14 DAY TRIAL // First announced in April this year, Acer's newest Predator portable gaming system has finally made its appearance at IFA today, showing that the company focuses intensely on powerful portability at affordable prices.
To create a brand of powerful hardware, Acer has announced that the Predator line will encompass a powerful desktop PC, a deca-core smartphone, and a gaming dedicated tablet. Wishing to impress gamers across the world, Acer wanted to turn every computing medium into a gaming platform.
However, the company's focus on portable gaming, translated into the Predator 17 and 15 laptops, is quite impressive. The first one sports an aggressive 17.3" 1080p display, while the second comes with a 15.6" one, in full HD and 4K options, thus offering the best resolutions available in mobile gaming at the moment.
Powerful, menacing, obnoxious
Both notebook models carry the somewhat powerful Skylake-H i7-6700HQ CPU and a pretty impressive NVIDIA GeForce GTX980 graphics card with 32 GB of DDR3L RAM, probably. Moreover, they will come complete with an impressive 512GB SSD.
At a closer analysis, this seems to be an offer similar to the Acer Aspire V Nitro, only much more powerful, and missing the essential 2TB HDD, going instead with the blazing fast but terribly small PCIe 512GB SSD.
Connectivity-wise, the laptops come with four USB 3.0 ports, one USB 3.1 Type-C port, one HDMI port, Ethernet, and a Kensington lock. The USB 3.1 Type-C will offer great data transfer of 40Gb/s for any device connected to them. The new notebooks come with Windows 10 and also feature keyboards with all the backlighting and programmable keys you'd expect from a gaming rig.
Although being priced $500 more than the Acer Nitro V, these new models are better at gaming and worse at being actual portable laptops. However, those who want to play on such beastly machines need to know that they'll go on sale in North America and Europe in November, starting at $1,500 (€1,599) for the Predator 15, and $1,600 (€1,799) for the Predator 17.
