Building a gaming PC is fairly straightforward, but it isn’t for everyone. For mainstream folks, pre-built gaming desktops are the way to go. Although that usually means settling for hardware that’s mainstream as well, that isn’t always the case. Just ask Acer.
Its Predator sub-brand has a new 5000 series of Orion gaming desktops, and it’s quite the beast. If you recall, the Orion 9000 blew us away last year with its massive size and all-powerful specifications. While the Orion 5000 doesn’t have as big a number, it may actually be more appealing.
The Orion 5000 can be decked out with Intel’s 8th-generation Core i7-8700K processor on a high-end Z370 chipset. To make load times even faster, up to 32GB of Intel Optane memory may be installed on top of the usual RAM and storage configurations. Finally, and this is the best part, two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards can fit at the same time for two-way SLI, meaning they’ll work together to push intense rendering during gaming and video editing.

Of course, it needs a worthy case to house all this hardware. Acer is equipping it with a transparent side panel to monitor (and show off) all the internals. That’s just for aesthetics, however; for cooling, IceTunnel 2.0 tech is on board for smart airflow management for every section of the case. It’s easy to open up too, in case you want to upgrade the components.
The Predator Orion 5000 will become available in North America in July with a starting price of US$ 1,499, while EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) will get it in June for EUR 1,699 and China in June as well for CNY 15,999.
If that pricing is too much for you, you can also go for the more affordable Orion 3000 series.

Predator Orion 3000
The Predator Orion 3000 isn’t as aggressive as its higher-end sibling, but offers a lot of the same power. You also get 8th-gen Intel Core i7 processors and up to 32GB of Optane memory to complement up to 64GB of RAM. The only real downgrade is the limit of a single GTX 1080 card, but that’s still enough for 4K gaming.
This one starts at US$ 999 in North America beginning October, EUR 1,299 in EMEA starting July, and CNY 6,999 in China in July as well.