So close, and yet so far
Buying a pre-built gaming PC from a mass-manufacturer like Acer brings a few key benefits with it. For starters, you won’t need to shed any blood inside the case when you’re trying to bung your graphics card under the drive cages. Secondly, if anything goes wrong you can rest assured that your machine will be collected, repaired and returned in a minimal amount of time. Finally, it’s pretty safe to say that all of the components within have been stress-tested with each other, avoiding the rare bugs that sometimes crop up between components. On the flipside, you’re going to have to pay a rather higher price tag than doing it yourself, and you also won’t learn anything about building or troubleshooting your PC. With Acer’s new Predator series hitting Aussie shores, I was keen to see just how this fabled maker of laptops and office machines would manage the distinct requirements of a gaming box. Not too well it would appear.
The designers behind the case of the Predator are obviously of the “more is more” school of design. Rather than the slick, subtle monoliths certain older gamers favour, Acer’s design team has gone for a very aggressive, armour-like finish to the front facia. Some will love it, others will loathe it, but one thing nobody can deny is that the plastic finish feels cheapish for a machine at this price point. Tucked away behind one of the flaps is a hidden optical drive, while a card reader resides slightly below. There’s also the usual twin USB 3.0 ports, alongside a headphone and microphone port.
Heading to the rear reveals a relatively Spartan butt. Both onboard HDMI and DisplayPort outputs are there if you want to pipe video directly from the Intel CPU, along with four more USB 3.0 and twin USB 2.0 ports. A single Gigabit Ethernet connector is included, but there’s also built-in 802.11ac Wi-Fi if you’d prefer wireless, though there’s no mention of whether it’s a 2x2 or 3x3 card – we’re guessing the former.
The first alarming sight on the rear are the audio connections – there are a mere three in total. Microphone, and two stereo outputs means you’re going to be limited to a quadrophonic speaker setup unless you have an AV receiver with HDMI. There’s not even S/PDIF, which is mandatory on most gaming motherboards. The only other outputs are delivered courtesy of the graphics card, with twin DVI-D/DVI-I, HDMI 2.0 and a single DisplayPort 1.2. We won’t spoil the surprise of just which video card it is yet…
Removing the side of the case reveals that apart from the front it’s constructed from steel, but the interior could only be described as functional. Case modders will not be impressed at all. While the cables are neatly tied, there’s nowhere to hide them, as the motherboard isn’t mounted on a removable tray. Just one spare 3.5 inch drive bay is available in case you’d like to upgrade the included storage. A mere two PCIe x1 expansion slots remain empty for any extras you’d like to add, so there’s no chance of converting this into an SLI or CrossFire powered beast.
One of the cheapest heatsink/fans we’ve seen in recent memory resides over the CPU, an Intel Core i7-6700. It’s actually a darn good processor for games, with all four cores featuring HyperThreading, and a maximum Turbo speed of 4GHz. Don’t even think about overclocking it though, as the included BIOS has no options to do so, even if that piddly fan was capable. Still, at 4GHz this thing is more than powerful enough for today’s best games, and the fan seems to do a fine job, keeping the machine silent while under load.
The inclusion of 16GB of GDDR4 2133MHz is quite generous at this price point, but we kind of wish they’d halved this and used the money on the GPU instead. Internal storage is also respectable, with a very speedy 128GB M.2 SSD alongside a meaty 1TB mechanical hard drive spinning by at the brisk pace of 7200RPM. And then we get to the graphics card… if you could call it that. It’s more of a silicon abacus that would be more at home in a budget gaming laptop.
Acer has decked out this $2400 machine with the lowest card in NVIDIA’s existing GeForce 900 series, a lowly GTX 950. This has a mere 768 CUDA Cores, 48 Texture Units and 32 ROPs. This makes it about half as powerful as a GTX 970 GPU, which can be purchased for around $470, likely much cheaper when companies like Acer buy in bulk. The boost speed of 1188MHz isn’t too shabby, but it’s the lack of transistors elsewhere that bogs this GPU down. It’s also only equipped with a mere 2GB of GDDR5 memory, so you can forget about running anything with ultra-high resolution textures.
As a result of this budget-GPU, the entire performance of the G3 710 is dragged down by this single choice, as you can see from our benchmark results. It seems there is an overseas version of this machine with a GTX 970 instead, which only costs US$1499, which is even more galling.
We’re not quite sure why Aussies are expected to pay so much more for the entry-level Predator G3, but that’s just the way it stands. Considering it’s possible to build a similarly specced system for around $1500, paying an extra grand just for the reassurance of an Acer warranty and build-quality simply isn’t worth it.
VERDICT
Acer has forgotten that a gaming machine needs a decent CPU and GPU to build a truly-game ready machine.