Ten years ago Acer debuted its awesomely ridiculous $10K gaming laptop – how well does it hold up in 2026? | Tech Radar

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Ten years ago Acer debuted its awesomely ridiculous $10K gaming laptop – how well does it hold up in 2026?

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When I was a teenager, the ultimate piece of tech unobtanium for me was the Acer Predator 21X. A decade ago, I remember seeing this ridiculous brute of a laptop and thinking "What if?" with regard to ever getting my hands on one.

It wasn't so much the internals of the device at the time, but more the fact it came in an over-the-top suitcase and with a curved, ultrawide screen and a proper Cherry MX Brown mechanical keyboard in a laptop – it's still nuts to this day in my head.

When this laptop was first announced at IFA 2016, I was fourteen. That firstly makes me feel quite old, and was secondly around the time I got into tech journalism on a very small basis, writing for, at the time, one of the only mechanical keyboard-focused news and reviews websites in the UK on the interwebs – Mech Boards UK.

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Searching around for news one morning, I spotted the Predator 21X announcement, and I remember marvelling at the device. Weirdly, I didn't end up writing about it, and I don't really know why, but here we are.

Fast forward virtually a decade, and I finally got pally enough with Acer's PR folks for them to let me borrow the Predator 21X for a couple of weeks, for the benefit of seeing whether it can actually fit in my home and how this once-$10,000 / £9,000 laptop holds up in the big 2026.

The first thing that got me was the sheer size of the Acer Predator 21X. Granted, this is well-covered ground by this point, but for a device I'd only seen in pictures, having a delivery driver turn up at my doorstep with a literal suitcase with lots of padding and a laptop somewhere in the middle inside was a new experience.

To put things into perspective, even some of the biggest and heaviest gaming laptops from the last couple of years, such as the Alienware 16 Area-51 and MSI Titan 18 HX AI, tip the scales at 3.4kg and 3.6kg, respectively.

By contrast, the Predator 21X weighs 8.5kg. That's those two laptops combined, and an additional 1.5kg, for one laptop – not to mention the two hefty power bricks you'll need to carry around to keep it topped up with go-juice that pushes the weight over the 10kg threshold.

The weight is only the start of things, though, as this Acer behemoth is also nearly two feet long, a foot deep and just over three inches high. We've got to the point where modern ultrabooks can be under 10cm in thickness and weigh less than a kilo, so going from that to this in my day-to-day workflow is quite the shock.

Acer said at the time it wanted to let its designers loose with the look of the Predator 21X, and I think it encompasses the 2016 RGB gamer aesthetic perfectly with lots of lighting and aggressive styling. It's not bereft of ports, either, coming with a sum total of four USB-A 3.0 ports on the sides, plus a headphone and microphone jack, with the rear having an HDMI port, two Display Port connectors, Gigabit Ethernet and a USB-C port.

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Opening up the lid reveals a huge bottom tray, of which only half is used for the keyboard and trackpad. The top portion is for cooling and additional flair, such as a triangular viewing window for a cooling fan, while below, you get a tactile, RGB-enabled mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Brown RGB switches inside (and a sole MX Black on the Esc key) that feels excellent.

The trackpad sits to the right of it, and can be turned over to reveal a scissor-actuated number pad if you'd prefer to use a separate mouse. It's a ludicrous laptop from a design perspective, and one I can't help but adore because of it.

The Predator 21X was an exhibition of the top-end components of the time for a laptop, within reason, as Acer didn't want the laptop to catch fire due to too much grunt. Here's the spec sheet in case you need a reminder:

2.90 GHz Intel Core i 7-7820HK (quad-core, 8MB cache, up to 3.90GHz)

2.90 GHz Intel Core i 7-7820HK (quad-core, 8MB cache, up to 3.90GHz)

That's two desktop-class GTX 1080 GPUs in an SLI configuration (remember that?) that could yield some immense gaming performance for the time alongside the quad-core Intel Core i 7-7820HK that's unlocked, so can be overclocked if you wanted to try and eke out as much oomph as possible.

To see how this laptop performs in 2026, I thought it might be fun to run it through a range of games – both ones that are contemporaries of the Predator 21X (with some that support SLI) and some slightly more modern titles that might push it quite hard. I've also put it through a range of modern benchmark tests to gauge performance against newer laptop hardware.

For reference, when this laptop was delivered to me, it was still running a version of Windows 10 from 2018 and hadn't been updated since, which took some head-scratching and troubleshooting to fix, plus a fair bit of waiting for the laptop to come to life.

For the benefit of stability, it's running the latest version of Windows 10 22H2 and Nvidia's last Game Ready drivers for the GTX 10-series, 581.80, which was released at the start of November 2025.

I've also elected to run games at both the laptop's native 2560x 1080 ultrawide resolution, where supported, and also hooked up to my 4K QD-OLED monitor to see how far we can really push the Predator 21X.

Firstly, I thought it was only right to run the Predator 21X through some games that would be period-correct for the time this laptop was released, and could potentially reap the benefits of SLI, to give an idea of a baseline alongside the original numbers Matt (Hanson, Managing Editor of Core Tech at Tech Radar) gathered in his original Predator 21X review. Games were run at their highest respective settings, as you'd expect.

Far Cry 5 seemed to be universally acclaimed for its SLI integration when it released back in 2018, and at the Ultra preset with HD textures enabled, it managed a 73fps average at 2560x 1080. Overclocking took things up to 77fps, although this is one of the only instances where the overclock and full fan-speed in the Predator Sense software yielded any benefits. At 4K, the Predator 21X managed a respectable 58fps average, which is excellent considering the age of the laptop.

