Acer Predator Orion 9000 Review
The Acer Orion 9000 is a gaming PC with some pretty insane hardware available, in this unit I’ve got an 18 core CPU and two Nvidia 1080Ti’s in SLI, so let’s see what it can do. There’s some pretty crazy hardware in this system, so let’s start there. While it’s available with a 6 core i7-8700K CPU, in mine I’ve got an 18 core i9-7980XE, and it can also be overclocked too for better performance, as we’ll see later. The 8700K model has 4 memory slots with support for up to 64GB in dual channel, while my i9 model has 8 memory slots with support for up to 128GB in quad channel, although my model has 8 sticks of 8gb memory, so 64gb total in this system, and this is running at DDR4-2666.
The graphics are also pretty insane, I’ve got two Nvidia 1080Ti’s running in SLI, and we’ll see how these perform later in the gaming benchmarks. For storage there are two M.2 slots, I’ve got two 256GB PCIe NVMe SSDs in a RAID 0 array and a 1TB hard drive. For network connectivity there’s gigabit ethernet, 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2. The whole system is listed as weighing 42 pounds, so around 19kg, pretty crazy. It’s so large and heavy that it’s got two handles on top to help you move it around, and even has wheels on the back of the case so that you can just lift the front handle and wheel it around.
The case is black and silver with a carbon fiber texture in some places, overall I thought it looked pretty nice for a prebuilt gaming system. It also came with matching Acer Predator gaming mouse and keyboard which worked pretty well. The front is covered in a metal mesh to allow air flow in with the two 120mm fans, and there’s a plastic headphone stand built into the front. Above this you can pull down one of the panels to reveal the DVD drive.
Toward the top there’s the Predator logo and the power button which lights up. On top there’s a turbo button, more on this soon, as well as 3 USB 3.1 gen1 Type-A ports, a Type-C port and 3.5mm headphone and mic jacks. On the top there’s air vents with two more 120mm fans which are used by the CPU cooler to exhaust air, and of course the aforementioned handles. On the back starting with the rear IO from top down there are two USB 2.0 Type-A ports, PS/2 port, CMOS clear button, SPDIF out, gigabit ethernet, 5 more USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A ports, a second Type-C port, and 6 3.5mm audio connectors, and next to the IO is the rear exhaust and 5th and final 120mm fan. On the back of the 1080Ti’s each card has 3 DisplayPort outputs with 1 HDMI port available, and down the bottom there’s the power supply with the previously mentioned wheels. Underneath the case there’s just some large rubber feet to prevent movement, although with this much weight that’s not really a concern.
On the right panel there’s the predator logo, and this is removed by unscrewing two screws and pulling the handle. Inside there’s our single 1TB hard drive installed, but the two mounts support up to two 3.5 inch drives, and four 2.5” drives can be mounted in the racks to the left of this towards the front of the case. The left panel is opened in the same way and also features the Predator logo but also a window, you can see inside, but there’s also a metal grill behind which blocks some of the view. Taking a look inside there’s a Cooler Master 240mm all-in-one liquid cooler to keep the CPU cool, the fans are above the radiator and pull air out of the case, and we’ll see how well this keeps the 18 core chip cool soon. Down the bottom there’s a plastic shroud for the power supply which can be removed, revealing the 1000 watt 80 plus gold power supply which pulls air in from the bottom of the case.
The two 1080Ti graphics cards have blower style coolers, so air is pulled in from the fan and exhausted out the back, and the SLI bridge features a lit predator logo, although the colour of this can’t be customized like the rest of the lighting. Behind the graphics cards are three M.2 slots, two for storage with our RAID 0 array and one for the WiFi card. As you’ve probably noticed the case has RGB lighting, and this can be controlled through Acer’s Predator Sense software. There are three separate zones that can be controlled individually, there’s the front zone, a strip above the left panel window, and a bunch of lights on the motherboard, 28 that I can count, above and below the memory slots, below the CPU socket, and below each PCIe slot. You can set these to any static color but effects are limited to breathing or wave. Otherwise inside there’s not much else going on, the two fans at the front bring air in and this plastic shroud allows some of this air to go behind the motherboard.
