels right at home, but tracking will take some getting used to; in all likelihood, you're going to be using a mouse when gaming anyway.
Acer Predator 21 X Speakers
However, I found that with the top-mounted tweeters and front-mounted midrange, the audio was loud, but hollow. As the track began, the vocals sounded pushed back with no real separation from the rest of the track.. And even though I listened to several bass-heavy tracks (Kendrick Lamar's "DNA.," Missy Elliot's "I'm Better") the pair of subwoofer consistently failed to bring the boom.
The problem persisted when I played Andromeda. While the various laser blasts and explosions sounded weighty, the accompanying music sounded distant, as did the dialogue. I tried to adjust the problem with the Dolby Audio Premium software, but didn't get a better result.
Acer Predator 21 X Webcam
We was a bit shocked to learn that this almost $9,000-laptop only has a 1280 x 720 webcam. However, We can't argue with the results, since the camera delivered images that were color-accurate with passable detail. In a few test shots we took, the blue and pink in my shirt were spot-on as was the purple in my hair. Despite the overall graininess, we could make out a few flyaway hairs at the top of my head.
Acer Predator 21 X Perforrmane
Even the most over-the-top gaming laptop might have to do a bit of work now and then. When that time comes, the Predator 21 X can get the job(s) done, thanks to its overclockable 2.9-GHz Intel Core i7-7820HK processor with 64GB of RAM. we successfully launched 40 tabs of Google Chrome, some of which were running TweetDeck, streaming from Twitch and Dear White People on Netflix. we ran a full system scan using Windows to make things interesting, but never saw any signs of slowing down from the system.
Boasting two 512GB NVMe PCIe SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration with a 1TB 7,200-rpm hard drive, the Predator 21 X has speed and storage to spare. But if that's not enough for you, the Predator has two empty bays just waiting for a couple of more SSDs or hard drives. On our File Transfer test, the notebook duplicated 4.97GB of multimedia files in 6 seconds for a transfer rate of 848.2 megabytes per second. That's enough to beat the Eon17 (dual 256GB NVMe PCI-e M.2 SSDs) and Alienware 17 (512GB SSD), which scored 424.1MBps and 246.5MBps, respectively, at bay. But the Titan with its dual 512GB PCIe SSDs delivered a ridiculous 1,017 MBps.
Acer Predator 21 X Graphic
You're probably already impressed by the specs on offer here but the 21X has not one, but two Nvidia GTX 1080 graphics cards. Those are full-on desktop GPUs and you would normally only get one in a decent PC rig.
With the two 1080s hooked up together with SLI (Nvidia's tech for linking multiple cards), you've got a whopping 16GB of graphics memory at your disposal here. Acer says "Each GPU is overclocked and eager for a challenge."
Anything in the world of gaming right now should be possible, from Ultra settings to VR headsets like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
We'll get to the benchmark results shortly but you might be wondering how all of the above is going to stay cool. Well the large, sorry huge, chassis means there's space for three of Acer's AeroBlade fans.
There are multiple vents on the back and sides that are hard to miss. While it does stay relatively quiet during intense gaming, the 21X does kick out some serious heat. If you have it in a small room in the winter, you can turn the radiator off for sure. To test the Acer 21X's capabilities we first ran the benchmark built into Grand Theft Auto 5.
It runs at an average of 157fps at 1080p with the ‘high’ graphics preset and post-processing. It actually ran even better at full resolution with ultra post-processing effects and ‘very high’ graphics preset with a result of 161fps. Moving onto Ghost Recon: Wildlands the 21X yielded 96fps on 'high' settings and 1080p, only dropping to 75fps when we switched to full resolution and 'very high' graphics settings.
The only way we could get the machine to drop below the 60fps mark was setting the game to 'ultra' settings where it got 49fps.
