Acer Predator Orion 5000 (2024) review: Set up right for 1440p might

Acer earned a special commendation with its Predator Orion 3000, which proved to be our top pick for budget gaming PCs. And with the Predator Orion 5000 (PO5-655-UB21), it offers a stepped-up experience with the latest components for a reasonable price. This model of the Acer Predator Orion 5000 opts for some capable mainstream parts, including an Intel Core i7-14700F CPU and RTX 4070 Super GPU, and builds around them in a smart, economical manner without making choices that sacrifice performance.

The result is a fairly stylish, effective machine that can readily handle 1080p and 1440p gaming even with the settings cranked up. It’s not a perfect PC, and it fumbles in a couple of areas, but it’s by no means a bad option. Even if you can build a gaming PC yourself, you won’t be able to save much money compared to what Acer asks for this system, and that helps cement the easy recommendation for this machine on our guide to the best gaming PC.

Specs

The Acer Predator Orion 5000 sits in the mid-range of the market, with componentry that’s geared up for excellent 1080p performance and decent 1440p capabilities. It features a powerful Intel Core i7-14700F CPU, and either an RTX 4070 Super or RTX 4070 Ti Super GPU, the former of which is in our review model and is currently sitting at the top of our best graphics card guide.

Both GPUs provide access to Nvidia DLSS 3, which is a great technology for achieving higher frame rates and resolutions than the GPU can handle natively, particularly with advanced features such as ray tracing enabled. It’s a respectable configuration that’s geared towards getting decent gaming performance for a reasonable price.

The CPU isn’t stuck with the stock Intel cooler, instead getting an Acer model with RGB lighting, although it’s still not a beefy tower cooler. It sits on top of an Intel Core i7 14700F, which has the same eight P-Cores and 12 E-Cores (for a total of 20) as the Core i7 14700K, but only boosts to 5.4GHz, and as such outputs less heat.

That’s why it has a lower TDP rating than the Core i7 14700K, with a 65W base power and 219W max turbo power, compared with 125W and 253W respectively on the 14700K. The ‘F’ on the end of its name means that this CPU doesn’t have an integrated GPU enabled, but that’s not a problem when you have an RTX 4070 Super graphics card also plugged into the motherboard.

The graphics card in our test configuration actually uses a blower-style cooler rarely seen on recent gaming graphics cards. These coolers have fallen out of favor in recent years, and they can often make a lot of noise when the GPU works hard. The system also includes three RGB-lit case fans to pull airflow through the interior and out the back.

Acer supplies 32GB of DDR5 memory with this system as the default, which is plenty for most people’s needs, including gaming. It’s a solid bonus over the 16GB or even 8GB some systems supplied with some systems, and gives you some headroom to have lots of apps and browser tabs open at the same time. On the downside, it does only run at 4,500MHz, which is slow for DDR5, even if it’s quicker than most DDR4 kits.

There’s 1TB of NVMe storage also on deck, courtesy of an SK Hynix drive, though it’s not incredibly fast for a PCIe 4.0 SSD. All of this hardware is packed into an Acer micro-ATX motherboard, which is a little disappointing as it limits upgrade and add-on potential, especially when the case has room for a full-size ATX motherboard.

The whole system is powered by an 800W power supply from LiteOn which gets 80 Plus Gold certification. That’s a good bonus, as not all pre-built systems bother to install an efficient power supply. This desktop also comes with Windows 11 Home and is thankfully not overloaded with a bunch of extraneous software. You won’t find a bunch of pre-installed apps, dubious games, or strange utilities of questionable utility clogging up the system when you first start it up.

Features

The Acer Predator Orion 5000 is a reasonably modern system, but it isn’t decked out with all the latest features. Rather than making the jump to Wi-Fi 7, for example, it settles for Wi-Fi 6E networking. Thankfully, that’s still plenty good, even if you have a Gigabit Internet connection, and it proved fast and stable in my testing.

For those who want more, this machine does also offer a 2.5Gbps Ethernet port, providing a boost over the typical Gigabit Ethernet ports, although your router will also need to support a 2.5Gbps connection if you want to get full advantage of it on your home network.

