Acer Aspire Predator G7750-U222 – No Blu ray drive

When this machine first came in to my labs, I spent some time just staring at the cabinet. Such sci-fi looks are rare in desktop machines; you have to pay a premium for it but fashion conscious people having plenty of money will have no issues. The Acer Aspire Predator G7750-U222 is powered by an Intel Core i7 900 processor which is really fast. The chip isn’t over clocked out of the box but you can tweak it manually thanks to the liquid cooling system inside.

I’m finding it a bit hard to compare the performance of Acer Aspire Predator G7750-U222 with the other gaming machines that I have had in my labs because this is the first desktop to have an Intel Core i7 900 chip. All other ones were based on Intel Core i7 800 like six-core AMD Phenom II X6 1055T or Dell Studio XPS 7100. Falcon Northwest and Velocity Micro desktops come with an overclocked Intel Core i7 875K CPUs and they are really impressive with the fast speeds.

Acer Aspire Predator G7750-U222 is priced at $1,899 and it is quite appropriate for the internal hardware that it has to offer. You can manually build a gaming system with all these components for a lot less but you won’t get the super sexy cabinet looks. Most of the gamers here will be happy with the stock configuration. However, for ambitious gamers, there are plenty of upgrade options.

You might want to play games at higher details or on larger displays. For such gamers, Acer gives another gaming card slot. You won’t have to upgrade the PSU, the current 750 watt unit will be able to take another GeForce GTX 470 graphics card. Apart from that, this machine can take three more hard drive through the front loading bays. You can also put in another optical drive. All six slots of RAM are occupied with the 12 GB memory. Options for expansion cards include two empty PCI Express 8x slots, a PCI Express 1x slot, and a standard PCI slot. You can put in another graphics card, TV tuner card, wireless networking card, sound card, etc.

Acer Aspire Predator G7750-U222 also gives you plenty of options for external drives connectivity. On the front, there is a media card reader, two analog audio ports, mini FireWire input and five USB 2.0 jacks. On the back, there are six more USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet jack, standard FireWire, 7.1 analog audio jacks, two eSATA ports and S/PDIF digital audio. There is no USB 3.0 here but I won’t complain about that since it is not that popular at the moment.

For testing, I played Crysis and got decent performance. The Acer Aspire Predator G7750-U222 was really impressive with Far Cry 2, the combination of Core i7 930 processor, 12 GB RAM and GeForce GTX 480 gaming card delivered superb performance. It was better than even the Falcon Northwest Talon which is more expensive at $2,499. The high end components inside this system will keep it future proof and you won’t have to think about upgrading it anytime soon. This high end hardware also justifies the price tag.