Acer Predator 21 X Software
The Acer Predator 21 X uses a custom version of PredatorSense. PredatorSense has six tabs: Home, Lighting, Overclocking, Hotkey, Fan Control, and Monitoring. The Home tab acts as PredatorSense's central hub, and gives you a quick overview of the CPU and GPU clock rates, temperatures, and fan speeds. Also, the Home tab provides quick shortcuts to switch hotkey, lighting, and overclocking profiles.
The Lighting tab grants you comprehensive RGB LED controls for the lighting accents and the mechanical keyboard. The keyboard has plenty of lighting effects. The Breathing effect slowly pulses the lights on and off. The Afterglow effect illuminates keys when you press them. The Neon effect keeps the brightness static while cycling through the RGB spectrum. The Snake effect creates a LED snake which trails its way through the keyboard. The Hedge effect bounces two walls of light back and forth from either end of the keyboard. If you hit the $ key while it's illuminated, gold coins flow out like a slot machine.
Anyway, you get the point. There are many more. The speed and direction of several effects can be adjusted as well. There are four lighting zones outside of the keyboard: the logo, the light bars, the power button, and the Slide Module. You can also adjust these to whatever color in the RGB spectrum you desire, although they don't have fancy effects like the keyboard does.
The Overclocking tab offers three presets for the CPU and GPU SLI configuration. The Normal preset keeps the CPUs and GPUs at their base clock rates. The Faster preset gives them a modest overclock, and the Turbo preset overclocks them aggressively.
The Hotkey tab comes with two sub-tabs for hotkey profiles and macros. You can assign functions to the five hotkeys to the left of the keyboard, and there are three profiles to cycle between. The macro sub-tab will allow you to record your own macro functions.
In the Fan Control tab, you can set fan speeds to Auto or Max, or you can create your own custom fan profiles for the CPU, GPUs, and system.
As extravagant as the Predator 21 X is, one place Acer couldn't splurge on is the battery life. The leviathan lasted only 2 hours and 4 minutes on our battery test, which consists of continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi. That's much shorter than the 4:24 desktop-replacement average, but enough to outpace the Eon17's 1:25. The Titan and Alienware only did marginally better at 2:18 and 2:46.
So what's it like gaming with a curved display? It's really immersive, as long as the game supports the 21 X's unique aspect ratio. For instance, when I was battling Kett in Mass Effect: Andromeda, the skirmishes filled the entire screen. It was thrilling running for cover in the heat of battle only to vault over and smash an enemy with my Krogan hammer.
However, I soon discovered that not everything scales to the Predator's 21:9 aspect ratio. Andromeda cutscenes scaled down to a normal 17-inch, 16:9 aspect ratio, which left thick black bars on both sides of the action. This also happened when I watched YouTube videos. Having such a jarring switch take place when I was gaming really took me out of the action. I tried adjusting the resolution settings, to no avail. This is a problem that could have easily been solved if the display was 4K. And for nearly $9,000, Acer really ought to give you a 4K panel.
It took a while to arrive after being announced back in January at CES 2017, but the Acer 21X is now available.
The big question is whether you can afford it because it's the most expensive laptop, or PC, we've ever had in for review - and by some margin.
In the UK this beast of a gaming laptop costs a jaw dropping $8,999 and no, we didn't put the decimal in the wrong place. If you're in the US, the Acer 21X price is $8,999 which seems like a bit of a harsh price for those in Blighty.
It clear just from the price that Acer is not aiming the 21X at the masses but the point is made further by the fact that only 300 units have been made. This feels like a device beyond what we would categorise as a luxury purchase.
If you are looking for a large desktop replacement gaming laptop but the Acer 21X is out of your budget, check out the Alienware 17 R4 which starts at just over £1,500 - comparatively cheap - and our best gaming laptops chart.
We love it when laptop companies throw everything but the kitchen-sink into a gaming rig. True, many of us will never be able to afford luxury laptops that cost several thousand dollars, but the results are always amazing. With its incredible curved display and Tobii eye-tracking technology, the 21-inch Acer Predator 21 X truly sets itself apart from the competition. The company added some serious high-end features, including an overclockable Core i7 CPU and two Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU in SLI configuration. And the hits keep coming with a comfortable, customizable keyboard and a smidgen of upgradability for good measure.
