Acer’s Predator Orion 7000 has been a staple of the prebuilt gaming PC market for years, but today at the brand’s presentation ahead of IFA 2024, it revealed a new version of its flagship desktop.
This refresh does more than just swap out the components inside the machine, though, as a new chassis design, innovative cooling methods, and a relaunch of its Predator Sense monitoring app could improve what I already consider to be one of the best gaming PCs on the market.
Last year, I reviewed the Acer Predator Orion 7000 (2023) model, and while it was powerful enough to earn the top spot in our overall buying guide, I wasn’t impressed with the machine’s cooling capabilities or its noise levels when trying to keep an Intel Core i9-13600K CPU below boiling point. It seems I wasn’t the only one to notice this, though, because inside the latest Orion 7000 chassis sits a new system fan and AOI cooler that the team at Acer told me came about as a result of listening to feedback.
The new Predator CycloneX 360 system fan was shown off during Acer’s keynote presentation, and it removes the borders between the three front-facing fans to increase the amount of airflow reaching the motherboard. This marks a change from the previous Orion 7000 chassis, which only featured two front-facing intake fans. The new three-fan setup will be used on the updated AIO CPU cooler, which uses a new pump head that I’m told has a much faster RPM than Acer’s previous one.
Overall, these new designs are said to increase the desktop's cooling efficiency by 15% and reduce motherboard temperatures by 9 degrees Celsius compared to the previous model. I asked Acer if this would translate into increased fan noise, but the team told me that reducing volume was a priority and that the new system runs much quieter.
The updated Predator Orion 7000 will feature an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU and a 14th Gen Intel Core i9 processor. Interestingly, I spoke to Acer’s consumer desktop product manager and asked if we’d see more affordable configurations hit shelves for those of us who can’t afford the best graphics cards and gaming CPUs. I was told that there are plans to release other models, but they might only feature two front-facing fans instead of three.
Elsewhere on the rig, the GPU is now mounted vertically, something that seems both a styling choice and an evolution of what the brand learned with the Acer Predator Orion X, the ITX version of a prebuilt Predator.
Storage and connectivity appear to be just as robust as on previous Orion models. Thanks to a removable SSD bay at the top of the chassis, as well as multiple M.2 bays on the motherboard and an HDD tray, there’s plenty of room to upgrade the space for gaming and media.
The 1200W power supply also protects you for upgrading parts in the future, and the rig will come with either 16GB or 32GB of multi-channel DDR5 RAM.
Finally, Predator Sense, the proprietary monitoring app that comes with every Orion desktop PC, is getting an update. There’s now even some integration with Nvidia for capturing gameplay, streaming it to a streaming platform, and utilizing AI features.
The only thing I don’t know about this update to one of my favorite gaming PCs is the price and release date. Either way, this all adds up to an exciting update that addresses some of my biggest complaints regarding an enthusiast-level gaming PC. It’ll be hard to know how effective the changes are until I try it out in my hands, but having a brand like Acer listen to feedback and act on it is always a good sign.
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