Acer Predator Orion 7000 2025 review - a well-built, quiet PC in a decent case

Despite the cheesy cyber-Sauron Predator logo on its front, the Acer Predator Orion 7000 feels like it's been designed by a team of genuine PC hardware enthusiasts, unlike many mass-produced gaming PCs. It has a massive 360mm AIO cooler to keep its CPU cool, and its full-size tempered glass side panel provides a premium window onto a tidy PC build with RGB lighting agogo. Even the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card is vertically mounted in a PCIe riser, and with plenty of room to breathe as well.

This Acer PC's looks aren't quite up there with the latest aquarium-style cases from the likes of Hyte, but there's decent airflow, and the machine has a real heft to it when you pull it out of the box, thanks to the large amount of metal in the chassis - it's a far cry from the plasticky cases and messy wiring you sometimes see in mainstream gaming desktops. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been running several of the latest games on the Predator Orion 7000 to see how well it copes with them, as well as benchmarking application software, to see if this machine is a contender for our best gaming PC guide. 

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Specs

The key component in this Acer machine's spec is, of course, that Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card, which sits proudly in its vertical mount with all three of its fans on full display. This GPU is as fast as you can get unless you can stump up the cash for the mighty RTX 5090, and I found it to be a formidable GPU in my full RTX 5080 review. In terms of specs, it's basically half an RTX 5090, which means it can struggle in some games if you max them out at 4K, but it's a fantastic card for gaming at 2,560 x 1,440.

It has 10,752 CUDA cores, which are the tiny processors that work in parallel to render the graphics in your games - the more the better, and this is plenty for most people's gaming needs. It also has 16GB of super-fast GDDR7 VRAM, which is fine for 1440p gaming, although you'll push the limits of this amount of memory if you max out demanding games at 4K with path tracing enabled. There are rumors that an RTX 5080 Super is on the way, with 24GB of VRAM and an otherwise-identical GPU, but the original RTX 5080 is still a great performer.

This graphics card also fully supports the full Nvidia DLSS 4 suite, which means it can handle multi-frame gen, Nvidia's clever new tech that uses the GPU's AI cores to insert up to three extra frames between the ones genuinely rendered by the GPU. It's not a fix for a bad frame rate, but if your GPU is already running at a decent pace, this tech works really well to smooth out the frame rate further, looking great if you have a monitor with a fast refresh rate.

The CPU is less special, with this Acer machine employing an Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF, which is basically the same as the 265K, but the "F" on the end of the model name denotes that it's had its integrated GPU disabled. In my Core Ultra 7 265K review, I found that this chip was massively more power-efficient than Intel's previous chips, and it ran surprisingly cool as well. However, it also lagged behind other CPUs in our gaming benchmarks, not only struggling to beat AMD's latest chips, but even Intel's previous 14th-gen Raptor Lake CPUs.

It's not a disastrous inclusion - as we'll see in the benchmarks later on, the power of the GPU means you can still play games well on this system, but it's disappointing that Acer hasn't used one of AMD's new X3D CPUs here, such as the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which are much stronger when it comes to gaming performance.

On the plus side, the CPU is cooled by a powerful AIO cooler, which looks great with its RGB fans and glowing Predator logo on the pump unit. What's more, it has a massive 360mm radiator mounted in the roof of the case, providing loads of cooling capacity without needing to employ fast (and noisy) fan speeds. Indeed, during stress testing in Cinebench, the system remained surprisingly quiet, and the CPU temperature never went above an absolute peak of 84°C (most of the core temperatures were considerably lower).

Another decent inclusion is the 32GB of Orion-branded RGB memory, which is actually made by Adata, using SK Hynix chips, and runs at 6,000MT/s (with CL40 latency timings). That's a good step above the vanilla 5,200MT/s sticks you sometimes see in mass-produced gaming PCs.

Meanwhile, storage comes in the form of a 2TB OEM SK Hynix SSD, which is mounted in the M.2 slot above the graphics card. It's a PCIe 4.0 SSD, rather than a new PCIe 5.0 one, and it looks pretty basic with its bare PCB and sticker, with no heatsink attached to it. However, it does give you a decent amount of storage space, and I tested it as running at respective sequential read and write speeds of 7,097MB/s and 6,498MB/s in CrystalDiskMark, so it's still quick.

Finally, while the I/O plate on the back looks a bit sparse compared to some of the latest motherboards, it does cover all the essentials. You get five standard-size Type-A USB ports, with two USB 2 ports you can use for devices where speed doesn't matter, such as printers and gaming mice, and three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports you can use for quicker devices, offering a top speed of 10Gbps. There's also a high-speed Thunderbolt 4 USB-C port here, which can be handy for connecting multiple devices to one port to minimize cable clutter, while offering a huge bandwidth of up to 40Gbps.