You get a good smattering of ports too, but again, none of the latest and greatest. On the top panel, you’ll find three USB-A ports offering 5Gbps speeds and one USB-C port also capped at the same speed — no 10Gbps ports or 20Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 ports there. The top panel also includes two 3.5mm jacks for headphones and microphones.

The rear panel offers somewhat better connection options but still comes up a little lacking. It offers one 20Gbps USB-C 3.2 Gen 2×2 port, two 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (one Type A and one Type C), as well as four USB 2.0 ports. Three more 3.5mm audio jacks are also found here, rounding out the ports needed for various analog audio setups. Notably, there’s no Thunderbolt or USB 4.0, though. Meanwhile, the graphics card provides an HDMI 2.1 port and three DisplayPort 1.4 ports.

Acer’s Predator desktop computers come with a one-year limited warranty, but reviews of the company on Trustpilot are not favorable. The warranty also does not explicitly cover shipping, which could leave buyers with a considerable shipping expense should they need warranty service on this weighty and sizable system.

Design

The Acer Predator Orion 5000 looks stylish, but it’s not altogether clever or polished in its assembly. The front of the desktop has an interesting extension that features a glass panel, an illuminated Predator logo, and extensive venting along the sizes. The glass panel looks in on two front fans, with large plastic structures surrounding them, but these don’t meaningfully channel airflow. This does provide an elegant way for Acer to install a glass front panel without suffocating the system, though Acer hasn’t put any finer mesh filters here to keep the fans from pulling in dust.

That’s a fairly common theme across the rest of the design. Looking over the system, there’s plenty of ventilation, but the only area with a fine filter that can keep out dust is on the underside of the power supply. The Acer Predator Orion 5000 is a system you’ll want to hit with compressed air on a regular basis.

The rest of the case is a bit more basic elsewhere. It’s largely metal, save for the glass panel on the left side. This side panel features tool-less access, with a simple switch to pop it open, but a single screw needs to be removed first before that switch works. Once this panel is removed, you get access to most of the system’s internals.

This includes a convenient drive bay that’s pre-wired, letting you simply slide in two 3.5-inch drives where they’ll link up with the connectors at the back of the bay. 2.5-inch drives aren’t a native fit here, but they’ll go in if they’re surrounded by a 3.5-inch adapter. On the opposite side of the case, underneath the metal side panel, you’ll also find two 2.5-inch SSD drive holders.

Beyond the initial first impressions, the Acer Predator Orion 5000 begins to fall apart a little in its design. The top I/O panel just sticks out of the case, for example, which isn’t necessarily bad, but I’ve seen tidier work on cheaper systems, such as the HP Omen 40L, which slightly recesses its ports.

They also don’t line up perfectly with the stamped holes for them, and the USB-C port visibly looks like it’s been adapted to fit a USB-A port’s hole. Even some of the VRMs on the motherboard have chokes that aren’t neatly lined up. While none of this affects the performance of the system, it makes the build look a bit amateurish.

The RGB lighting also runs into a handful of issues. While it looks fun and gives the system some flair, especially with its default icy blue color, it begins to fall apart as soon as you try to customize it. Acer’s software will let you customize the lighting in multiple zones, including the front fans, exhaust fan, CPU cooler, and a series of small LED lights scattered around the motherboard.

Notably, this doesn’t include the Predator logo on the front of the case, so you’re stuck with that glowing blue. The tools in the Predator Sense app for changing the color also don’t line up with the colors that end up being displayed by the case.

For instance, selecting red in the app shows as more of a peach orange on the outside of the case. It’s possible to get a red but it takes some guesswork and checking. Quite a few of the lighting presets also didn’t seem to do anything, making the whole process of customizing the system all the more inscrutable.

The airflow system could be better optimized too. While there were no problems with this Acer system’s components overheating or fans making too much noise, the bottom intake fan blows straight into the empty drive bay, for example. The upper intake fan also blows straight at the edge of the graphics card, which is a blower-style card, so it really only benefits from air coming in below it.

The CPU cooler’s fan is also positioned above the CPU, so it’s pushing air in another direction. Essentially, the air is flowing in a lot of directions, and some of that CPU cooler exhaust is going to blow back against the air from the upper intake fan.

