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If you've been saving your money up for a high-end gaming PC, I have some news you should know about.
The Acer Predator Orion X, Acer's newest (and tiniest) gaming PC is still practically brand new. It only started rolling out in the UK in December of 2023, and in a big plot twist, it's already seen a £500 price cut. That brings the POX down to £3,299 at Currys, which is pretty ludicrous for a brand new RTX 4080 gaming PC that's powered by an Intel Core i9 processor.
Now, I won't lie to you - this is still a very expensive gaming PC. If you're shopping for specs like these, you're going to need to part with a lot of coin first. Usually, I tend to recommend gaming PC deals that cater to the budget buyer, but since our Acer Predator Orion X review is still hot off the press, I'm inclined to highlight this offer.
If you're like me, you're a fan of the best gaming PCs that don't dominate the majority of your desktop, or bulge out from underneath it like a hulking great mass of RGB. The trouble is, small form factor gaming PCs aren't always the most trusted. Their motherboards can have quirks to make up for their smaller size, and they can prove difficult to cool because their cases pack everything so closely together.
Acer, however, crafted something truly innovative with the Orion X, and it somehow managed to sneak a water cooler into a tiny case that could already squeeze the biggest size of graphics card inside it.
What makes the Orion X worth buying?
Putting its innovative design to one side, this PC is just a little behemoth. As I said in my review of this machine, there's very little you can throw an i9 and a 4080 at and be disappointed. I spent plenty of time gaming on this PC, but I also did a fair bit of content creation with it as well, editing an entire video for my YouTube channel, and the Orion X made it all as speedy and easy as possible.
Playing games in exclusively 4K admittedly trounced the admirable frame rates of my own machine, and despite slower-than-expected SSD speeds, there wasn't much to fault here. Everything, especially its cooling, was a vast improvement over the last Acer gaming PC I tested. The Acer Predator Orion 7000 (2023) refreshed its motherboard for the DDR5 generation, but its BIOS was extremely prohibitive and didn't let you change timings or access XMP. Similarly, its reliance on air cooling only couldn't keep up with its new 13th generation i9 processor, which frequently reached boiling point when I benchmarked it. The noise from its fans was pretty unruly as well.
The Orion X improved on all of those things - XMP was easily accessible in the BIOS, temperatures remained under control, and even when using the Turbo settings, the noise was kept to an absolute low.
The price of this little PC is considerably lower than the larger Orion 7000, which is surprising in my opinion. According to our recorded benchmarks, and from my experience, the Orion X is a much, much better gaming PC. While it is still over £3,000 in this deal at Currys, I'd say it's worth buying because of that fact alone - this is already great value when you pit it against similar brands like Asus or compare it to the prices of the best Alienware gaming PCs.
For a brand new rig like this to drop by £500 for no real occasion, it makes it very worth buying.
Looking for PC parts instead of a full machine? Check out the best graphics cards, the best CPU for gaming, and the best RAM for gaming for a range of high spec components.
