Acer's jamming old CPUs with newer GPUs and it's working

Our Verdict If you're looking for a pre-built gaming PC, you could do worse than the Acer Predator Orion 3000. You could probably do a lot better too, if you're willing to spend that bit more money. But what Acer has created here is a reasonably priced desktop that offers decent 1440p performance, and that might be enough if you're not looking to get your hands dirty building your own machine. (Image credit: Future) (Image credit: Future) (Image credit: Future) (Image credit: Future) (Image credit: Future) (Image credit: Future) (Image credit: Future) (Image credit: Future) For Good for the money Decent 1440p performance Compact case Against Older, slower parts No Thunderbolt PC Gamer's got your back Find out more about how we evaluate games and hardware. Reviews should always start with the most important piece of information, so here it is: you can't store your prized collection of lightly used cricket balls on top of the Acer Predator Orion 3000. Why not? Because it slopes backward, and they'll end up on the floor. The front support foot is slightly taller than the back one, giving it a lean of, if a fun 10 minutes spent with a spirit level and a child's protractor have produced correct results, about 10 degrees. This means you can still rest your coffee mug on the top, as long as it's not too full, but also that, if you're buying this smaller-than-average tower PC with the intention of it flitting flush with a piece of furniture, it won't. This may or may not be a problem, depending on how picky you are about these things, but the Predator logo that sticks off the front and looks rather like someone melded a Space Invader with a Decepticon means you might want to push it back a little further. Despite its drunken lean, it's not a bad case. The front panel ports are easy to get to, there's a bit of RGB behind that logo, and it's nicely compact at 28 litres, though slightly larger than previous Orion 3000 cases, which were 26 litres. Pre-built PCs in smaller cases can have a bit of a reputation for losing performance unless their cooling solutions are particularly well designed, but the simple fan over the CPU here may be the least of the Orion 3000's problems. For a start, 2025's Christmas tree is well and truly up as I write, and here's a PC with a 14th-gen Raptor Lake CPU that launched in January 2024. It's quite a good one, admittedly, with 20 cores, 28 threads and a max turbo frequency of 5.3 GHz. It starts up incredibly fast from cold, and even after going through the PCG benchmark suite never got too hot, which is remarkable when you look inside and see a plain RGB fan over the CPU with no gigantic heat sink in sight. ✅ You want a pre-built PC that can play all the 1440p games: Sure, Acer's cut some corners, but you can't argue...

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