Two Nvidia GTX 1080 GPUs, a 21-inch screen, and a $10,000 price tag: The Acer Predator 21X was a ridiculous device 10 years ago, and I fired it up to see how it performs today.

When I was a teenager, the ultimate piece of technology for me was the Acer Predator 21X. Ten years ago, I remember seeing this ridiculous brute of a laptop and thinking “What if?” » regarding one day getting your hands on one.

It wasn’t so much the inside of the device at the time, but rather the fact that it came in an extravagant suitcase and with an ultra-wide curved screen and a real Cherry MX Brown mechanical keyboard in a laptop – that’s still crazy to this day in my head.

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Look at the size of this

The first thing that attracted me was the size of the Acer Predator 21X. Granted, the topic is well covered at this point, but for a device I had only seen in photos, having a delivery driver show up at my door with a literal suitcase with lots of padding and a laptop somewhere in the middle, it was a new experience.

To put things into perspective, even some of the biggest and heaviest gaming laptops of recent years, like the Alienware 16 Area-51 And MSI Titan 18 HX AItip the scales at 3.4 kg and 3.6 kg, respectively.

On the other hand, the Predator 21X weighs 8.5 kg. It’s those two laptops combined, and an extra 1.5kg for a laptop – not to mention the two large power bricks you’ll need to carry around to recharge it with juice that pushes the weight over the 10kg threshold.

Weight is just the start of things, as this Acer behemoth also measures nearly two feet long, a foot deep, and just over three inches tall. We’ve gotten to the point where modern ultrabooks can be less than 10cm thick and weigh less than a kilo, so going from that to this in my daily workflow is quite a shock.

Acer said at the time that it wanted to give its designers free reign with the look of the Predator 21X, and I think it perfectly encompasses the 2016 RGB gamer aesthetic with lots of lighting and aggressive styling. It’s not without ports either, with a 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 DisplayPort connectors, Gigabit Ethernet and a USB-C port.

Opening the lid reveals a huge bottom tray, only half of which is used for the keyboard and trackpad. The top is for cooling and an extra key, like a triangular viewing window for a cooling fan, while below you get a touchscreen RGB-compatible mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Brown RGB switches inside (and a single MX Black on the Escape key) that looks excellent.

The trackpad sits to the right of this and can be flipped over to reveal a scissor-operated number pad if you prefer to use a separate mouse. It’s a ridiculous laptop from a design standpoint, and I can’t help but love it because of it.

The beating heart of the machine

The Predator 21X was an exhibition of the era’s high-end components for a laptop, within reason, as Acer didn’t want the laptop to catch fire from too much grunt. Here’s the spec sheet in case you need a refresher:

It is two Desktop GTX 1080 GPUs in an SLI configuration (remember that?) which could produce immense gaming performance for the time alongside the quad-core Intel Core i7-7820HK which is unlocked, and therefore can be overclocked if you want to try and get as much punch as possible.

To see how this laptop performs in 2026, I thought it might be fun to run it on a range of games – both contemporary to the Predator 21X (with some supporting SLI) and some slightly more modern titles that could push it pretty hard. I also put it through a series 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 2018 version of Windows 10 and hadn’t been updated since, which required some headaches and troubleshooting to sort out, as well as a bit of waiting for the laptop to come to life.

To benefit from stability, it runs the latest version of Windows 10 22H2 and Nvidia’s latest Game Ready drivers for the GTX 10 series, 581.80, released in early November 2025.

I also opted to run games both at the laptop’s native 2,560 x 1,080 ultra-wide resolution, where supported, and also connect to my 4K QD-OLED monitor to see how far we can really push the Predator 21X.

Games adapted to the times

First off, I thought it was only fair to run the Predator 21X on some games that would be period-correct at the time of this laptop’s release and could potentially take advantage of the benefits of SLI, to give a sense of a benchmark alongside the original numbers that Matt (Hanson, Core Tech Editor at TechRadar) put together in his original review of the Predator 21X. The games were run at their respective highest settings, as you would expect.

Far cry 5 seemed universally acclaimed for its SLI integration when it released in 2018, and with the Ultra preset with HD textures enabled, it managed an average of 73 fps at 2560 x 1080. Overclocking took things up to 77 fps, although this was one of the only cases where overclocking and max fan speed in the PredatorSense software brought any advantages. At 4K, the Predator 21X managed a respectable average of 58fps, which is excellent considering the age of the laptop.

I followed with the original Dirt Rallyonce again praised for its SLI integration and a game that relies on a powerful processor to help the pair of desktop-class GTX 1080s inside. With the Ultra preset, I saw an average of 99fps at 2560 x 1080, making for a smooth and immersive sim racing experience, while at 4K the results dropped to 46fps.