As an X299 motherboard it also supports overclocking and presumably other X299 CPUs as well, although with the 7980XE there’s not really an upgrade path as I believe that’s the best currently available for the socket, and I presume the 8700K model would come with a Z370 motherboard to support overclocking too. The motherboard I’ve got here actually has two spare PCIe slots, and I think it would support two more graphics cards if you really wanted. Acer’s Predator Sense software gives you the option of overclocking the CPU quite easily by selecting the faster or turbo profile. These are the clock speeds that will be in use with each profile, the speed varies based on the amount of active CPU cores in use, so for example with the turbo profile in use in a single core workload the boost speed will get to 4.8GHz, up from 4.4GHz at stock, but if all 18 cores are in use then we can expect 3.8GHz clock speeds, up from the 3.4GHz all core stock speed.
This is where the big turbo button on the front of the case comes in too, basically you can press the turbo button and it will light up and enable turbo mode. Likewise if you just enable turbo mode through the software in Windows it will also light the button up to let you know it’s enabled. In general I found it to boost performance quite well, but I did have some occasional instability issues with the turbo profile on while under heavy load, but overclocking will vary between CPUs. Here are some Cinebench CPU benchmarks to give you an idea of how these CPU overclocking profiles affect performance. The 18 core CPU is giving us very impressive results in this test, and we’re seeing nice improvements using the faster and turbo profiles. There was no easy built in way to overclock the graphics cards, so I just manually downloaded and installed MSI Afterburner for that.
With all of that in mind let’s take a look at some gaming benchmarks, I’ve run these with both the CPU and GPUs overclocked, as I’m assuming if you’re buying a system with this high end hardware you’ll probably be doing that to get the most out of it. The CPU was overclocked just by using the turbo profile, while the graphics were overclocked to these speeds with Afterburner, although I probably could have gone further. As this is a fairly powerful system, I’ve also tested with 4K, 1440p, and 1080p resolutions. PUBG was tested using the replay feature, and we’re seeing really nice results for this game regardless of setting level, even above 100 FPS at ultra. Moving up to 1440p there was a bit of a drop off in frame rates, but overall the results are still quite nice, you could play the game pretty well with a high refresh rate panel at lower settings. 4K definitely did look nice, but I probably wouldn’t want to play at anything above very low as this game really benefits more from a higher frame rate in my opinion. Far Cry 5 was tested with the built in benchmark, and at 1080p we’re almost averaging 100 FPS at ultra-settings in this test, pretty impressive. At 1440p there was almost no change in this test at the higher setting levels, more of a noticeable difference at the lower settings, and then at 4K the frame rates drop quite a bit, but realistically still quite good, above 60 FPS at ultra. Assassin’s Creed Origins was also tested using the built in benchmark, and the results are pretty nice at 1080p, over 80 FPS at ultra-settings. At 1440p there wasn’t much of a difference at the lower setting levels, but the results at higher levels are still pretty good.
4K is pretty rough, but the frame rates are still quite decent as this is a pretty demanding test. Ghost Recon is another resource intensive game and was again tested with the built in benchmark. The average frame rates at 1080p are really nice, although at higher settings there were lots of dips in performance, as shown by the 1% lows. Stepping up to 1440p we’re still able to average above 60 FPS at ultra settings, although the 1% lows here at all setting levels are a fair bit below the averages. 4K is extremely resource intensive here, you’d definitely want to play at lower settings if you’ve got your heart set on running at 4K. Rainbow Six Siege was also tested with the built in benchmark, and the frame rates at 1080p are pretty insane regardless of setting level. Even at 1440p the results are still nice, if you’ve got a high refresh rate 1440p monitor then with this hardware it should be easy. In comparison the 4K results dropped down quite a bit with very large dips shown by the 1% lows, you’d definitely want to look at lower settings here. Watchdogs 2 played extremely well at 1080p with all setting levels, absolutely no problems at all here. At 1440p the average frame rates are fairly high, higher at lower settings in fact which was a little strange, otherwise at higher settings there was a bit of stuttering, not sure if that was due to SLI though. At 4k there was still some stuttering at high settings, again I suspect the SLI but it is quite a resource intensive game, no problems playing at the lower levels though.