Design

I'll be honest, I normally expect to be underwhelmed by the design and build quality of mass-produced gaming PCs, as they often lack the attention to detail you find in a build from an independent system builder, but the Acer Predator Orion 7000 is a refreshingly good build. The case might be a massive monolith, and the Predator helmet logo might look a bit cheesy, but it otherwise looks great.

The tinted, full-size tempered glass side panel offers a view into the interior so you can see all the RGB lighting, and the vertically-mounted graphics card looks striking too. It's plugged into a PCIe riser that plugs into the motherboard's top 16x PCIe 5.0 slot, with its 12VHPWR cable neatly plugged into the top, and there's plenty of room for the graphics card's fans to breathe before the air gets blocked by the glass panel.

If there's one oddity about the graphics card choice, it's that the bland, all-black design of the card's front doesn't really lend itself to being viewed in a vertical mount behind a glass panel. If it were a colorful card with RGB lighting on the front, you could understand it, but the only lighting sits behind the GeForce logo on the top edge, and even that's largely obscured by the vertical mount if you look at it from the side. This particular graphics card would arguably look better just slotted into the motherboard as normal, without the PCIe riser.

The other downside of the vertical GPU mount, of course, is that it blocks access to the rest of the motherboard, although most people are unlikely to use extra PCIe slots these days, and there is still at least room to install your own choice of the best gaming SSD in the two spare PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 slots on the board. The top M.2 slot, where you'll currently find the SK Hynix drive, also supports PCIe 5.0, so you could potentially move this drive to one of the other slots and install a high-speed PCIe 5.0 drive with a heatsink here later.

Meanwhile, a cleverly-positioned cable tidying plate in the top right of the interior enables Acer to hide a lot of the wires from sight, resulting in a tidy build - it looks massively better than the interior of the Alienware Aurora R16, which had a mess of GPU cables clearly visible behind its plastic window.

All the lights look good too, and there are a lot of them, with three RGB fans in the front, one in the back, and three in the roof, plus the distinctive RGB Acer Predator logo emanating from the AIO cooler's pump unit. All the lighting is directly controllable from the Acer PredatorSense software app, from which you can choose a wide range of effects, including static, breathing, wave, and rainbow motions, along with the speed and color of the lighting and transitions. Weirdly, the RAM RGB lighting is found in a separate area from the fans, but you can get it all synced up and looking good to match your setup.

PredatorSense also allows you to pick from several different performance profiles, from quiet to turbo, all with different fan speeds. I ran all our benchmarks at the Balanced profile setting, as that's the default, but the machine ran impressively quietly throughout all our benchmarks, and without any disturbing temperature spikes either.

You'll need to make sure you have room for this system's massive case, but it's a much tidier build than the smaller Alienware Aurora, and it's great to have a genuine tempered-glass panel on the side as well. Removing this panel to access the interior isn't a tooless job, but it's not too much hassle - you just remove two Philips type-2 screws and push down a big block on the back, and there's an audible clunk as the panel comes free.

Benchmarks

Thanks to its mightily powerful GPU, the Acer Orion 7000 can generate some excellent frame rates in the latest games at top settings, even at 4K in some cases, but it's at 2,560 x 1,440 where it really shines. Let's start with Doom The Dark Ages, which has the benefit of supporting the new Nvidia DLSS 4 suite in full, and runs really well on this GPU. Running it at the great-looking Ultra Nightmare settings at 1440p results in a 104fps average and an 80fps 1% low, and that's without any help from DLSS.

That also gives you plenty of headroom to increase the frame rate further with DLSS, and with upscaling set to Quality, and multi-frame-gen maxed out, the Acer Orion 7000 clocked up an amazing average of 339fps, while the latency remained responsive enough at 28ms. The game feels quick and responsive at these settings, and it looks super-smooth.

You can even run the game at 4K at the Ultra Nightmare preset, where it averages 60fps without DLSS, and 88fps with DLSS at the Quality setting. Enabling multi-frame gen here pushes the average up to 228fps, but the latency also increases from 25ms to 38ms. If you really want to give this machine a workout, you can also enable the highly demanding path-tracing mode, which engages an advanced form of ray tracing to give you super-realistic lighting.

We recommend enabling DLSS on the Balanced setting if you're going to enable this mode, as it's very demanding, and DLSS 4 on the Balanced setting still looks good, as it uses Nvidia's new Transformer model. Running these settings at 1440p resulted in an average of 75fps with 1% lows of 61fps, and it's perfectly playable, with the latency at 31ms. Enabling multi-frame gen pushes the average up to 217fps, but the resulting 41ms latency starts to bite into responsiveness at this point.

Likewise, the great-looking, but GPU-punishing, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle runs great on this machine. Run it at the Ultra preset, and it will happily run at 93fps at 4K and 142fps at 2,560 x 1,440. You can also max it out at the Supreme setting with path tracing enabled with the Full RT settings, where it averages 73fps if you set DLSS to Quality. It just about runs at 1440p with these settings too, averaging 56fps, with a 45fps 1% low. Enabling multi-frame gen at these settings really increases the latency, though, which we measured at 52fps.