We'd normally write a verdict explaining whether you should buy the product we've reviewed but that hardly seems appropriate here. The 21X is clearly not a product for the masses and is essentially a concept you can buy.
The value of this laptop is very low but that's probably not an issue if you've got the money to afford one. Acer has successfully made the most insane gaming device we've ever seen that, despite some flaws, we'd love to own. It's a great way of showing off what it can do and to point the majority of gamers to its more accessible Predator devices.
Even the most over-the-top gaming laptop might have to do a bit of work now and then. When that time comes, the Predator 21 X can get the job(s) done, thanks to its overclockable 2.9-GHz Intel Core i7-7820HK processor with 64GB of RAM. we successfully launched 40 tabs of Google Chrome, some of which were running TweetDeck, streaming from Twitch and Dear White People on Netflix. we ran a full system scan using Windows to make things interesting, but never saw any signs of slowing down from the system.
Boasting two 512GB NVMe PCIe SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration with a 1TB 7,200-rpm hard drive, the Predator 21 X has speed and storage to spare. But if that's not enough for you, the Predator has two empty bays just waiting for a couple of more SSDs or hard drives. On our File Transfer test, the notebook duplicated 4.97GB of multimedia files in 6 seconds for a transfer rate of 848.2 megabytes per second. That's enough to beat the Eon17 (dual 256GB NVMe PCI-e M.2 SSDs) and Alienware 17 (512GB SSD), which scored 424.1MBps and 246.5MBps, respectively, at bay. But the Titan with its dual 512GB PCIe SSDs delivered a ridiculous 1,017 MBps.
Acer Predator 21 X Graphic
You're probably already impressed by the specs on offer here but the 21X has not one, but two Nvidia GTX 1080 graphics cards. Those are full-on desktop GPUs and you would normally only get one in a decent PC rig.
With the two 1080s hooked up together with SLI (Nvidia's tech for linking multiple cards), you've got a whopping 16GB of graphics memory at your disposal here. Acer says "Each GPU is overclocked and eager for a challenge."
Anything in the world of gaming right now should be possible, from Ultra settings to VR headsets like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
We'll get to the benchmark results shortly but you might be wondering how all of the above is going to stay cool. Well the large, sorry huge, chassis means there's space for three of Acer's AeroBlade fans.
There are multiple vents on the back and sides that are hard to miss. While it does stay relatively quiet during intense gaming, the 21X does kick out some serious heat. If you have it in a small room in the winter, you can turn the radiator off for sure. To test the Acer 21X's capabilities we first ran the benchmark built into Grand Theft Auto 5.
It runs at an average of 157fps at 1080p with the ‘high’ graphics preset and post-processing. It actually ran even better at full resolution with ultra post-processing effects and ‘very high’ graphics preset with a result of 161fps. Moving onto Ghost Recon: Wildlands the 21X yielded 96fps on 'high' settings and 1080p, only dropping to 75fps when we switched to full resolution and 'very high' graphics settings.
The only way we could get the machine to drop below the 60fps mark was setting the game to 'ultra' settings where it got 49fps.
Acer Predator 21 X Software
The Acer Predator 21 X uses a custom version of PredatorSense. PredatorSense has six tabs: Home, Lighting, Overclocking, Hotkey, Fan Control, and Monitoring. The Home tab acts as PredatorSense's central hub, and gives you a quick overview of the CPU and GPU clock rates, temperatures, and fan speeds. Also, the Home tab provides quick shortcuts to switch hotkey, lighting, and overclocking profiles.
