Alienware vs Predator.For years, serious gamers have only ever considered one brand of off-the-shelf PC: Alienware. Now Acer, the Taiwanese brand renowned for cost-effective computing, have moved into the gaming market with the Predator, a boldly designed, liquid-cooled beast stuffed with high-end components. And for the last few days we've had our sweaty little mitts on a demo model. There was an awed silence when we first removed the Predator from its box. Its hot orange case looks like it belongs on the body of an F1 racing car. When we powered up, the sense of awe grew. The model we were lent runs Crysis at max resolution with graphics settings turned up to high. And the production model (the Trooper II) features more RAM, a Raptor drive and a faster Intel Quad chip (see box). The Predator comes with four front-loading hot-swap hard drive slots, four USB ports, twin DVD/HD drives and speaker and microphone sockets are also conveniently located in the front. Round the back are more USB USB in full Universal Serial Bus Type of serial bus that allows peripheral devices (disks, modems, printers, digitizers, data gloves, etc.) to be easily connected to a computer. sockets, connections for up to four monitors, firewire, two LAN (Local Area Network) A communications network that serves users within a confined geographical area. The "clients" are the user's workstations typically running Windows, although Mac and Linux clients are also used. sockets, two SATA (Serial ATA) A serial version of the ATA (IDE) interface, which has been the de facto standard hard disk interface for desktop PCs for more than two decades. The original Parallel ATA (PATA) interface was launched in 1986. hookups and all the usual connections. We aren't just convinced. Giving our demo model back fills us with such sorrow that we're going to buy the Trooper II ourselves. Predator facts Test model: Trooper (Trooper II specs in brackets) IntelA Coreao 2 Quad 2.66GHz Q9450 CPU CPU in full central processing unit Principal component of a digital computer, composed of a control unit, an instruction-decoding unit, and an arithmetic-logic unit. (2.833GHz Q9550 in the Trooper II) 4GB 800MHz RAM (8GB in the Trooper II) 2 640GB hard disks (Trooper II adds an extra 150Gb 10k rpm Raptor drive) DVDRW DVDRW Digital Versatile Disc - Rewriteable DVDRW Dvd Read Write + BD ROM 3 way capable NVIDIA Force 780i SLI (Scalable Link Interface) A multi-GPU interface from NVIDIA for connecting two or four NVIDIA display adapters together for faster graphics rendering on one monitor or two monitors. motherboard n Twin G9800GXT GXT Graded Exercise Testing (cardiac testing) 512MB DDR3 Graphics Cards Liquid Cooling Thermal Solution Logitech Gaming -- G11 Keyboard and G5 Mouse 2 x Gigabit Ethernet n 750W Power Supply Cost: Dh10,560 Copyright 2007 Al Nisr Media FZ LLC. All rights reserved. Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company |
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