In all honesty, I'd just run this game at the standard Ultra preset without any of the path tracing and AI trickery. It looks fantastic, and it runs really smoothly at 4K without any need for DLSS.

This PC also had no trouble running Call of Duty Black Ops 6 at the Extreme graphics preset, averaging 147fps at 1440p with the latency measured at just 16ms, and 102fps at 4K with 20ms latency. This game does support DLSS upscaling and frame gen as well, but you don't need it.

Finally, the veteran GPU beater, Cyberpunk 2077, also runs well on this machine, with the benefit of full support for DLSS 4. Enable the ultra ray tracing preset at 2,560 x 1,440, and set DLSS to Quality, and the game looks superb and runs at 97fps.

You can then enable multi-frame gen, and watch the frame rate leap to over 300fps, while the latency remains reasonable at 34ms. 4K is a bit too much of a stretch for this machine, but it looks great at 1440p. You can even enable the Overdrive setting with full path tracing, and DLSS set on Balanced, and it averages a solid 83fps, with a 63fps 1% low and latency of 28ms.

This is all good, but it's frustrating that it could have been better if Acer had used an AMD X3D CPU, rather than an Intel Arrow Lake chip. As a point of comparison, an RTX 5080 on our last-gen AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D test rig averages 70fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p with the Ultra ray tracing preset, and no DLSS, compared with 64fps on this machine. The difference isn't disastrous, but it's significant, and it hurts the value of this machine when it comes to gaming.

On the plus side, the 20-core Intel CPU is definitely quicker than the eight-core Ryzen 7 9800X3D when it comes to multi-threaded application software. Running Cinebench R24, the Acer Orion 7000 produced a multi-threaded score of 1,849, while the 9800X3D only hits 1,361 in this test, and the lower-clocked 7800X3D only scores 1,059. If you use a lot of heavily multi-threaded software, perhaps for video encoding or 3D rendering, then this CPU's extra cores help it out. It's just a shame the gaming performance lags behind.

Price

The Acer Predator Orion 7000 price is £3,299 for the spec we reviewed. US pricing hasn't been announced for the new updated range with Nvidia Blackwell GPUs yet, but the UK price works out at around $3,700 once you've removed VAT from the UK price and converted the currency. The previous Orion 7000 with an RTX 4080 and Core i7 13700KF cost $3,799 at launch, so we expect the new PC to launch in the same ballpark.

We'll stick to the UK price for comparisons, as it's a known quantity, but it's expensive for the specs on offer. Comparatively, an Alienware Aurora R16 with the same CPU and GPU, plus 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD, costs £2,998.99, and is currently on offer for £2,498.99. The Acer might offer a superior build, but it's hard to justify spending an extra £300 on it.

Head to independent UK system builder Scan, and you can get a system with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, a 360mm AIO cooler, 32GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD, and an RTX 5080 for £2,799.98, and it has a nicer-looking case too. At MSRP, the Acer Predator Orion 7000 is simply too expensive, but it's worth considering if you find it on offer for a significantly reduced price.

Alternatives

Alienware Aurora R16

Alienware's compact space-age rig takes up less space on your desk than the Orion 7000, and it has a cheaper price for the same core spec as well, especially if you can find it on offer. It doesn't have the genuine tempered glass side panel and premium metal chassis of the Orion, and the cable tidying was slapdash in our review sample, but it still looks good, and it offers similarly solid gaming performance.

Read our full Alienware Aurora R16 review for more information.

Verdict

It's a shame the price of the Acer Orion 7000 is so high, as I'm otherwise pleasantly surprised by the quality of this gaming PC. The chassis is sturdy, the interior is tidy and well designed, and Acer has balanced airflow and cooling really well, resulting in a quiet-running system that doesn't overheat. This PC might be a massive glowing monolith, but it looks good and it's well built.

Meanwhile, the specs are largely on point, with a great GPU, a decent memory configuration, and plenty of storage space. It's also good to see a really powerful AIO CPU cooler used in the build, and the 1,200W PSU gives you plenty of headroom to upgrade to an RTX 5090 at a later date.

There are two issues, though. One is the choice of CPU, which would be fine for an all-purpose PC that's largely aimed at productivity, but there are much better gaming CPU choices from the AMD stable right now. The other is the price, which is considerably higher than the cost of a similar-spec PC from either Alienware or an independent system builder. As a result, it doesn't offer great value at its standard price, but it's absolutely worth considering if you can find it cheaper.

That brings me to the end of this PC review, but if you're interested in which CPUs are better choices for gaming, check out our guide to the best gaming CPU, where we take you through all our favorite chips right now.