Gamers' dreams come true with Predator desktop

Dubai: Anyone looking for a top-of-the-line gaming computer has a new machine to consider: the Acer Predator.

To start with, many gamers will probably get the inside joke about the name. Alienware for years has been one of the top names in gaming computers, so playing up the Alien vs. Predator theme is an easy way to market the machine. The Predator even resembles the armour-plated warrior from the movie, complete with movable faceplate.

Once you get past the look of the machine, it's a gamer's dream. The machines comes with a Core 2 Extreme quad-core chip, up to eight gigabytes of memory, supports up to three videos cards, and has four bays for swappable hard drives. You start off with 640 megabytes.

I'm not a hard-core gamer, so I wasn't able to push the machine to its limit, but Acer has pre-installed Crysis, one of the latest graphic-intense games on the market, to try out. The game was incredibly life-like, but despite the intense graphics, there was never a lag or jerk on the screen. I installed a number of other games too, including World of Warcraft (WoW), and turned the graphic setting all the way up. WoW isn't the most graphically intensive game in the market, but it's given my computer some problems. The Predator handled it beautifully.

This was all helped by the 24-inch LCD monitor that came with this machine, which was incredibly bright.

Running a machine with this much power, I expected a lot of noise from the cooling system. I was even told by Acer that the machine had a three-step liquid cooling system, and that I would probably only notice the noise when it got to the third step. I never heard anything. The machines seemed to run as quietly when I was playing Crysis as when I was just surfing the net.

My only complain with the machines was the size and the weight. This is definitely a machine you will need to find space for, and then leave it there.

The price on the computer here in the UAE starts in around Dh9,999 for the base model, so this isn't the machine you buy for basic home computing. However, its video capabilities also make it ideal for rendering video or editing photos.