Acer's new RTX 4090-powered PC is puny but hella powerful
Phenomenal cosmic power. Itty bitty living space. We give you the new Acer Predator Orion X, an Nvidia RTX 4090-powered gaming PC crammed into a puny 15.4-liter box.
Oh, and you also get an Intel Core i9 13900KS clocked up at 6GHz. Ouch. It's all possible thanks to water cooling throughout. The CPU gets a pretty standard 240mm AIO solution, but hooking that RTX 4090 up to liquid coolness took a little more effort.
Essentially, Acer has built a full water cooling solution into what looks like a standard GPU air cooler, albeit the cooler size on any RTX 4090 is obviously pretty monstrous. If anything, however, Acer's water-cooled RTX 4090 looks to be a little shorter than your typical 12-foot RTX 4090.
More generally, the Predator Orion X's mini-ITX box is split into three zones, the better to both control thermals and also enable access to the tightly package internals. Zone one is for the CPU PSU and SSD, zone two contains the GPU plus dual SATA slots and zone three houses the 240mm AIO cooler.
Styling wise, the all-metal chassis has a sci-fi space-capsule vibe and plenty of pop-off panels. Further highlights include a hot-swappable M.2 slot, up to 32GB of DDR5 RAM and some relatively low-key RGB lighting.
As for pricing, the fun kicks off at $2,999 but Acer hasn't released the full damage for the RTX 4090 version of the Predator Orion X. It's likely in "if you have to ask, you probably can't afford it" territory, however. Still, as these things go, this looks like a particularly well engineered effort. And that custom water-cooled RTX 4090 is a pretty trick, just on its own.
Meanwhile Acer has also announced that it's getting in on the 34-inch ultrawide OLED gaming monitor action. The Acer Predator X34 V looks very likely to be based on the same Samsung QD-OLED panel as the Alienware AW3423DW and Philips Evnia 34M2C8600 .
The slight snag is that Acer is pricing it up at $1,299, which is significantly more than the competition.
It's hard to compute what would justify that premium position. Any time you've got something similar to but priced higher than an Alienware product, you know some reassessment is in order. But maybe, just maybe, Acer is doing something special and different to justify the price.