Now let’s check out some benchmarking tools. We’ll start with the Unigine benchmarks, I’ve tested Heaven and valley at 1080p, 1440p and 4K resolutions, as well as Superposition with the 1080p, 4k and 8k tests. I’ve also tested 3DMark’s VRMark, TimeSpy, and FireStrike, and for the first time I’ve also tested Firestrike extreme and ultra as we’ve got some serious hardware here, and we’re getting really impressive results in all tests. As expected the two 1080Ti’s in SLI are giving us excellent performance, this setup pretty much laughs at 4K gaming, but keep in mind that the performance of SLI will vary depending on the game and how well the developers have implemented multi GPU support, some games like CSGO for instance would just blue screen with SLI enabled and couldn’t be run, while others may not see as much of an improvement compared to another game with better support. During testing I did notice a little coil whine from the graphics cards, although once the fans spin up it’s less noticeable, and this will vary between components anyway. These are the system temperatures in various workloads while testing in a room with an ambient temperature of 18 degrees celsius. Even while under stress test which was done by running Aida64 and the Heaven benchmark to try and utilize both the processor and graphics or while gaming at 4K they’re perfectly acceptable.
To be honest I was expecting worse CPU temperatures as we’re dealing with 18 cores here, but as we can see it was perfectly fine, no thermal throttling and we were getting full multicore performance. It’s also worth noting that GPU 1 is the one up the top with its fan covered by the back of GPU 2 below it, which is why the temperature of GPU 1 is higher, but we can improve the temperatures quite a bit by manually boosting the fan speed, but this does get quite loud. As for overall system volume I’ll let you have a listen to these tests. I thought it sounded alright while gaming, a little more fan noise at idle than I expected, and it gets quite loud if you manually max out the fans, but it never got too high just with the fans on auto. I didn’t test overclocking in my temperature testing as the stress test would cause the PC to shut off, it wasn’t a blue screen or a crash so I don’t think it was due a bad overclock, my guess is that there wasn’t enough power under such an intense worst case workload, as it would instantly reset as soon as I tried to smash both 1080Ti’s and all 18 CPU cores while overclocked. I did a rough calculation and with overclocks applied the estimation is a fair bit over 1000 watts.
I’ve measured power draw at idle, and then under CPU and GPU stress tests running at stock speeds and while overclocked. I’ve said in the past that I suspect my power meter isn’t accurate, so take the results with a grain of salt, especially when considering that we’re dealing with a 1000 watt power supply. In Crystal Disk Mark the 256GB RAID 0 array is getting fairly decent results, considering the write speeds of the individual drives are about 540MB/s we’re basically doubling performance, although if a single drive in the array fails all data will be lost. Finally here are the speeds for the 1TB 7,200RPM hard drive, fairly average results for a hard drive. You can find up to date pricing using the links in the description. At the time of recording, according to Acer's website the lowest specced model of the Orion 9000 starts at $2289 USD, but that’s the more affordable 8700K version. The i9-7980XE model with two 1080Ti’s in SLI that I’ve got here is listed at $8000 USD, although that’s with double the RAM and disk space that I had in mine, and it’s around $7300 USD on Amazon.
It’s quite an expensive machine, and you could of course build your own similarly specced PC for less money, but that’s generally not the market these type of pre-built machines are aimed towards. In the case of the Orion 9000 in this configuration I can only imagine that it would be for someone who has serious cash to burn and just wants an amazing gaming machine and workstation that can do it all straight out of the box. Realistically if your focus is on gaming you’ll probably be just fine with the 8700K model, as that’s still a great CPU for gaming, I’d only be looking at the i9-7980XE shown here if you really need the extra CPU cores and are after more of a workstation, for instance if you’re serious about video editing or run a lot of virtual machines in addition to gaming.
There’s a bit of upgradability here, it can take plenty of memory and a fair bit of storage, there are spare PCIe slots and 4 spare SATA connectors with 6 in total, the only thing you might be limited by would be the CPU socket of the motherboard, as Intel have a habit of changing the sockets pretty much every new generation, although I think the 8700K or 7980XE should be able to last you for quite a while. So what did you guys think of Acer’s Predator Orion 9000 gaming PC? It’s not quite over 9000 but I think I can let that slide with such a beast of a machine, this is by far the highest specced system I’ve ever tested and it was seriously impressive in every test that I threw at it, which you’d expect based on the price. It is quite large though, so make sure you’ve got enough space for it. It doesn’t get too loud unless you start manually boosting the fans and the cooling seems sufficient, otherwise the only issue I personally had was while fully using both graphics cards and all 18 CPU cores under stress test with overclocks applied which would cause the system to reboot, so the 1000 watt power supply may not be enough to handle full load while overclocked, no issues while just using it for gaming though, or while at stock speeds and under the same stress tests.
Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments.