Overclock the Predator 21 X using the built-in “Turbo” preset, though, and it spits out a result 20 percent faster. The Predator 21 X at its stock speed is slightly edged out by the MSI GT73VR by about 4 percent. For the most part, quad cores are quad cores, and the performance is predictable for the laptops you see here. It’s a benchmark based on the company’s Cinema4D engine and scales well with clock speed and core and thread count. Our first test is Maxon’s popular Cinebench 15 benchmark. The back of the Predator 21X follows the aggressive lines seen in most gaming laptops today. Sure, Acer’s task is made easier due to the sheer size of the laptop, but it’s still something the company should get credit for. This may not sound like a big deal to you, but keeping this much hardware cool under load is an impressive accomplishment. Fortunately you get that with the Predator 21 X, which can bring on the GPU and CPU loads without sounding like a Huey chopper is taking off in front of you. Today, people want their gaming as quiet as possible. Two years ago, loud and gaming went hand-in-hand. Gaming laptops have come a long way in just two years, and so have consumer expectations. Performance: Powerful, yet still relatively quiet You can easily access the hard drive and RAM from the top. Just remove one screw and carefully pull off the the personalized plate, and you can replace the hard drive (again, limited only to 9.5mm) and replace the RAM if you need to. But there’s also more hardware you can replace on the top.
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You already know about the two M.2 SATA slots under the bottom service door. The Predator 21X’s size lets it hold very high overclocks without sounding like an F-22 on afterburners. Unplugging the laptop would switch off the overclock and severely ratchet back the GPU clock speeds. When there wasn’t a load on the Predator 21 X, the laptop would behave in a more civil matter.
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But considering the Predator 21 X’s formidable power load, it’s probably safest to hit full stop rather than shove a 400-watt load onto the onboard batteries in a millisecond. For any other laptop, you’d expect it to switch over to the internal battery. We ran into one interesting behavior: If you push the GPUs hard running Furmark, with the CPU and GPUs overclocked, and then suddenly pull the plug, the Predator 21 X immediately cut power to the laptop. Power consumption itself, for what it’s worth, generally sat in the 400-watt range under a graphically intense workload such as Furmark. For the sake of appearance and neatness, it’s a nice touch you’d expect of a premium machine. In a sign of how much thought Acer put into the Predator 21 X, the company includes a rubber stand for the AC adapters, emblazoned with the Predator logo and shaped in an X. The Predator 21X runs on two 330 watt bricks that can stylishly be held together using the included X-shaped rubber coupler. Both are identical, so there’s no specific order for plugging them in. Because no external bricks are available in sizes larger than 330 watts, Acer uses the old trick of slaving two 330-watt bricks together. It looks like the thickest hard drive you can get in the Predator 21 X is a 9.5mm HDD, which tops out at 2TB today.Īs you can imagine, all of this hardware takes a considerable amount of power to run. It’s hard to quibble with that much storage, but if we had to complain, we’d say the hard drive is too small at 1TB. There’s also a quad-core Core i7-7820HK, 64GB of DDR4/2400, two Toshiba 512GB NVMe M.2 drives, and a 1TB hard drive. To drive that 2.8-megapixel screen, Acer stuffs no fewer than two GeForce GTX 1080 cards inside, in SLI mode. At 21 inches, the curve-rated at 2000R-doesn’t make a huge difference to our eyes, but it certainly adds to the panache of the Predator 21 X.
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We generally prefer curved screens to flat screens-on ultra-wide panels measuring 34 inches. It is decently bright, though-we measured its maximum brightness at 420 nits. The panel has decent off-axis support and a light anti-glare finish, but it won’t win any color accuracy contests. Once you’ve used a high refresh-rate panel, you never want to go back.
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The high refresh rate and G-Sync means everything is simply smoother-from gaming to just moving windows and scrolling a browser windows. The panel is 2560×1080, and supports G-Sync with a refresh rate of 120Hz.
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The most striking feature of the Predator 21 X is its 21-inch curved screen. 21.yup Features: Everything inside the Predator 21 X