Gear

Tested: Predator Orion 3000 i7 32GB 2070 gaming rig will make you forget PC part-pickers

Admin December 24, 2020

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I’m usually a Mac user and have been for decades. But my son wanted to build a PC so he could compete with his online friends in high power games during the Pandemic. For just over $1,000 and a ton of time, he built a mean PC.

I’m now jealous and want to play Flight Simulator 2020 and some other games but don’t have the time to meticulously pick through the perfect build parts. Thankfully the whole package, including the gaudy RGB Frostblade fans configurable with PredatorSense App that make him jealous, are available in just a click or, if you are short on time before Christmas, a trip to Costco.

My Costco Acer Predator Orion 3000 Gaming Desktop – 10th Gen Intel Core i7-10700 – GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER Graphics arrived in a non-descript brown box via Fedex in about 48 hours.

Taking it out of the box to my surprise, it was significantly smaller than my son’s rig. At 15″x15″x7″, I’d even call it portable in the same way that the original Macs were with the handle on the back. In fact, when we went skiing in Vermont, we grabbed it where we’ve only taken laptops before. Size matters!

My son, who opted for the NVIDIA 2060, was instantly jealous of the 2070 Super card squeezed into the Predator box. That and the Core i7 vs. his Ryzen 7 are the biggest differences in builds. Clearly the Acer wins in every game we threw at it often blowing away the 2060/Ryzen by up to 50% more in framerates, even on simpler games like Minecraft.

And don’t get me started on the wiring. Acer’s design is going to beat most homebuilds every time. And you also get 1 year warranty on the whole product vs. various warranties on all the separate parts.

Want an interesting quirk? Push a button on the top of the case and out shoots a headphone holder.

I was particularly interested in how Flight Simulator 2020 worked and found it to be extremely playable (though it did fill more of the 512GB SSD and 2TB hard drive than I was hoping). Perhaps a 1TB SSD makes more sense in a $1700 rig. I’ve heard rumors that Santa has Logitech yoke and pedals on the way so that should be fun to test. The plan is to eventually get an Oculus and do VR Flight Simulator as well.

Some simple framerate tests:

Minecraft with Optifine installed: 800fps
Destiny 2: 400-500fps

Downsides

If I had to pick some gripes, I might have opted for a 1TB SSD or maybe a bigger than 500W power supply to support future upgrades. I get it though. Acer wanted to keep the size and price manageable and in this case, I think they made the right tradeoffs.

That can also be said for the keyboard and mouse which both have the requisite RGB lights but you’ll probably want to upgrade to something more substantial if you want to do serious gaming. Or so my son tells me.

Upgrade Predator Orion 3000

Will I upgrade to a 3080 at some point? Perhaps. I’m not anywhere near what a 2070 Super can do at the moment and frankly not sure 3000 series GPUs will fit in this box. 32GB of RAM is plenty for the foreseeable future although it is upgradable to 64GB. There is also space for an additional 3.5 inch ATA hard drive but I have a huge NAS for hard drive space that will let me keep the smaller 2TB internal storage effectively. For now and the foreseeable future, this machine is perfect for me and comes in at a more than reasonable price and smaller footprint.

If Amazon is more your speed, there are two Predator Orion 10th gen Intels there but neither has a 2070 and the specs are a lot more basic. This Costco one is the beast.

For $1,700, and no fuss.