The Lighting tab grants you comprehensive RGB LED controls for the lighting accents and the mechanical keyboard. The keyboard has plenty of lighting effects. The Breathing effect slowly pulses the lights on and off. The Afterglow effect illuminates keys when you press them. The Neon effect keeps the brightness static while cycling through the RGB spectrum. The Snake effect creates a LED snake which trails its way through the keyboard. The Hedge effect bounces two walls of light back and forth from either end of the keyboard. If you hit the $ key while it's illuminated, gold coins flow out like a slot machine.
Anyway, you get the point. There are many more. The speed and direction of several effects can be adjusted as well. There are four lighting zones outside of the keyboard: the logo, the light bars, the power button, and the Slide Module. You can also adjust these to whatever color in the RGB spectrum you desire, although they don't have fancy effects like the keyboard does.
The Overclocking tab offers three presets for the CPU and GPU SLI configuration. The Normal preset keeps the CPUs and GPUs at their base clock rates. The Faster preset gives them a modest overclock, and the Turbo preset overclocks them aggressively.
The Hotkey tab comes with two sub-tabs for hotkey profiles and macros. You can assign functions to the five hotkeys to the left of the keyboard, and there are three profiles to cycle between. The macro sub-tab will allow you to record your own macro functions.
In the Fan Control tab, you can set fan speeds to Auto or Max, or you can create your own custom fan profiles for the CPU, GPUs, and system.
Acer Predator 21 X Battery
What It's like Gaming on a Curve Screen?
So what's it like gaming with a curved display? It's really immersive, as long as the game supports the 21 X's unique aspect ratio. For instance, when I was battling Kett in Mass Effect: Andromeda, the skirmishes filled the entire screen. It was thrilling running for cover in the heat of battle only to vault over and smash an enemy with my Krogan hammer.
However, I soon discovered that not everything scales to the Predator's 21:9 aspect ratio. Andromeda cutscenes scaled down to a normal 17-inch, 16:9 aspect ratio, which left thick black bars on both sides of the action. This also happened when I watched YouTube videos. Having such a jarring switch take place when I was gaming really took me out of the action. I tried adjusting the resolution settings, to no avail. This is a problem that could have easily been solved if the display was 4K. And for nearly $9,000, Acer really ought to give you a 4K panel.
Acer Predator 21 X Price
It took a while to arrive after being announced back in January at CES 2017, but the Acer 21X is now available.
The big question is whether you can afford it because it's the most expensive laptop, or PC, we've ever had in for review - and by some margin.
In the UK this beast of a gaming laptop costs a jaw dropping $8,999 and no, we didn't put the decimal in the wrong place. If you're in the US, the Acer 21X price is $8,999 which seems like a bit of a harsh price for those in Blighty.
It clear just from the price that Acer is not aiming the 21X at the masses but the point is made further by the fact that only 300 units have been made. This feels like a device beyond what we would categorise as a luxury purchase.
If you are looking for a large desktop replacement gaming laptop but the Acer 21X is out of your budget, check out the Alienware 17 R4 which starts at just over £1,500 - comparatively cheap - and our best gaming laptops chart.
Conclusion
We love it when laptop companies throw everything but the kitchen-sink into a gaming rig. True, many of us will never be able to afford luxury laptops that cost several thousand dollars, but the results are always amazing. With its incredible curved display and Tobii eye-tracking technology, the 21-inch Acer Predator 21 X truly sets itself apart from the competition. The company added some serious high-end features, including an overclockable Core i7 CPU and two Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU in SLI configuration. And the hits keep coming with a comfortable, customizable keyboard and a smidgen of upgradability for good measure.
We'd normally write a verdict explaining whether you should buy the product we've reviewed but that hardly seems appropriate here. The 21X is clearly not a product for the masses and is essentially a concept you can buy.
The value of this laptop is very low but that's probably not an issue if you've got the money to afford one. Acer has successfully made the most insane gaming device we've ever seen that, despite some flaws, we'd love to own. It's a great way of showing off what it can do and to point the majority of gamers to its more accessible Predator devices.
Comments
Post a Comment
LEAVE A COMMMENT