I followed this up with the original Dirt Rally, again lauded for its SLI integration, and a game that relies on a strong CPU to help along the pair of desktop-class GTX 1080s inside. With the Ultra preset, I saw a 99fps average at 2560x 1080, making for a smooth and immersive sim racing experience, while at 4K, results took a hit down to 46fps.

The original Hitman is where things get interesting, as it's here where we get a bit of a choice between Direct X 11 and Direct X12. Using the latter allows for multi-GPU scaling and potentially stronger performance, which is where I started. I saw an average of 87fps at 2560x 1080 and 69fps at 4K. Running on Direct X 11 without multi-GPU scaling saw results go to 65fps and 61fps, respectively, providing a difference in power with two 1080s in tow.

Conversely, Rise of the Tomb Raider wouldn't work in DX12 mode at all, as the game simply wouldn't boot, and there wasn't anything I could do to help. Nonetheless, at the game's maximum settings, the Predator 21X managed 73fps at 2560x 1080, although 4K results weren't too strong at 38fps.

I also wanted to run 2013's Crysis 3 for obvious reasons, but the wretched combination of the Xbox app and the EA Play integration on PC meant the game wouldn't load despite my troubleshooting and verbal threats aimed at the laptop.

I also chose to run the Predator 21X through some newer games to see if this system could keep up. Of course, there isn't any SLI support in these more modern titles (due to Nvidia dropping the tech half a decade ago), and as you'll see, this is where things get a little disappointing.

My first port of call was Cyberpunk 2077, perhaps this generation's Crysis equivalent, as it can be quite a demanding title for a range of systems. At native 2560x 1080 resolution on the game's Ultra preset, it yielded 37fps, while adding in the default FSR 2.1 upscaling on Quality mode pushed things up to 48fps.

4K Ultra Cyberpunk at 12fps natively was quite a rotten experience, though, and the upscaler could only push it up to 17fps. If you wanted to play Cyberpunk on the Predator 21X, you'd need to sacrifice some settings and be quite liberal with the use of the upscaler to hit more playable framerates.

It was much the same story for Returnal, too, with the native 2560x 1080 resolution pushing 44fps, while the 4K result of 22fps is quite meagre.

In moving over to Rainbow Six Extraction, I had higher hopes for a more modern e Sports-type title. The default Ultra preset includes a 'Dynamic' resolution of 25-100%, which is how I left it, and the Predator 21X managed an 82fps average at 2560x 1080 and a more than playable 64fps at 4K. Fiddle around with some settings, and you'd be close to maxing out the 120 Hz refresh rate on the Predator 21X's ultrawide IPS panel.

For one final test, I thought it'd be interesting to try a super up-to-date Unreal Engine 5-based title in Black Myth Wukong, as one of the only games I've got that doesn't need any hardware-based ray-tracing.

I elected to step down to the Very High preset, with FSR enabled (with a resolution scale of 33) and frame-gen on. With those settings applied, the Predator 21X achieved 49fps at 2560x 1080 and 37fps at 4K. That pleasantly surprised me, I must admit.

As for the more modern synthetic benchmarks, I'll put these in a table against more modern hardware, so you can judge performance for yourself. In essence, the CPU here is anything from a third to a half as quick as its more modern equivalents in single-core loads, while multi-threaded performance is several magnitudes worse.

3D performance in the array of benchmarks is reasonable, if quite unremarkable, although that is being compared with the latest generation of GPU hardware, as you'll see below. The scores provided were run with the laptop's CPU, and GPU overclocked in Predator Sense to eke out as much performance as possible, which made more of a tangible difference here than in games.

With all of these tests, the Predator 21X fan noise was surprisingly manageable and wasn't too loud, although crank the fans up to full with an overclock, and it will turn into a jet airliner taking off a few feet away from you.

10 years on... is the Acer Predator 21X still a beast?

So, to sum up – the Acer Predator 21X is everything I hoped it would be when I was a teenager when coming to take a look at it a virtual decade later. Okay, it isn't that powerful in more modern games, and your $10,000 investment wouldn't have necessarily been as sound all this time after, but it can still run well in the titles it was ultimately designed to, while feeling excellent with a full mechanical keyboard, a decently bright ultrawide screen and the thickest laptop chassis I've ever seen.

It goes to prove how much laptop tech has moved on, with beefy gaming machines being a third of the weight of this Acer beast while still packing in several magnitudes more power.

But, I can't help but feel a certain appeal to this large slab of ridiculousness, especially with things we don't seen on laptops much these days. Ultrawide, let alone curved, displays haven't really caught on in the mobile space, while mechanical keyboards in laptops are also rare – there has only been a handful with ultra-low-profile switches in them in more recent years.

It's a reminder of a time gone by in computer design, when manufacturers encouraged the sublime and diabolical, where now a lot of things have turned into a homogenous, thin, black or grey slab. I think we need to return to the days of the bonkers in gaming, as the hardware was all the better for it.

➡️ Read our full guide to the best gaming laptops

1. Best overall: Razer Blade 16
2. Best budget: Acer Nitro V 15
3. Best premium: Alienware 16 Area-51
4. Best 18-inch: MSI Titan 18 HX AI
5. Best for creators Lenovo Legion Pro 7i

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Reece Bithrey is a freelance journalist with credits in Trusted Reviews, Digital Foundry, PC Gamer, Tech Radar, PCGames N, and Custom PC magazine reviewing all sorts of computing gubbins, including keyboards, mice, laptops, and more. He also has his own blog, UNTITLED, has bylines for Watch Gecko's online magazine, and graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in International History and Politics in 2023. When not writing, you'll usually find him bellowing at virtual footballers on Football Manager or tinkering with mechanical keyboards.

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• Ten years ago Acer debuted its awesomely ridiculous $10K gaming laptop – how well does it hold up in 2026