Acer Predator 21 X review: The most insane laptop ever built - dilleythadmories87
There are three things you should immediately know most Acer's Piranha 21 X laptop. First, IT's easy the fastest laptop we've ever seen. Period.
Indorsement, it's the widest laptop we've ever seen: 22.4 inches wide, 12.4 inches deep, and 2.71 inches to 3.28 inches in high spirits, front to back.
And third: It's the most expensive laptop computer we've seen in a age. Sure, at $9,000, you'd think it would be the priciest ever in PCWorld history, but a 1990-era 286 laptop that cost $6,000 adjusted for ostentatiousness would make up $11,367 today. So, the Predator 21 X is almost a muckle, right?
Just in earnest, Acer's Predator 21 X isn't meant to be a mainstream product. Hell, it's not even meant to be a high-ending product. Information technology's the very definition of a showcase, low-volume, high-profile "halo" ware, intended to show that Acer can produce the biggest, baddest laptop computer happening the major planet. And Acer's done just that.
Gordon Mah Ung/IDG Only 300 Predator 21X leave be made. This unit is No. 21.yup
Features: Everything inside the Predator 21 X
The most striking boast of the Predator 21 X is its 21-column inch curved screen. The dialog box is 2560×1080, and supports G-Synchronise with a refresh pace of 120Hz. The countertenor refreshen rate and G-Sync way everything is simply smoother—from gaming to just moving windows and scrolling a browser windows. Once you've victimized a high refresh-rate panel, you never want to go back down.
The panel has decent off-axis patronise and a light anti-glare finish, just it won't win any color accuracy contests. It is decently bright, though—we measured its maximum brightness at 420 nits.
We more often than not prefer curved screens to flat screens—along extremist-wide panels measuring 34 inches. At 21 inches, the curve—rated at 2000R—doesn't make a huge difference to our eyes, but information technology certainly adds to the style of the Predator 21 X.
Gordon Mah Ung/IDG The screen door is a 2000R curved screen.
To drive that 2.8-megapixel screen, Acer stuffs atomic number 102 fewer than two GeForce GTX 1080 card game inside, in SLI mode. There's also a quadriceps-core Core i7-7820HK, 64GB of DDR4/2400, ii Toshiba 512GB NVMe M.2 drives, and a 1TB hard drive. It's hard to quibble with that some storage, but if we had to complain, we'd tell the hard drive is to a fault small at 1TB. It looks like the thickest disc drive you behind turn in the Predator 21 X is a 9.5mm HDD, which tops out at 2TB today.
The saintlike tidings is there's two free M.2 slots that are easily accessible erstwhile you remove the service entrance on the bottom of the laptop. The bad word they lock only at SATA speeds.
Gordon Mah Ung/IDG The bottom of the Predatory animal 21X gives you easy access to the gumption that you might actually swap out.
Keyboard and trackpad
The Vulture 21 X features a full-height automatonlike keyboard using Cherry Maxwell Brown switches. Acer isn't the archetypical laptop maker to integrate full-height mechanical keys, of course, but it's a nice touch. The keys are individually RGB-lit, too. If you don't like the colored WASD keys, Genus Acer includes more sedate melanise keys in the box.
Gordon Mah Ung/IDG Cherry Mx brown switches will keep your fingers happy. The keys are RGB and Acer includes more tranquillis black keys in the box.
There's an integrated Tobii EyeX eye tracker below the display, and a rather unique trackpad. The trackpad is cancel to the right of the keys, but Acer knows any gamer worth a damn won't use up a trackpad to play, so the trackpad buttocks be flipped over (it's attached via magnets) to break a 10-significant footslog. The keys are not mechanical, simply we won't get picky.
Gordon Mah Ung/IDG An offset trackpad can be flipped over to let ou a 10-key pad. Magnets hold it in place.
Ports and power
The Piranha 21 X pours on the ports: one Thunderbolt 3, quatern USB 3.0 Typecast A, two DisplayPort, and peerless HDMI 2.0.There's also an SD Card reader, Gigabit ethernet, a Kensington lock away expansion slot, and analog mic and headphone larboard.
As you rump imagine, every last of this hardware takes a sizeable amount of power to run. Because no external bricks are free in sizes larger than 330 watts, Genus Acer uses the old trick of slaving two 330-watt bricks in concert. Each brick gets its own port in back. Both are identical, so at that place's no specific regularise for plugging them in.
Gordon Mah Ung/IDG The Marauder 21X runs on ii 330 James Watt bricks that tail end stylishly be held put together victimization the included X-attribute rubber coupler.
In a signboard of how some thought Acer put into the Predator 21 X, the company includes a rubberize symbolise the Actinium adapters, emblazoned with the Predator logo and wrought in an X. For the interest of appearance and neatness, it's a nice touch you'd gestate of a premium machine.
