Acer Predator Orion 3000

A small but mighty system

- CHRISTIAN GUYTON

Air is drawn in through the front and top, then vented through the rear.

CONSIDERING THAT, on paper, it’s a prebuilt gaming powerhouse, the Orion 3000 is surprisingly compact. Its case has a capacity of just 18 liters, and the whole rig weighs under 22 pounds. With a footprint less than 15 x 7 inches, it can squeeze comfortably on or below any desk.

It’s a fairly unassuming PC, all things considered. Its relatively small size and gentle RGB front lighting don’t immediately grab your attention the way bigger, badder machines do. The $1,500 price tag isn’t particularly demanding, either, especially as it contains a GeForce RTX 3070, which is extremely hard to find right now. The prospect of scooping up a powerful pre-built system instead of trying to out-bid bots in the GPU scalping war is certainly attractive.

If it wasn’t a giveaway, the RTX 3070 is matched with a similarly impressive bevy of internal components. An octacore i7-10700 handles core processing, supported by 16GB of HyperX Fury RAM, while storage is covered by a 512GB M.2 SSD and a 1TB hard drive. It’s all neatly packed away, with cables routed along the front, sewing together the proprietary motherboard and power supply.