Benchmarks

The Acer Predator Orion 5000 has some good muscle in it. The Intel Core i7 14700F CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super are well suited to playing AAA games and esports with a mix of high-quality graphics and fast frame rates. To get the most out of it, you can also take advantage of Nvidia’s DLSS technology suite where available, especially if you’re aiming for 1440p or higher resolution. But generally, the Acer Predator Orion 5000 gets the job done with its hardware.

Across our benchmark suite, the Acer Predator Orion 5000 never failed to deliver playable frame rates. Cyberpunk 2077 presented perhaps its biggest challenge, with its extensive use of high-res textures, long draw distances, and extreme ray tracing effects in the Ultra RT mode we use for testing. Still, the Acer Predator Orion 5000 was able to exceed 60fps at 1080p for both its average and minimum frame rates, even without any help from DLSS.

Bumping this up to 1440p at the same settings resulted in the system struggling a bit, but you can get a helping hand from DLSS here. The Acer Predator Orion 5000 can take advantage of this upscaling technology to improve frame rates, and it supports DLSS 3.0 Frame Generation too. With the latter enabled, the Acer Predator Orion 5000 exceeded an average of 100fps at 1080p Ultra and 72fps at 1440p, which are both fantastic results.

With playable performance in Cyberpunk 2077, it’s unsurprising that the Acer Predator Orion 5000 holds well in other games as well. Whether you’re gaming at 1080p or 1440p, the system performed well in F1 23, hitting an average of 102fps and 75fps at the two resolutions, respectively. Performance is stable as well, with minimum frame rates not straying terribly far from the averages.

Total War: Warhammer 3 also proved a fairly easy lift for the system. Even the minimum frame rate at 1440p sat well above 60fps. This suggests that gamers could go for a 4K resolution on this system if they’re playing less graphically demanding games, or they’re willing to dial back some settings, or don’t mind dipping a bit below 60fps.

Crucially, the performance from the Acer Predator Orion 5000 us also consistent. There were only minor variances between the results between test runs, and we saw this through our series of synthetic benchmarks as well. The CPU offered very respectable performance in Cinebench R24, hitting 1,547 points in the multi-core test thanks to its 20 cores.

While the CPU has a fairly simple cooler, it proves ample in most scenarios. In 3DMark’s CPU Profile test, we saw little thermal throttling outside of the max-threads test, which saw clock speeds sink as low as about 4.6GHz, whereas the CPU’s cores ran at speeds above 5GHz in the other gaming tests.

Price

The Acer Predator Orion 5000 configuration we tested comes in at $1,749, which also serves as the base price for this generation of the Predator Orion 5000. This can be upgraded to include 2TB of storage and an RTX 4070 Ti Super upgrade for $2,099. It’s available as a Best Buy exclusive, and it’s often sometimes on offer for just $1,499.99, which is great value for the spec.

The price of this desktop is fair. The CPU and graphics combo alone costs close to $1,000 if you were to build your own system. With storage, memory, a motherboard, a solid power supply, a decent case, and a Windows 11 license, you’ll soon pass the $1,500 mark, and going down this route means you don’t need to worry about putting it all together either.

Verdict

The Acer Predator Orion 5000 may be a bit simple in some regards, but it has a splash of style out front and puts your money to good use in the form of capable components for gaming. If you’re after high frame rates in esports or high settings in AAA games, the Acer Predator Orion 5000 delivers the goods, and Acer isn’t charging too much of a premium for the components here either.

There are plenty of cheaper systems with lesser components, such as the HP Omen 40L we reviewed with an RTX 4060 Ti, but this spec of the Acer Predator Orion 5000 sits just at the right point, offering solid performance without running into major trade-offs, such as having too little memory, a 500GB SSD, or a weedy power supply.

Alternatives

HP Omen 40L

If you can’t quite run to the cost of the Acer Predator Orion 5000, you can get a decent 1080p gaming spec for a lower price from the HP Omen 40L. This machine looks great with its RGB lighting eerily glowing through the glass panels, and the spec we tested, with an RTX 4060 Ti and AMD Ryzen 7 7700 was fine for gaming at 1,920 x 1,080.

It’s worth looking out for a deal on this machine, though. You can often find this spec going for just $1,199.99 at Best Buy, or sometimes even lower, which is much better than the usual $1,479.99 price.

Read our full HP Omen 40L review for more detail.