Power consumption itself, for what it's worth, generally sat in the 400-watt range under a graphically intense workload such as Furmark. We ran into unrivalled interesting behavior: If you drive the GPUs baffling running Furmark, with the CPU and GPUs overclocked, and then suddenly pull the plug, the Predator 21 X immediately cut power to the laptop. For any other laptop, you'd expect it to switch over to the inward battery. But considering the Predator 21 X's formidable top executive load, it's probably safest to tally full stop rather than shove a 400-watt load onto the onboard batteries in a millisecond.
When there wasn't a load on the Marauder 21 X, the laptop would deport in a more civil matter. Unplugging the laptop would turn off the overclock and severely ratchet back the GPU time speeds.
IDG The Predator 21X's size lets it hold very high overclocks without superficial like an F-22 on afterburners.
Other upgrades
You already know about the two M.2 SATA slots under the bottommost service door. But there's also more computer hardware you can replace on the top. Just remove extraordinary have sex and carefully pull dispatch the the personalized plate, and you can replace the tricky crusade (again, limited only to 9.5mm) and replace the RAM if you need to.
Gordon Mah Ung/IDG You buttocks easily access the hard drive and RAM from the top.
Functioning: Powerful, even still relatively quiet
Gaming laptops have come a long way in just two eld, and so have consumer expectations. Two years past, loud and gaming went hand-in-give. Nowadays, people want their gaming as tiptoe as possible. As luck would have it you get that with the Predator 21 X, which can bring on the GPU and CPU loads without full corresponding a Huey chopper is taking dispatch in front of you.
This May non good like a big deal to you, simply keeping this much hardware cool under consignment is an impressive achievement. Sure, Acer's undertaking is made easier attributable the plain size of the laptop, but it's still something the company should begin cite for.
Gordon Mah Ung/IDG The back of the Piranha 21X follows the aggressive lines seen in most gaming laptops today.
Cinebench R15 Performance
Our first test is Maxon's popular Cinebench 15 benchmark. Information technology's a benchmark based on the company's Cinema4D engine and scales well with clock speed and core and thread count. Mostly, quad cores are quad cores, and the performance is predictable for the laptops you see here.
The Predator 21 X at its stock speed is slightly edged out by the MSI GT73VR by about 4 percent. Overclock the Predator 21 X using the collective-in "Turbo" preset, though, and it spits out a final result 20 pct faster.
IDG Mostly, quad-core laptops tend to pack group up in multi-threaded tasks simply the overclock on the Predator 21X gives IT a good interpose performance.
Handbrake Performance
Most people don't do 3D rendition, though, so we also gauge CPU performance using the free and popular Handbrake encoder. For this test, we take a 30GB 1080p MKV file and convert IT using the Android Tablet preset. Like Cinebench, Handbrake loves CPU time fastness and CPU thread and core count.
But different Cinebench R15, which runs in conscionable a minute or three, Handbrake can take 45 transactions to run on a quad-inwardness, and well in excess of an hour to run happening a dual-core. On small laptops, this is a dispute for their cooling systems. On giant gaming laptops, it's rattling no sweat at all.
Again, the GT73VR pulls ahead slightly. (We suspect both Central processing unit results were overclocked results, merely we no thirster undergo the laptop to check.) And just like with Cinebench R15, when you run the Predator 21 X in its Turbo preset, it's clearly in front of the pack. Everyone's close enough, though, that the differences don't matter much.
IDG Connected a long encoding task, the overclock again gives the Predator 21X the nod in performance but it's not like it's a 6-core laptop computer.
Midsection-earth: Dwarf of Mordor Performance
You don't buy a laptop comparable the Predator 21 X unless you want top-notch gambling performance, so our first gaming test is Middle-earthly concern: Phantasm of Mordor. We run the game at 1920×1080 resolution using the Ultra preset and the optional 4K texture coterie.
As with the C.P.U. benchmarks, we ran this test with the Mainframe and GPU both coiffur to the Turbo overclock preset. The hike up is fairly significant during the overclock.
If you look at the results here a little harder, you may be skeptical of the Predator 21 X's art chops. Afterward each, the stock performance is a jolly marginal come ou over the MSI GT73VR and its single GPU.
Some of the lack of richness is likely due to the resolution we coiffe for this game. We run most of our really-globe gaming tests at resolutions that most gaming laptops digest: 1920×1080. The Predator's 120Hz G-Sync panel has a native resolution of 2560×1080 which is about 2.7 1000000 pixels, vs. the 2 million pixels of an FHD panel. Continual Middle-earth at its native resolution and smooth overclocked, we adage the Marauder 21 X actually spit out 198 fps, compared to 190 at 1920×1080. Even though it was interpretation 30 percent many pixels, the duple GTX 1080's were still paying off significant dividends. In fact, dual GTX 1080's probably father't really get a physical exercise until you're playing games at 4K or continual multiple monitors at low resolutions.
