The Acer Predator Orion 3000 is a small gaming PC with some pretty powerful specs inside,
so let’s take an in depth look and find out what it’s got to offer and see how well
it performs in games.
The Orion 3000 is available with different hardware configurations, my unit here has
a 6 core i7-8700 CPU, Nvidia GTX 1070 graphics, 16GB of DDR4-2666 memory running in dual channel,
a 256GB NVMe M.2 SSD and 2TB hard drive. It’s also got gigabit network connectivity, with
802.11ac WiFi and bluetooth.
It’s available in a few different configurations, including with GTX 1060 or 1080 graphics or
Intel i5-8400 CPU instead, you can check the links in the description to see some of the
other options available.
The Orion 3000 is smaller than your typical PC too, at just 34cm high, 16cm in width and
35cm in depth, and weighs in at around 7.1KG.
The metal case has a matte black finish to it with a plastic front panel, overall I thought
the exterior design looked pretty good, but that will always be subjective. It also came
with matching Acer Predator gaming keyboard, mouse and mouse pad, which I found to work
well.
The front panel has a couple of blue lighting strips towards the top, and a blue LED fan
down the bottom behind the plastic grill which also features the Predator logo. The blue
lighting appears to be static, and cannot be changed, there are no effects or other
colours possible. Nearby on the side there’s the front I/O, which includes 3.5mm headphone
and microphone jacks, a USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A and Type-C port. The DVD drive is found on
the upper half and it comes out by pressing the button, and the power button is found
in the center towards the top and lights up blue when on. The left and right sides also
have headphone holders which pop out, so you can store up to two sets at a time on either
side.
There’s nothing on top of the case, just flat black metal. On the back there’s a
500 Watt power supply up the top, an 80mm exhaust fan underneath, the rear I/O, which
contains 6 USB Type-A ports, four of which are USB 2.0 while two are USB 3.1 Gen1, gigabit
ethernet port, and 3.5mm audio ports. Down the bottom from the GTX 1070 we get three
DisplayPort outputs, HDMI and DVI port.
Underneath there’s just some rubber feet.
The right hand side panel is riveted to the case and can’t be removed, while the left
panel has a grill for airflow with the Predator logo up the top, and can be removed by simply
taking out two screws with a Phillips head screwdriver from the back and sliding it off.
Inside isn’t quite as nice looking as the exterior, which is pretty common with many
prebuilt systems, and seems fine anyway as it doesn’t have a side window to look through.
We can see we’ve got what appears to be a stock Intel CPU cooler, we’ll see the
temperatures for that soon, two of the four memory slots in use, the WiFi card just below
the CPU cooler and the GTX 1070 graphics card down the bottom. I’ll cover off the upgrade
options towards the end of the video.
It comes with Acer’s Predator Sense software, but there’s not much you can do with this
unit, pretty much all you can do is monitor the system and adjust the fan speed of the
front fan, no other fans can be adjusted here, but I was able to adjust the fan on the graphics
card using MSI Afterburner.
Now let’s look at the thermals, testing was completed with an ambient room temperature
of 24 degrees celsius, and I’ve tested both with the stock 65W TDP limit that the 8700
CPU is set with by default, but also with the power limit boosted using Intel XTU, along
with a 150MHz overclock to the graphics using MSI Afterburner.
Starting at the bottom of the graph in the light blue bar, at idle both the CPU and graphics
were fairly cool. Moving up to the green bar I tested gaming with Watch Dogs 2, as I find
that it uses a good combination of CPU and GPU, and the temperatures were perfectly fine
here. With the CPU power limit boosted for full performance and graphics overclocked
by 150MHz the temperatures rise a little, shown by the yellow bar, but if we boost the
fan speeds, shown in the orange bar, the temperatures drop back, particularly the graphics.
The stress test results are from running the Aida64 stress test and Heaven benchmark at
the time time, in order to try and fully utilize both the processor and graphics in a worst
case scenario. Continuing up in the graph in the red bar the temperatures are about
the same as our worst case gaming result. When we boost the power limit the CPU gets
quite hot, no thermal throttling in my test but it must have been close, shown by the
purple bar. With the fans maxed out the CPU drops back to manageable levels, and the graphics
get quite a lot cooler. Despite the weak looking cooling solution for the most part it was
able to run well enough at stock, and with the fans boosted it still ran fairly cool
even with our graphics overclocked and CPU power limit increased.
