To the right of the keyboard is a removable panel with a touchpad on one side, and a numeric keypad on the other. The lighting is attractive, and broadcasts that this is a high-end gaming laptop. Each key can be lit with an individual color or by zones, and can be matched to, or contrast with, the light strips on the lid and laptop body. The keyboard features RGB lighting (16.7 million colors), which is fully customizable in Acer’s Predator Sense utility.
The keys have 4mm of travel, and actuate after about 2mm. The depth of the key switches is another reason that the system is so big: they need a couple of inches of vertical clearance, so the keyboard is farther from the screen.
Some professional and enthusiast gamers prefer the solid feel and rapid response of mechanical key switches over the shallow scissor switches on most gaming laptops. The display also has a 120Hz refresh rate and is Nvidia G-Sync certified, which translates into smoother animation with fewer glitches like tearing and blurring during game play.Īcer hasn’t taken any dramatic departures when it comes to the aesthetic design, between the slew of glowing LED lights, the sharp edges on the plastic case, the giant plastic exhaust vents, and the enormous metallic blue dragon that graces the vast expanse of space above the keyboard, this is a gaming laptop through and through.
The screen specs allow more visuals, like a full screen for CinemaScope-wide movies or two or three game windows side by side, to be displayed. The 21-inch curved screen, with 2,560 by 1,080 resolution and 21:9 aspect ratio, is part of the reason for its large body. Despite all that, it’s arguably easier to move than a desktop, monitor, and peripherals, at least in terms of simplicity and number of items. That’s far too heavy to carry around, hence the rolling luggage, and most users are likely to only cart the Predator around when totally necessary. The Predator 21 X tips the scales at a shocking 19.4 pounds. Put simply: this is the biggest, most powerful, and most expensive gaming laptop ever made. And with an $8,999.99 price tag, weight isn’t the only place the 21 X beats out any competitor. Weighing in at an impressive 18.76 pounds, the Predator 21 X physically dwarfs pretty much any other laptop ever made.
Acer ships a single configuration, with one 1TB hard drive and two 500GB SSDs in a RAID configuration. Five storage slots: three SATA, two PCIe. USB-C, USB 3.0, an HDMI port, two DisplayPorts, and an SD card slot. Two SLI linked GTX 1080 GPUs, with a total of 16GB of dedicated onboard VRAM.
The lower the R, the deeper the curve.Ī Core i7 Skylake Intel processor that’s overclocked up to 4.1 GHz. The curve is measured in “R,” which reflects the radius if it were to be extended into a full circle. It’s even a deeper curve than on big-screen curved TVs. The curved screen is the single-biggest talking point about the 21 X, as this is the first laptop to offer one. Like the external design, the 21 X’s spec sheet feels built for sheer overkill. Acer has made the most of the enormous size of the 21 X, cramming what feels like every inch of it with some serious firepower.