IDG The Predator 21X is king of Capitol Hill, but its performance is a slight handcuffed by the relatively low resolution we test at.
Rise of the Tomb Raider Performance
The hard Truth everyone should know when considering an SLI laptop computer is just how many games brush off multi-GPU backing. We ran Rise of the Tomb Plunderer at 1920×1080 using the Rattling Tall preset and in DirectX 11 style. If you look away at the chart downstairs, you'll insure that SLI ready-made a conflict in this game—it depressed performance.
With SLI enabled, performance in Rise of the Grave Raider was 95 fps. With SLI off (without overclocking), carrying out jumps to 115 fps, which is connected a par with the MSI GT73VR and its GTX 1080 GPU.
What gives? Fewer and fewer games are optimizing for Nvidia's SLI, and it's opening to show. Of course, you backside disable one of the GPUs to get normal carrying out, but at that point, you're getting nothing for all the money you paid for an SLI configuration.
IDG Rise of the Tomb Raider runs slower under SLI.
3DMark Firestrike Extreme Performance
Still, there are many games that do indeed get a decent performance extrusion from SLI, and even extraordinary new games support it. If you actually want to feel worthy, you can also run the celluloid 3DMark benchmark. Information technology scales very well with multiple GPUs, and we can see what's possible theoretically.
IDG Futuremark's 3DMark shows off how speeding GTX 1080's in SLI can be in possibility. Obviously, not all games will be as effective.
Barrage fire life
Our last essa measures how long a laptop volition play a looped 4K video at 250 to 260 nits.
Yes, the Marauder 21 X has a electric battery—a the right way sized 89-watt-hour tank. But no surprise, a 21-edge in, 120Hz panel united with two GeForce GTX 1080 cards, RAID M.2 storage, and a quad-core CPU substance dismal battery life. How dismal? It's actually the pessimum we've seen from a gaming laptop computer in video playback.
Should you upkeep? Believably not. Video playback is i of the lightest chores a laptop can perform today. If we were to play games on whatsoever of the laptops below, we wouldn't expect many than an hour along any of them. Sol, Eastern Samoa bad as this looks like, if you'Re buying a gambling laptop this powerful to toy a video on a even, you bought the wrong laptop.
IDG Pushing ii GPUs, a quad-core CPU, RAIDed M.2 drives and a 21-in 120Hz panel consumes a lot of power.
It's thus braggart, it has its own incase
We've seen gaming laptops so immense, they come with their personal behemoth backpacks. For the Predator 21 X, that isn't decent. It is, after all, an 18.7-pound laptop with another 6.5 pounds' worth of power bricks. When you add in the brick coupling and magnetically attached wrist rest, you want wheels. For all that, Acer includes a custom-made rolling Pelican case.
Gordon Mah Ung/IDG The Predator 21 X comes with a swanky and durable Pelican reverberant grammatical case.
If you know your hard cases, Pelican is unrivaled of the premium makers. The case features swing-outs and compartments for all your parts. One matter we do wish Acer had done was to leave a bit room for other accessories, such American Samoa a gaming-grade pussyfoot. (Check unsuccessful our roundup of the best gaming mice.)
Gordon Mah Ung/IDG The Acer includes a customized Pelican case with cutouts for your computer hardware.
Decision
Normally our review is supposed to tell you whether to bribe this product. Answering that question for the Predator 21 X seems simpleton: probably not. But the actual answer is to a greater extent complicated.
For the price of the Predatory animal 21 X, you could buy a "normal" gaming laptop and have enough left over to buy nicely built gaming desktop, too. Or a used car, or individual months' worth of rent on your apartment. But that attitude misses the entire point of the Predator 21 X. It's not for you Beaver State me, operating theater the genial of person World Health Organization gets weak-kneed over a good hardware bargain on Slickdeals.
No, if you're the kind of person who is even considering a $9,000 gaming laptop computer, you probably too take a whirlybird to the Burj Al Arab and have the bellhop rolling wave your Predator 21 X adequate the Presidential Suite for you. So, yes, if that's you and you need something to get your game connected, information technology would be hard to find a Thomas More appropriately excessive gaming laptop computer than the Predator 21 X. The rest of the States can just keep dreaming.
Gordon Mah Ung/IDG Acer's jumbo Predator 21 X doesn't disappoint.
Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/407225/acer-predator-21-x-review.html
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