That said, it was nice to be able to stack tons of windows side by side, even if I had to manually adjust text size smaller to fit a reasonable amount of information.
But the resolution is relatively low at 2800 x 1080 pixels - sure, it’s wide, but it comes out to the same vertical resolution of a regular 1080p panel. On paper, the massive 21-inch curved panel seems like it would be great for productivity.
But even with the rest, given the high height that the keyboard actually sits at due to the thickness of the 21 X, I found it to be uncomfortable to use for extended periods of time, which drove me back to my MacBook Pro when I needed to get actual work done.Īll three of these issues vanish when it comes to actually gaming Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The verge Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The verge That means that there’s no natural place to rest your palms except for the optional, magnetic palm rest, which becomes yet another thing to carry around. Sorry, Dan / Ashley / Kaitlyn / Lizzie / Michael / Kwame!)īut the keyboard itself is incredibly awkward to use for non-gaming purposes: it’s positioned right up at the front edge of the laptop, instead of farther back. (I personally find the MX Brown to be a good middle ground for both typing and gaming use, but I can see why the noise would get on people’s nerves. It is loud, very loud, to the point where the entire pod of co-workers near me had either commented, complained, or possibly plotted my death in a secret Slack room.
But wrestling through a door while desperately trying not to drop the $9,000 computer I was holding really highlighted for me how absurd it was to even try to use this thing in an office setting.Īdditionally, the 21 X features a full mechanical keyboard, complete with standard desktop Cherry MX Brown switches. Breaking that down a bit more, there is, of course, the size, which I’ve already said plenty about. In short: The 21 X is simply not very good at regular computer tasks. The 21 X is simply not very good at regular computer tasks Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The verge And the power bricks - yes, there are two of them, each individually massive - are made even more comical when placed together in the custom rubber enclosure that comes with the laptop. Hypothetically, you can use the Predator unplugged for a few minutes, but it was clearly designed to remain attached to the nearest wall. Unplugging it for gaming resulted in even poorer results that brought the time to under an hour (exactly how much depends on how hard you’re pushing it) along with a hit to performance to boot.
The Predator lasted just an hour and 51 minutes on the Verge Battery Test, which cycles a series of web pages through Google Chrome.
(As a side note, the blue dragon is one of 20 options for the panel, which is removable to access internal hardware.) Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The vergeīattery life is a disappointment with the 21 X, even compared to the lowered expectations for gaming laptops. Between the slew of glowing LED lights, the sharp edges on the plastic case, the giant plastic exhaust vents, and the enormous metallic blue dragon that graces the vast expanse of space above the keyboard, this is a gaming laptop through and through. While the scale and specs the 21 X may be impressive (as is the engineering to actually build it), Acer hasn't taken any dramatic departures when it comes to the aesthetic design. Side by side with any other laptop (gaming or otherwise), it almost feels like the punchline to a joke: "You call that a laptop? No, THIS is a laptop." And of course, the show-stopping curved 21-inch screen, which Acer highlights as the first in a laptop (the screen also features a 120Hz refresh rate and NVIDIA’s G-Sync technology). (Acer ships a single configuration, with one 1TB hard drive and two 500GB SSDs in a RAID configuration.) A Tobii eye-tracking rig, for further immersion. Five storage slots: three SATA, two PCIe. USB-C, USB 3.0, an HDMI port, two DisplayPorts, and an SD card slot.
Two SLI linked GTX 1080 GPUs, with a total of 16GB of dedicated onboard VRAM. A Core i7 Skylake Intel processor that’s overclocked up to 4.1 GHz. Like the external design, the 21 X's spec sheet feels built for sheer overkill. This is the biggest, most powerful, and most expensive gaming laptop ever made Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The vergeĪcer has made the most of the enormous size of the 21 X, cramming what feels like every inch of it with some serious firepower.