Acer Predator Orion 7000 review

The large, black case of a real tower PC – without all the SFF and aquarium nonsense – is a pretty thing. It’s also weighty and uncomfortable, but that’s the price you pay for having everything you need in a gaming PC, as well as adequate airflow. Acer case for 2025 Predator Orion 7000 is a perfect example of this type. It’s large and roomy, weighs a ton, has enough glass to satisfy your curiosity about what’s going on inside, and three illuminated fans on the front to keep it looking good.

There are three more fans at the top – the CPU is liquid-cooled via AIO – the intake is at the back, and the GPU is mounted vertically, making its cooling system apparent. This is a computer that leaves no doubt that it can dissipate heat.

The front of the computer is the part you’ll see most often, so Acer has opted to place the 3D Predator logo behind a clear front panel that proudly showcases the case itself, which is a mesh molding that allows heated air to escape around the edges, and on top is a good, deep power button that’s basic to find by digging around under the desk.

It’s also a well-equipped case, with a removable holder for a second SSD that simply slides out of the top when you lift the latch (though you’ll need a screwdriver to place the M2 drive in it), and four USB ports on the top. And thanks to the RTX 5080 GPU, there are enough video ports to support four monitors.

What are you NO get multiple I/O options on the rear panel, with only one USB4 port and no external Wi-Fi antenna ports. Due to the vertical design of the graphics card, any available M2 slots on the motherboard are blocked, making this expansion tray a godsend for anyone who doesn’t feel like digging around inside their PC.

You can replace the boot drive, but only if you are bothered by the thought of not having the best solutions. In our tests, the SK Hynix drive achieved a perfectly reasonable speed of around 7,000 MB/s in the CrystalDiskMark test – which is around the high end among PCIe 4.0 drives – but in the 3DMark storage test it fell well tiny of even the slowest drives tested last year. With an average throughput score of 151.41 MB/s, it ranks at the bottom of the desktop rankings.

The drive has no heatsink, which is not uncommon for a PCIe 4.0 drive, but the drive sits in the M2’s PCIe 5.0 slot and is easily accessible. Like RAM: The PC shipped for testing has 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory, but it can take up 128GB at 7200 MT/s, which means a quick refresh in a few years when prices have calmed down a bit could be a shortcut to a slight performance boost.

The space inside and the extra airflow it provides is certainly effective in cooling. Fan noise isn’t a problem – Cinebench 2024 benchmark really hurts desktops and can make laptop fans spin like a roulette wheel in a hellish casino. The AIO in the Orion 7000 is a different matter, and on the afternoon we tested, the rain on the roof of the test lab was louder than the rain falling on the fans.

The CPU liquid cooling uses a 3400 rpm pump, a 360 mm radiator and an “extra thick” cooling plate that allows more space in the internal channels for coolant flow. It’s clearly doing something, because in the Cinebench Ultra 7 multi-core test it overtook the Ultra 9 275K and the holy Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Only the Ultra 9 285K in the Corsair One i600, with two 240mm liquid coolers and four extra cores (24 vs 20, same number of P cores backed by extra E cores), beats it here.

The same applies to the graphics card. The RTX 5080 may have struggled at launch, but it has established itself as an effective high-end graphics card, especially when you factor in tricks like multi-frame generation. It shares the RTX 5080 with the Corsair One, but it excels in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, generating an average of 15 more frames per second in the 1440p test.

It delivers the best performance we’ve seen from a 5080 in Ubisoft’s furious Smurf, only beaten in benchmarks by the RTX 5090. In Cyberpunk 2077, it matches the Corsair in average frame rate, although its lows of 1% are lower. Upgrade Cyberpunk to 4K and you’ll be able to get 99 frames per second at the ultra quality ray tracing setting using DLSS quality mode and dual frame generation.

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Arrow Lake processors are easier to frigid than their Raptor Lake predecessors, and Acer’s thickened AIO cooling plate helps keep heated spots in check. During the three-time benchmark test, the Metro Exodus barely broke a sweat, reaching an average of 53°C and a maximum of 62°C – almost the coldest temperature PCG has ever recorded in this test.

Buying a gigantic, pre-built gaming PC like this will come down to price, and at £3,299 or US equivalent (almost four and a half grand) that’s a lot of money to spend in one go. That said, the Corsair One with a slightly better processor and smaller form factor is almost the same price, so we could look at the market price as we enter 2026, a year in which RAM prices explode, even if graphics cards aren’t as infrequent as they once were.

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