As we covered very recently, Acer has as of recently finally started taking pre-orders for their highly anticipated beast of a 4K gaming monitor, the Predator X27, 18 months after first announcing it and then delaying, and delaying, and delaying release for vague reasons. Now we know that it’s going to start shipping as of late June and for those cash-rich and very serious gamers who ordered their own unit after forking over about $2000, this is probably some pretty exciting news.
The Predator X27 may be one damn expensive piece of PC gaming display hardware but the company behind it has some fairly strong justification for the machine’s steep price. The X27 is pretty much the only monitor on today’s market with the sorts of cutting-edge specs it comes with all rolled into one device. Most importantly of all it lets PC gamers finally have the best of both worlds: high refresh rates and ultra HD resolution with HDR as a bonus.
Older PC monitors of almost any type either offered 144Hz refresh rates for high frame rate PC gaming only if they had display resolutions of 1080p HD or at a maximum, 1440p. For 4K monitors, refresh usually capped off at 60Hz. Only recently have monitors with 4K resolution and 144Hz refresh started popping up on sale and the X27 from Acer is the first of these to also offer high caliber HDR display and Nvidia G-synch technology for smoothing our frame rate synchronization between display refresh and GPU frame rates.
This is why the Predator X27 is so expensive and for a certain very rarified subset of PC gaming fan, it’s promising some killer performance across its 27 inch display space.
Now to be realistic, having a monitor that’s physically capable of handling 4K HDR game graphics at more than 60fps is one thing, to have a PC rig that can actually take such games to anywhere near this performance metric is something entirely different. Very, very few gamers have such PC setups and in order to pull off 4K gaming at anywhere near 144Hz, an owner of the X27 would need at least a couple or maybe more of today’s absolute most powerful gaming GPUs from NVIDIA. These GPU’s alone cost nearly $1000 each. In other words, spending all that money on the Predator X27 is just part of the piggy bank-shattering cost of high frame rate 4K gaming.
Nonetheless, it’s good to see the ceiling for monitor performance raised so high in terms of what’s available for the consumer market.
The Predator X27 also offers a whole array of other excellent specs, including full high dynamic range color support, a blinding 1000 nits of peak brightness (more than even most premium 4K TVs can output) and a great connectivity package that includes multiple HDMI 2.0 ports, USB-A 3.0 and DisplayPort 1.4