Acer Predator Orion 3000 review

Reviews should always start with the most essential information, so here it is: you can’t store your precious collection of gently used cricket balls on your Acer Predator Orion 3000. Why not? Because he leans back and they land on the floor. The front support foot is slightly higher than the rear, which causes it to swing out about 10 degrees if a fun 10 minutes spent with a level and a kid’s protractor yielded the correct results.

This means you can still put your coffee mug on top, provided it’s not too full, but also that if you’re buying this smaller-than-average tower PC with the intention of it flush with your furniture, that won’t happen. This may or may not be a problem depending on how picky you are about these things, but the Predator logo sticking out from the front and looking rather like a cross between Space Invader and Decepticon means you may want to push it a little further.

Despite the drunken thinness, it’s not a bad case. Access to the front panel ports is effortless, there’s some RGB behind the logo, and the case is nicely compact at 28 liters, although it’s slightly larger than previous Orion 3000 cases, which were 26 liters. Off-the-shelf PCs in smaller cases can have a reputation for losing performance unless their cooling solutions are particularly well-designed, but a plain fan placed above the CPU may be the least of the Orion 3000’s problems in this case.

For starters, as I write this, the 2025 Christmas tree is already in great shape, and here’s the 14th Gen Raptor Lake PC that launched in January 2024. It must be admitted that it is quite good, with 20 cores, 28 threads and a maximum turbo frequency of 5.3 GHz. It boots up incredibly quickly from frosty, and even after passing a set of PCG benchmarks, it never got sizzling, which is remarkable when you look inside and see a regular RGB fan above the CPU, with no giant heatsink in sight.

That’s what’s good. Now for some criticism. Even though the Airdisk APF10-001 SSD in Orion 3000 is built on a PCIe 4.0 motherboard, it runs at PCIe 3.0 speeds and only 16GB of DDR4-3000 RAM is installed.

Is this a cost-cutting measure for Acer to put its compact gaming PC in the financial abyss, or a brutal indictment of the way the PC component industry has been cannibalized by the insatiable demands of AI data centers? Or both? Either way, it feels like the PC has fallen through the world’s most unfortunate time portal, skipping two consecutive years of the decline of Western civilization and reemerging just in time to witness its gradual aging.

There isn’t much room for improvement either. Remove the side panel (which requires a screwdriver instead of thumbscrews) and you’ll see that the SSD is hidden behind the GPU, but it can be replaced at the same time you replace the card – the 850W PSU allows for some headroom. It’s also a strange feeling as we enter 2026, open the computer case and see RAM sticks without RGB, branding or even heat spreaders. There’s no high-speed I/O, either, with just one 10Gbps USB-C port (on the front and easily accessible) and a few Type-A ports — including four USB 2.0. Sorry Thunderbolt fans, there’s nothing for you here. You also get an old-fashioned green and purple PS/2 keyboard and mouse connector, which makes you wonder where Acer dug up this motherboard.

Still, the RTX 5070 with 12GB of VRAM provides some decent pixel-shifting power for 1440p gaming, and the processor really isn’t that bad. It will deliver almost 60fps in ultra ray tracing mode in Cyberpunk, almost 90fps in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and with a little upscaling you’ll be able to play Blackmyth: Wukong at 70fps. All this without having to touch the frame generator, which will easily double the frame rate in Cyberpunk 2077. It actually performs slightly better in games with circumscribed graphics cards than I expected, staying close to the results posted by machines equipped with the RTX 5070Ti and even the RTX 5080 in Avatar and beating those equipped with the RX 9070 XT.

And while it would be effortless to criticize Acer’s choice of a stock CPU fan and single-input, single-output fan array to frigid the Orion 3000, there’s no denying that it works. The maximum operating temperature of the i7 is 100°C, but I have never seen it exceed 92°C. The maximum GPU temperature was around 72°C, which is right around the middle of the incredibly intricate spreadsheet where Dave stores this data, and the idle temperature was much lower.

The downside to this isn’t that it gets particularly raucous – there aren’t enough fans for that – but that it makes a strange, grating sound that I’ve never quite gotten to the bottom of. Hours of holding my ear to the side of the case during testing suggest it’s the GPU and that’s a bit concerning, but none of the fans went black and it didn’t seem to have any impact on performance. Desktop computers often have features you don’t see in laptops, and this is one of them.

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Which brings us to values. The RTX 5070 is a popular card among DIY builders, but less popular among pre-built desktop PCs. The performance you get for your money is actually quite good, especially if you can buy it at a discount. The choice of components helps keep the price low without forcing you to play at 1080p, although if this is your first foray into PC gaming you’ll need to factor in the added cost of one of the best 1440p gaming monitors and a mouse and keyboard. For a similar price, you can buy Acer’s Helios Neo 16 AI gaming laptop, which has better specs on paper but isn’t capable of achieving the same frame rate as a desktop PC.

It’s pretty clear where the corners were cut on Orion 3000, but maybe…maybe– PC gaming doesn’t have to involve localized power outages if you want to play the game because you only employ the latest and greatest components. Perhaps the point is to just have fun and not analyze every frame and discard the ones that aren’t 4K Ultra.

Perhaps, although it’s unlikely, you won’t have to spend money until your wallet is depleted to enjoy the best PC games have to offer. This is where desktop computers like the Orion 3000 come in, and they do quite well as long as you don’t want to store cricket balls on them.

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