These are the average clock speeds for the same tests just shown. At stock while gaming
and under stress test, shown by the green and red bars, the CPU was power limit throttling
to the defined 65 Watts, and that’s why it wasn’t able to reach the full 4.3GHz
all core turbo speed under stress test. As soon as the CPU has the power limit boosted
we’re able to get full performance even in a multi core stress test, and the graphics
while gaming see a nice boost from the 150MHz overclock, and we’ll see how this improves
gaming performance later.
Here are some Cinebench CPU benchmarks, which show the difference in performance at stock
and then with the extra performance gained from boosting the power limit and allowing
the CPU to run at the full 4.3GHz all core turbo speed constantly. This resulted in 15%
better multicore performance, and the CPU was running with a 116 Watt TDP now in this
workload and did start thermal throttling, although it sat at around 80 watts in my previous
Aida64 stress testing.
As for the fan noise produced by the system I’ll let you have a listen to some of these
tests.
At idle it was fairly quiet, and even while gaming at stock it wasn’t too bad, perfectly
fine in my opinion, and not too different while under stress test. We only start to
get louder fan noise once we get into overclocking the graphics or boosting the power limit of
the CPU, and if we manually max out all fans for best cooling performance it can get very
loud. Despite the CPU cooler which didn’t look good based on first impressions, it is
at least able to keep temperatures in check and do its job, granted the fans may need
to spin up and become louder as a result of the smaller cooler if you start boosting the
power limits.
I’ve also measured total system power draw from the wall, and at stock under a combined
CPU and GPU stress test it’s using around 270 Watts, and then with 10% more with the
CPU power limit boosted and GPU overclocked, so there appears to be a little headroom for
upgrades with the 500 watt unit.
Finally let’s get into some gaming benchmarks, I’ve tested these games at stock settings
as that’s probably how most people will use the PC. I’ve tested at 1080p and 1440p
resolutions at all setting levels, as I think those are the best resolutions for this level
of hardware, it’s not quite up to 4K gaming.
Fortnite was tested with the replay feature, and starting with 1080p we’re getting pretty
good results, well over 100 FPS even at epic, so it was playing very nicely even maxed out.
Moving up to 1440p I still found it to run very smoothly even at max settings, but if
you’ve got a high refresh rate 1440p display you might want to lower the settings a bit
for the best experience.
Overwatch was tested in the practice range with the same test run, and at 1080p medium
and low settings were able to hit the 300 FPS cap, with epic settings still giving us
really high levels of performance. At 1440p it was still very playable at epic settings
without issue, still averaging above 100 FPS here, with much higher possible with lower
settings.
Battlefield V was tested in campaign mode rather than multiplayer, as it’s easier
to consistently reproduce the test. At 1080p it was playing well with no problems even
at ultra settings, but you might want medium or low settings to average above 100 FPS which
may be useful in this game. At 1440p ultra settings were just able to average around
60 FPS, with almost 100 possible with low settings.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was tested with the built in benchmark, and I was able to
get above 60 FPS averages with very high settings here, and closer to 100 at low settings. Going
up to 1440p still saw acceptable performance, I don’t think this game really needs a high
frame rate to play well, and medium settings still saw it scoring above 60 FPS in this
test.
Far Cry 5 was also tested using the built in benchmark, and there was some pretty nice
results from this test, 120 FPS at low settings and above 90 at ultra. With 1440p the frame
rates drop back a bit, but still pretty good and definitely playable, with over 60 FPS
still possible at ultra settings.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was another game that was tested using the built in benchmark.
At ultra settings this test was still producing above the 60 FPS sweet spot and around 120
at lowest settings. At 1440p the results drop back a bit, but still pretty respectable results
and definitely playable with this resolution on this hardware.
CS:GO was tested using the Ulletical benchmark, and at 1080p we’re seeing extremely high
frame rates from this test, which is to be expected as this game should run well on pretty
much any modern hardware. At 1440p we’re still seeing very high frame rates, so it
should be easily playable at this resolution.
PUBG was tested using the replay feature, and for a less optimized game it was still
performing quite well at 1080p, with 100 FPS possible at high settings and below. Even
at 1440p 100 FPS averages were still possible with very low settings, so it should still
run well with lower settings.
Just quickly I’ve also got the results from 3DMark’s Firestrike, Timespy, and VRMark
benchmarks.
