When you’re a seasoned gamer, you know exactly what to expect in games and what hardware you need…. or want for that matter. It’s not such a surprise then that most gamers tend to assemble their own PCs because they want to have control of the specs of their system. Pre-assembled desktops however, don’t really offer that flexibility. The price might be affordable, but the items inside may not be what you want. And more often than not, these desktops come with more unwanted components than outstanding ones. But here we have something that may change that general perception. Acer sent in the Aspire G7700, otherwise known as the Predator.
This behemoth of machine is by no means just a metaphorical statement. When we received the Predator, carrying the box itself into our test lab was a muscle building endeavour. It took two of us to lift the thing out of the box, and I think I almost broke my back. That being said, it’s probably made from the same metal as Wolverine’s claws. Okay jokes aside, the Predator can withstand quite a massive beating (not that you’ll want to move it around anyways). The design of the casing is noteworthy as not only does it look pretty cool, it is ergonomic friendly. At the top, a panel comprising of four USB2.0 slots and audio-out and microphone jacks are easily accessible at seating level, so you don’t have to bend down to slot a thumb drive or a pair of headphones. Also, a big power button is located not far from the panel for easy access. Moving down to the front side, Acer placed a lid that can be lifted up, revealing a few nifty components. First, we have two 5.25” drive bays that has claw-like doors, which look something out of from Transformers. Also, you can opt to get a Blu-Ray drive, though that will up the cost quite a bit. Below that lies the multi-card reader, which encompasses 14 different types altogether. Now the next thing below the card reader is something worth shouting about.
Acer has included an EasySwap HDD cage, which is found behind the illuminated door right at the bottom. Inside are four slots where four hard drives can be stored in. You can easily take them out and swap them with other hard disks, and better yet, when RAID is enabled, you can take out the hard disks without having to restart the comp. Very useful indeed. The magic doesn’t stop there. Within the Herculean casing, there are multiple fans and brackets that provide efficient cooling and easy handling of hardware. Acer has put in a liquid cooling solution for the CPU, which has liquid constantly circulating through a huge heatsink mounted at the rear that is attached with a similar size fan, so there should be adequate ventilation inside as well.
Now the computer tower didn’t come alone. Acer bundles a Logitech G11 keyboard and a G5 mouse, which are both designed especially for gamers. You get quite a number of extra buttons on the keyboard for different macro functions while the mouse comes with additional weights to give you that extra leverage for fast FPS games. Drivers are provided so you can configure settings for the keyboard and mouse, and allocate functions and what not. Also, we received a 24” LCD dubbed the G24. It has a 2ms response rate, high contrast ratio and a native resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 for full HD viewing.
On to its core components, The Predator runs on an Intel Q9450 Core 2 Quad processor, which has a clockspeed of 2.66GHz, a 12MB L2 cache, and an FSB of 1,333MHz. There are two sticks of 2GB Transcend AXE DDR2-1066 CL5 memory modules, totalling to 4GB of RAM. Now the board actually supports a maximum of 8GB. But you’re thinking there’s no point of upgrading right? Wrong. Acer actually bundles the 64-bit version of Windows Vista Home Premium, so 8GB system memory is indeed possible. That being said, you need to make sure that your applications can run on a 64-bit OS. For storage, you get two 320GB Western Digital Caviar Blue hard disks that have an 8MB cache and a speed of 7,200 RPM; pretty decent for your gaming needs. Now what’s a gaming rig without an uber graphics card? The Geforce 9800GTX comes with the Aspire G7700, with clockspeeds of 675MHz and 1,100MHz for the GPU and GDDR3 memory respectively. Don’t be mistaken however, as this is not the 55nm 9800GTX+ that NVIDIA released a while ago, which I think they should have put instead since there is more headroom for overclocking, higher speeds, and support for newer technologies. Speaking of SLI, the motherboard inside is an nForce 780i board, which supports tri-SLI, and you also get a bunch of SLI ribbons in the box. As we can see from the details of the specs, this is a pretty awesome setup.
So does it deliver? Let’s check the scores. On PCMark Vantage, the overall score was 5,798, which is pretty high among the motherboard scores we’ve got considering its specs are lower than our benchmark equipment save for our graphics card. For the memory, gaming and HDD suites, Vantage produced figures of 4,877, 4,705 and 4,490 respectively. All in all, the performance is pretty good.
We don’t really get gaming desktops, so it’s hard to judge if the pricing is justifiable. Still, you get excellent ergonomics, easy upgrading, good performance and it look awesome. Don’t forget the warranty that comes with it, so you don’t have to worry if it breaks down.
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