The first thing I noticed when opening this out of the box was the design of the PC. The front and side panels are glass with the standard powder coated metal for the rest of the chassis. There’s a funnel design element for the fans in the front that give it a nice aesthetic. The fan on the CPU cooler is also RGB to illuminate from behind the glass panel, as well as the exhaust. The case front I/O has 3 USB type A ports and 1 USB type C port which is nice to quickly plug and unplug any accessories. There’s a recessed vent at the top which promotes throwing things like flash drives in but I wouldn’t recommend covering this up as it helps exhaust some of the heat.
As for performance, I’ve been playing COD, Apex, and New World, all at max settings. COD averaged around 72 FPS at 4K on max settings. Although I was getting closer to 112 FPS at 2k max settings which is more ideal with a higher refresh rate monitor. New World, a game in my opinion you want the higher resolution for better visuals, averaged around 65-75 FPS at max settings at 4k resolution. I only saw frames drop when I was in town and there were a lot of other players on screen. You could probably tone down some of the settings and prevent this. Otherwise, out in the open world, it played great. I’m not a great Apex player but the story is the same, max settings, averaged around 110FPS.
The 3080 in this system is where you’re going to see all of the gaming advantages. The card in this system has 3 fans which seems to carry the best cooling. I didn’t see temps above 73 degrees when playing games. There is a bit of headroom for overclocking if you’re into that, but I didn’t feel the need to. As for CPU performance, the 12700f checks the box. It’s not super powerful like the enthusiast grade CPUs that are out there, but the 1st generation E core and P core design outputs some impressive performance and remained cool the whole time doing it. I think this is a great balance if you’re main goal is gaming and don’t plan on doing any type of heavy video editing or CAD design. Although, I do think it’ll still handle those tasks, but you’ll have to be patient with it. Also worth noting it comes with the stock intel air cooler from what I can tell. Since there’s no overclocking this type of cooler is plenty enough.
The system comes with 3 RGB case fans and a CPU fan. All of these can be controlled in the predator sense app. The main menu of the app offers a quick glance at temperatures, profile settings, and quick fan selection. You can then use the menu on the left to set custom profiles to lighting, cooling, as well as a system monitor to see system voltage, usage, as well as temperatures.
Storage has a great balance of 1TB SDD and 2 TB HDD. You can put your steam library on the 2TB HDD and move you’re commonly played games onto the 1TB NVMe drive for a bit faster load times. RAM is 2 8 TB DDR5 sticks. The CAS latency comes in at 36 which is pretty good for DDR5 but 16GB is the bare minimum in my opinion for gaming, but it doesn’t diminish the experience. There’s a really neat hard drive dock that plugs the drives into a stationary SATA and molex so hot swapping the drives should be very easy to do. What makes it easy is you can quick release the glass side panel with a lever on the back to go in swap hard drives and upgrade components. Also I noticed a slot for another M.2 SSD if you have one to slot in. However, I didn’t see a hold down screw included, hopefully you’re drive came with one. It's easy to get to as well, located just off the side of the motherboard.
I/O for the motherboard is pretty good. You get a 2.5 GB ethernet which is nice to see along with 5 type A and a type C USB ports. Also if you prefer to use Wi-Fi or in a part of your house where you can wire it to a router, it connects at 2.5gb if you’re router supports it. All together that’s 8 USB type A and 2 type C you can connect. Beyond that there’s not much else. I would have liked to have seen an optical audio out but by no means a deal breaker.
There’s also a keyboard and mouse that comes with this system. They’re both wired and RGB. The mouse has two extra buttons on the left that can be used and a center button behind the scroll wheel that switches RGB color. I wouldn’t say there’s anything special about either but it’s nice to see them included. Really just a TV or monitor would be all that’s needed to get you gaming out of the box. I would say most people have a TV and an HDMI cable to get started, Acer will include the mouse and keyboard on their end.
Overall I think this is a great gaming machine. It’s a nice replacement for what I had before and there’s a path of upgradability if you want a better processor, add RAM, or need to hot swap out hard drives. I’m happy to see it’s taken everything I’ve thrown at it and I look forward to using it as my daily driver for years to come.