As expected the i7-8700 and GTX 1070 are offering great performance in 1080p, and still nice
results at 1440p.
I’ve also retested Far Cry 5 with the CPU power limit boosted and graphics overclocked
to see what sort of a performance difference this actually makes in games. At 1080p with
ultra settings this resulted in a 7.7% improvement to the average frame rate, pretty nice for
some simple tweaks. At 1440p there was an even larger 10.8% improvement to average FPS
with ultra settings, so you can definitely squeeze out extra performance if you’re
fine with running a little warmer and louder.
I’ve used Crystal disk mark to test the storage, and the 256GB M.2 NVME SSD was scoring
nicely on the reads and alright for the writes. The 2TB 7,200RPM hard drive was performing
fairly well too.
For up to date pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over
time. At the time of recording, here in Australia with these specs it’s going for around $3000
AUD, while in the US it’s around $1600 USD at Newegg. As always with prebuilt systems
you can of course build your own for less money, but that’s not the audience these
types of machines are targeted towards, they’re for people that just want to buy a system
ready to go to start playing games, and as shown the Orion 3000 is doing a good job at
that.
Now let’s talk about upgrade options, as it does seem there are quite a few upgrades
you can make with this PC. I’ve left this to the end as I suspect most people buying
a prebuilt system like this just want it to work out of the box, but if you know a bit
about what you’re doing this information may be useful if you’re after some upgrades.
First up the 4 memory slots support up to 64GB, so you could always add more memory
in future.
There’s only one M.2 slot on the motherboard which is in use for the operating system drive,
but you could look at either transferring the OS or doing a fresh install onto a new
larger SSD. Getting to the SSD might be a little tricky though, you’ve got to first
remove the hard drive bracket, pull out the DVD drive, then open the front panel to get
access.
The hard drive on the other hand is quite easy to get to, it’s just behind this metal
bracket which you can unscrew. The motherboard has 3 SATA ports in total, one in use for
the hard drive and the second is used by the DVD drive, so I had one free. I didn’t really
see any room for mounting another, but you could in theory connect a third drive to the
SATA port and just stick it in there with ghetto mounting, although powering it may
be challenging as the power supply didn’t appear to have a spare SATA power connector,
but you may be able to get a splitter cable to do this.
The power supply also provides 6 and 8 pin connectors for the graphics card, so with
that in mind you could swap out the graphics too. I roughly measured the space available
at 29cm in length and maybe just over 13cm in height. The reference blower style 1070
installed takes up 2 slots but there is at least 3 slots worth of space, so again upgrading
should be possible. There is a single PCIe 1x slot under the graphics card, but it’s
covered by the 2 slot card and not usable.
I’m not sure about upgrading the i7-8700 CPU we have here and as we saw it’s got
what appears to be a stock cooler. The only CPU above this in the 8th generation is the
8700K, and you might be able to upgrade to that but I’m honestly not sure about compatibility
with the motherboard, in theory it will work, but the board appears to use the B360 chipset
so you won’t be able to overclock even if you could upgrade the cooling. I’m also
not sure if there will be BIOS updates that bring 9th gen support, as was the case with
other B360 motherboards, so CPU upgrading might not be possible or worth it here. If
you’ve got the i5-8400 unit though you should be able to upgrade to the 8700 like I have
here.
The other limitation when looking at upgrading the CPU or graphics may be the power supply.
It’s a 500 Watt unit, so if you start using higher powered components there may be issues.
It appears to use the standard 24 pin and 4 pin ATX cables, so should be possible to
replace. It was able to keep working fine with my graphics overclocking and CPU power
limit increases though, so it seems alright.
Acer actually show how to open it all up and replace the graphics, hard drive, and M.2
SSD in the user manual, so check that if you need detailed information with step by step
pictures. The only component they don’t talk about upgrading is the CPU and cooler,
so again not sure what’s supported there.
Overall the Acer Predator Orion 3000 is a pretty capable gaming machine, and quite a
lot smaller than the massive Orion 9000 that I previously covered on the channel. You’ll
be able to play pretty much any game at 1080p and even 1440p with decent settings with this
hardware without issue. It does seem to cost quite a bit compared to other alternatives
here in Australia, such as building it yourself or even other prebuilt systems, but if you’re
after a prebuilt system that runs well I didn’t have any other issues with the Orion 3000,
and as we saw it played all games well. Let me know what you guys thought down in the
comments, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this one.