Last year, my eyes watered in awe when I saw the most absurd (in the best way possible) gaming laptop ever — Acer’s Predator 21 X. Back then, all I had to play with was a pre-production unit with unconfirmed specifications. Now, in CES 2017, the beast has returned with a more official spec list.
Oh, and it’s got a ludicrous price tag too. Then again, you’ve probably already read the title.
I think, to quite a lot of people, Acer has built a bit of a reputation for making rather “boring” devices. Just the other day I was talking to some people I recently met about the new Swift 7 and the gist of their reaction was: Really? Acer? In fact, at one point, I even thought it spilt over into their Predator Gaming lineup with the previous generation Predator 17 X.
But if you thought Acer couldn’t something absolutely bonkers, all doubt — for me, at least — was wiped off the face of the earth when I saw what they had on display in IFA 2016: the Predator 21 X. It was utterly brilliant in its madness.
Here’s a quick spec recap:
It’s got a 21-inch 2560×1080 Full HD curved monitor that runs at 120Hz with NVIDIA’s G-Sync technology for smooth tear-free gaming performance. Inside, it’s powered by an Intel Core i7-7820HK processor and two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 graphics cards in SLI, all of which are overclockable. It’ll also pack 64GB of DDR4-2400 memory, up to four 512GB SSDs in RAID 0 configuration (two of which are NVMe PCIe SSDs) and a 7200 RPM 1TB hard drive for mass storage.
It’s also got four speakers and two subwoofers. It’s got five fans. It’s got a full mechanical individually RGB backlit keyboard with Chery MX Brown switches and a numeric keypad that can be flipped over to double as a precision touchpad.
But that’s not all. It also supports Windows Hello and has Tobii eye-tracking technology (which is awesome by the way) built in. And, of course, it will have prices in Europe, the Middle East and Africa starting at EUR9,999 (about RM47,400). If that number scares you a little, in North America, you can have it for as low as USD8,999 (which is still about RM40,250). It is worth noting that in the past, our prices have usually fallen closer to the one in USD. Still, you can customise the panel above the keyboard with whatever graphics, flags or nation engravings you want.
You can also customise the panel above the keyboard with whatever graphics, flags or nation engravings you want. What’s more, if you’re one of the first 300 people with enough money for this insane laptop, you’ll even get a limited edition series number on the panel. Now that’s what I call value!
While Acer didn’t state in the press release when this monstrosity will be available in Malaysia, I did reach out to them and they did get back to me with a hint. Two words: Q2 2017.
Well, I guess that’s actually an alphabet and five numbers, but I digress.
Is this a practical purchase? No, probably not. Is this good value for money? Absolutely not. It’s more of a showcase of what you can do when you go all out on a laptop. It’s a statement, more than anything else, that something like this can exist.
So, do I (and, let’s face it, you too) want one of these bad boys? Yes, a hundred times yes.