The original Hitman This is where things get interesting, because this is where we have a choice between DirectX 11 and DirectX12. Using the latter allows for multi-GPU scaling and potentially better performance, which is where I started. I saw an average of 87 fps at 2560 x 1080 and 69 fps at 4K. Running on DirectX 11 without multi-GPU scaling saw results reach 65fps and 61fps respectively, offering a difference in power with two 1080s in tow.

Vice versa, The Rise of the Tomb Raider wouldn’t work at all in DX12 mode, because the game just wouldn’t start and there was nothing I could do to help. Still, at the game’s maximum settings, the Predator 21X managed 73fps at 2560 x 1080, although 4K results weren’t too strong at 38fps.

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

Something a little more recent

I also opted to run the Predator 21X on newer games to see if this system could keep up. Of course, there’s no SLI support in these more modern titles (due to Nvidia abandoning the technology half a decade ago), and as you’ll see, that’s where things get a little disappointing.

My first stop was Cyberpunk 2077perhaps that of this generation Crisis equivalent, as it can be quite a demanding title for a range of systems. At a native resolution of 2,560 x 1,080 on the game’s Ultra preset, it produced 37fps, while adding the default FSR 2.1 scaling in Quality mode pushed things up to 48fps.

4K Ultra Cyberpunk However, at 12fps natively, it was a pretty crappy experience, and the upscaler could only push it up to 17fps. If you wanted to play Cyberpunk On the Predator 21X, you’ll need to sacrifice some settings and be quite liberal with the use of the upscaler to achieve more playable frame rates.

It was pretty much the same story for Backtoo, with the native resolution of 2560 x 1080 pushing at 44fps, while the 4K result of 22fps is quite meager.

By passing to Rainbow Six ExtractionI had higher hopes for a more modern eSports type title. The default Ultra preset includes 25-100% “dynamic” resolution, which is how I left it, and the Predator 21X managed an average of 82fps at 2560 x 1080 and a more than playable 64fps at 4K. Play around with some settings and you’d be close to maxing out the 120Hz refresh rate on the Predator 21X’s ultra-wide IPS panel.

For a final test, I thought it would be interesting to try a super recent title based on Unreal Engine 5 in Black Myth Wukongas one of the only games I own that doesn’t require any hardware-based ray tracing.

I chose to go to the Very High preset, with FSR enabled (with a resolution scale of 33) and image generation enabled. With these settings applied, the Predator 21X achieved 49 fps at 2560 x 1080 and 37 fps at 4K. This pleasantly surprised me, I must admit.

Benchmarking time

As for the more modern synthetic benchmarks, I’ll put them in a table against more modern hardware, so you can judge the performance for yourself. Essentially, the CPU here is between a third and half as fast as its more modern counterparts in single-core loads, while multithreaded performance is several times lower.

3D performance in he range of benchmarks are reasonable, if quite unremarkable, despite being compared to 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 PredatorSense to get as much performance as possible, which made a more tangible difference here than in games.

With all of this testing, the Predator 21X’s fan noise was surprisingly manageable and wasn’t too loud, although the fans are turned up to maximum with an overclock, and it will turn into an airliner taking off a few feet away from you.

10 years later… is the Acer Predator 21X still a beast?

So, to sum it up, the Acer Predator 21X is everything I hoped for as a teenager when I came to take a look at it a decade later. Okay, it’s not that powerful in more modern games, and your $10,000 investment wouldn’t necessarily have been as strong all this time later, but it can still perform well in the titles it was ultimately designed for, while feeling excellent with a full mechanical keyboard, a fairly bright ultra-wide screen, and the thickest laptop chassis I’ve ever seen.

It proves just how far laptop technology has come, with rugged gaming machines being a third of the weight of this Acer beast while still packing several extra horsepower.

But I can’t help but feel a certain attraction to this large slice of ridiculousness, especially with things we don’t see much on laptops these days. Ultra-wide, let alone curved, screens haven’t really taken hold in the mobile space, while mechanical keyboards in laptops are also rare – there have only been a handful with ultra-slim switches in recent years.

It’s a reminder of a bygone era in computer design, when manufacturers encouraged the sublime and the diabolical, where now many things have morphed into a homogenous, thin, black or gray slab. I think we need to go back to the days of gaming nuts, because the hardware just got better.

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Reece Bithrey is a freelance journalist with credits in Trusted Reviews, Digital Foundry, PC Gamer, TechRadar, PCGamesN, and Custom PC magazine, reviewing all kinds of computing machines, including keyboards, mice, laptops, and more. He also has his own blog, UNTITLED, has bylines for online magazine WatchGecko and graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in International History and Politics in 2023. When he’s not writing, you’ll usually find him yelling at virtual footballers on Football coach or tinker with mechanical keyboards.