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In a nutshell: The recent IFA event in Berlin featured new product launches and announcements from various companies. Acer seized the opportunity to unveil several new PCs across multiple hardware tiers, including a behemoth desktop powered by Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake CPU architecture and Acer's first entry into the rapidly growing handheld gaming PC market.
Acer's showcase featured an upcoming gaming desktop, two mainstream laptops, and the company's first handheld gaming PC. Although Acer's branding attempts to align these new products with the emerging AI PC trend, they primarily feature relatively mature processors.
The new Predator Orion 7000 desktop, equipped with unspecified "next-gen Arrow Lake" chips, is the flagship of the lineup and the only model to include CPUs that meet Microsoft's "AI PC" specifications. Intel has not yet fully unveiled Arrow Lake, but this series, which succeeds the 14th-generation Raptor Lake Refresh, will be the company's first desktop CPU lineup to incorporate powerful neural processing units (NPUs). Intel's laptop Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake series also use NPUs to enhance onboard generative AI workloads.
Pricing for the Orion 7000 isn't available yet, but its remaining system specs suggest a high-end rig. It includes an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, up to 32 GB of DDR5 memory, up to 6 TB of NVMe SSD storage, a Thunderbolt 4 port, Wi-Fi 7 support, and a 1200W power supply.
Acer also announced new 14-inch and 16-inch Nitro V laptops, starting at $1,100 and $1,300, respectively. The two variants are broadly similar, offering options for high-refresh-rate 1200p or 1600p displays, up to 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, and up to 2 TB of SSD storage.
However, the Nitro V 16 features an Intel i5 or i7 Raptor Lake Refresh CPU, while the V 14 includes an AMD Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 8040HS processor. Both laptops offer entry-level RTX 3050 and 4050 graphics options, but customers can upgrade the 16-inch variant to an RTX 4060, whereas the cheapest 14-inch model uses the aging RTX 2050.
Acer is marketing these GPUs as part of its "AI PC" branding, echoing Nvidia's claim that RTX cards can easily outperform Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm APUs in onboard generative AI tasks.
Finally, Acer is entering the handheld gaming PC market with the Nitro Blaze 7. It features AMD's Ryzen 7 8840HS processor paired with a Radeon 780M GPU, likely offering performance similar to competitors from Asus, Antec, Zotac, and Ayaneo. The Nitro 7's display supports 1080p resolution at 144Hz with 500 nits of brightness and AMD FreeSync. Internal SSD storage is available up to 2 TB.
Looking further into the future, Acer also revealed a concept for a gaming laptop with a detachable wireless controller. By pressing two fingers on the release button at the top of the keyboard, users can remove the touchpad, which transforms into an oddly shaped gamepad.