Why it matters to you
Acer is addressing the casual gaming market with three new laptops and a desktop monitor just before students return to school this fall.
On Thursday during Acer’s press event in New York City, the company revealed five new products for PC gamers — three laptopsone desktop monitor, and an updated desktop. They are part of the company’s overall back-to-school rollout, which will begin shipping to stores later this summer, and apparently includes the “lifestyle gamer” crowd. Let’s jump right in, shall we?
Nitro 5
Acer started its gaming-focused segment by teasing the audience with the Nitro 5, which is pictured above. Although the company confirmed the unit will arrive sometime in July, Acer didn’t reveal much about its specs. Instead, Acer confirmed it was indeed a “tease” after the presentation.
What we do know is that the Nitro 5 relies on Acer’s CoolBoost technology, which enables users to manually adjust the speed of the fan cooling the innards inside. This enables Acer to inject the slim notebook with seventh-generation Core processors from Intel, and discrete GeForce GTX 1050 (2GB/4GB) or GTX 1050 Ti graphics chips.
Other minute details spilled during the press conference include PCI Express-based SSD storage and Dolby audio.
Predator X27
The Predator X27 desktop display will support Nvidia’s G-Sync technology for synchronizing the visuals on-screen with the output of a GeForce graphics chip. This prevents screen tearing, stuttering, and visual input lag caused when the display and graphics chip are generating frames at different rates. This tech is backed by High Dynamic Range (HDR) for the blackest of blacks and incredibly bright whites for a huge, rich color spectrum.
Even better, the panel is based on Quantum Dot Technology, which relies on nanocrystals of different sizes, each of which can emit light at different frequencies. The panel also sports 384 individual backlights that can be controlled on a per-light basis, providing perfect void-like blacks and a maximum brightness of 1,000 nits (the average display is only around 300 nits).
There will actually be two models released later this summer: the vanilla “flat” Predator X27 with a 3,840 x 2,160 resolution at 144Hz, and the curved Predator Z2271UV with a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution and a curvature of 1800R. The latter curvy model will sport a ZeroFrame edge-to-edge design, support for 125 percent of the sRGB color space, a 1mn response time (3ms native), and an overclocked 165Hz refresh rate.
Not mentioned during the show is that both panels will include integrated Tobii eye-tracking technology. We presume Acer plans to sell displays with and without the Tobii technology, but we won’t know the full scoop until Acer gets ready to toss the monitors out into the PC gaming community later this year.
Here are the specs provided by Acer during the press briefing:
Predator Z271UV
Predator X27
Panel Type:
TN
IPS
Max resolution:
2,560 x 1,440 @ 165Hz
3,840 x 2,160 @ 144Hz
Response time:
1ms
4Ms
Contrast ratio:
1,000:1 typical
100M:1 (ACM)
Brightness:
400 nits
1,000 nits (peak)
Color space:
sRGB 130 percent
DCI-P3 95 percent
Adobe RGB 99 percent
sRGB 100 percent
DCI-P3 96 percent
Color support:
16.7 million
1.07 billion
Color depth:
8-bit
10-bit
Ports:
1x HDMI 1.2
1x DisplayPort 1.2
4x USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-C
Audio output
1x HDMI 2.0
2x DisplayPort 1.4
Audio:
2x 7-watt speakers
2x 7-watt speakers