Acer's entrance into the “enthusiast” PC market is now underway, with the company planning the release of their “Predator” series PCs. They're going head to head with other brand-name high performance machines such as Dell's XPS and Alienware lines, targeting both notebook and PC users. The machines are fairly conspicuous, according to reports, with Acer going for shock value in designing the color scheme for the units. It looks unique, to say the least.

The Predator PCs will be an extension of their Aspire G hardware, and will come out of the factory with a Core 2 Extreme or Core 2 Quad CPU with 1333MHz FSB available. The units will also feature a motherboard with an nForce 780 SLI chipset, can be configured for up to 8GB of DDR2-1066, include a Blu-ray burner by default and will sport at least two GPUs. While the chassis for the unit looks gawky in my eyes, the HDD bays are the same type of externally-accessible hot-swap bays you'd find in modern servers. All and all, on paper the system has impressive specifications, likely for an impressive price. Given that many enthusiasts seek to build systems themselves, I don't know how much more room there is for “super elite” hardware resellers. Acer will try, though.