Holy crap. The top-of-the-line laptop
market has been expanding, even
exploding in recent years. And it seems now pretty much everybody and their dog
has a laptop with a GTX 1080 desktop
edition or even two of them in SLI. So,
how do you set yourself apart from the crowd? Well, Acer decided to conjure
forth the purest, maddest gaming laptop
ever created. Gaze upon the Predator
21X and tremble puny mortals.
The Master Keys Pro keyboard lineup from Cooler Master is available in three
sizes each in white or RGB flavors.
Check them out at the link below. All right, so we really can't go
any further without addressing the
display. It's freaking amazing. It's a
21 in curved ultrawide display on a
laptop. When you open this thing up, it
is immediately clear. It means
business. While it does have a little bit of backlight bleed, it's bright, has
great viewing angles and vivid colors. And the 120 Hz refresh rate along with
G-Sync compatibility cements it as the
laptop gaming display to end all laptop
gaming displays. And speaking of games,
if your game dips below 120 FPS, well,
you can pretty much blame the developers since this baby packs more power than
your average split Atom. dual power
bricks feed the two GTX 1080s in SLI, a
Core i7 7820HK quad core, two NVMe SSDs
in RAID zero, and 64 gigabytes of DDR4
memory. So, these specs and the monitor
make playing frantic games like Doom
extra awesome with no perceptible input
lag and colors popping like the overwrite postules dotting the cranium
of a demon. IO, while we're at it, is
also near desktop class, but there's a
bunch of way cooler stuff that we want to get to. So, we're going to kind of
gloss over that. In games, this thing crushed everything
we threw at it, regularly getting into the hundreds of frames per second while
running at ultra settings. The ultrawide display made all those frames even more
sweet, except in DSX and DirectX12,
where things outside of the 16x9 aspect
ratio kind of drendered. Now, since Acer was the first
one to include an ultrawide display on a laptop, we had to actually step it down
to 16 by9 and rerun all of our
benchmarks in order to do direct comparisons against anything else. Good
news for Acer, though, even compared to other top laptops, the Predator 21X took
no prisoners. Although to be clear, it is still not quite able to take on a
desktop running GTX 1080s and SLI. And
it should also be noted that these benchmarks were taken with the fans on
what we call jet engine mode. More about
that soon. So if you expect it to be quiet!, you might see frame rates that
are a little bit lower. Thermals then.
The Predator 21X's thermals surprisingly actually aren't that amazing when you
leave it on the auto setting. It does keep it nice and quiet, but it falls
into the same CPU thermal limiting issues that all of
the hyperlaptops seem to run up against with
a bit of throttling when running ID 64.
But if you have the fans to max, aka
hope you have active noiseancelling headphones because an F-18 is taking off
in your backyard mode. The internals are kept nice and cool, which you'd hope
would be the case because there are five fans and nine freaking heat pipes. I
mean, don't get me wrong here. With a machine like this, I expect you're going
to love the noise because this isn't Civic with a hole in the muffler. This
is Ferrari V12 as it screams at over
8,000 RPM. And you can make it roar
anytime you want with the uh oh yeah,
four speakers and two subwoofers. This
is the loudest laptop I've ever heard in
every possible way. Even the keyboard is fully mechanical with Cherry MX Brown
switches. And with the wrist rest attached, it actually feels like typing
on a standalone mechanical keyboard.
Now, the astute among you might have noticed there isn't a
trackpad, but have no fear. All you got
to do is lift up the number pad and turn it around if you've forgotten your
mouse. Pretty sweet. Now, the Predator
21X also features Toby eye tracking,
which allows for dynamic lighting and
aiming depending on where you're looking. And as more games begin to
support it, I can see this becoming a really cool feature, but at the moment,
it doesn't do a whole heck of a lot. Routine disassembly of the 21X is
actually relatively easy with only one screw required to remove the top panel,
giving you access to the spinning storage and half of the RAM. Opening up
the bottom requires removing three screws and gives you access to the four
M.2 drive bays, plus the rest of the
RAM. This is all that can be easily
accessed though and any other internal components are only possible to reach
through pretty much a full disassembly. So then by this point in
the video you must be thinking to yourself, wait a second, L minus at
17.8B. Isn't portability kind of out the
window? And the answer is no.
Fortunately, Acer thought of this and they included this incredibly convenient
custom Pelican case with every
21X. Its compact size and ergonomic
wheels and handles mean taking the 21X
with you on the go is almost simple, and
it can fit in the trunk of your average van with ease. Joking aside though, the
21X is still considerably easier to pack up
than a full desktop computer. And with the hardware it's packing, that is
really not an unjust comparison. So, if
you want full-on performance at a land
party or if you move around a fair bit,
it's actually a pretty incredible
option. I was slightly worried that the
curved monitor would be easily damaged
in more casual transportation though, like say in a backpack. But during our
testing, we actually found that it remained quite sturdy even when you put
pressure on it. Using it on your lap, go
figure, it is a laptop still, is surprisingly comfortable. That is to
say, until your legs start to go numb. And if you roll up in the coffee shop to
do some work, it does work, even if you
might get a couple of funny looks. But bottom line then, should you get one?
Well, really, it's more of a question of
can you get one? To which the answer
is probably no. First of all, it costs
$9,000, which is enough to get you at this time 608 shares in Acer or two mini
trucks. And second, they're only making
300 of them, of which I already have one. So, if you didn't order one
already, chances are you're out of luck.
But the Acer Predator 21X isn't about
practical things like price, availability, noise, weight, thinness,
general usability, professional appearance. It's a chest thumping piece.
This was about Acer delivering the
craziest gaming experience that anyone's
ever seen in a laptop. And I have to say
this, mission accomplished, Acer, I absolutely
love this thing. Dollar Shave Club. The
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that, and it's only a few bucks a month. So, thanks for watching, guys. I hope
you enjoyed this video as much as we enjoyed making it. If you didn't, well,
there's that button. But if you did, hit that like button, get subscribed, maybe
consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured if you can at the link
in the video description. Also down there is a link to our merch
store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you
should totally join.