Acer Predator G5900 review

Mike Jennings Read more September 7, 2011

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Acer’s Predator machines have been prowling the higher echelons of the PC world for a few years now, but the latest addition to the range, the G5900, weighs in at only £480.

It’s probably the cheapest PC with gaming pretensions we’ve come across and, while others in this price bracket make do with flimsy, bland cases, the Predator is something of a shock to the system. It certainly doesn’t look like a budget PC: the front is dominated by bulbous black plastic, and it’s liberally scattered with the orange accents that made the original Predator so distinctive. The whole chassis stands at a slight angle, too, adding to the dramatic effect.

Acer has kitted out the Predator with more unusual features: press a button on the front and a flap lowers, revealing two spring-loaded, hot-swappable hard disk cages; and the optical drive’s disc tray slides out from behind an angled door. While these feel a little flimsy, build quality is good for the money. If we were told this PC cost twice the price, we wouldn’t be surprised.

Pop the side panel off, though, and the Predator begins to show its true colours. The interior is made from bare metal, the motherboard tray is hardly utilised, and a bargain-basement power supply trails cables throughout the interior. It’s not quite as messy as recent Medion or Advent machines, though – at least all the main components are accessible.

Upgrade room is a mixed bag too. The two hot-swappable drive bays are accompanied by one free side-facing 3.5in bay (which can be removed, if you’d like to install a longer graphics card) and there’s a pair of 5.25in bays vacant. A pair of free DIMM sockets can only handle an additional 4GB of DDR3 RAM, and there are only a couple of SATA/300 sockets free.

The rear port selection is paltry, with no sign of eSATA, FireWire or (shockingly) USB 3. Instead, you’re given eight USB 2 ports, a pair of PS/2 sockets and Gigabit Ethernet, with four additional USB 2 sockets and a card reader on the front.

The 3.2GHz Intel Core i5-650 processor is last year’s model and, with a benchmark score of 0.7, not the quickest out of the blocks. With only two Hyper-Threaded cores compared to the four physical cores you’ll find on newer i5 chips, multitasking performance suffers, with the Predator scoring only 0.57 in the that element of our Real World benchmarks.

Graphics performance is similarly middle of the road, with a cheap Nvidia GeForce GT 440 card fitted. A score of 43fps in our Medium quality Crysis benchmark run at 1,600 x 900 ensures it’ll run most modern titles, but at the native resolution of most modern monitors it may struggle: the Predator only scored 14fps in our High quality test at 1,920 x 1,080.

The processor’s peak temperature of 65˚C is fine but the graphics card, which is only fitted with a tiny fan, peaked at a toasty 88˚C – a result that could also be blamed on the lack of intake and exhaust fans. At least it makes the Predator extremely quiet, with barely a whisper escaping the dramatic case during stress tests. The peak power draw of 147W is modest, too.

The problem this PC has isn’t that it’s bad value for money, though, just that it falls rather awkwardly between two stools. On the one hand, it’s a little over-the-top to serve the function of a low-cost office PC; on the other, its gaming credentials don’t quite meet with the expectations raised by its bold, brash styling. If you do happen find yourself in this gap though – strapped for cash and after a modicum of gaming ability – its £480 price tag makes it a pretty tempting buy.