When it comes to the Acer Predator lineup, the Taiwanese company always reserves its biggest reveals for the annual Global Press Conference. It adopted a similar tactic for this year's iteration, debuting a number of new notebooks, desktop PCs, peripherals and accessories. The ones that caught our eye were the Helios 500 and Orion 5000, with Acer continuing its change in colourway, swapping out black and red for black and blue.

Helios 500

Starting with the Helios 500, which is Acer's latest dedicated gaming notebook. Although unconfirmed which option South Africa will be getting, the Helios 500 will serve up either an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 or AMD Radeon RX Vega56 graphics card powering the notebook. Each GPU will also offer their own syncing technology to ensure framerates are kept smooth.

Shifting to the CPU, two options are once again available, with an 8th Gen Intel Core i9 8950HK or AMD Ryzen 7 2700 listed by Acer. Added to this is a standard 16 GB DDR4 RAM, but gamers can customise for up to 64 GB should they have some extra cash. There's also up to 2 TB HDD storage depending on the model, with two PCIe SSDs internally as well.

Orion 5000   

Next the desktop PC in the form of the Orion 5000. Much like the Helios 500, Acer hasn't held back when it comes to specifications for this device. Intel's 8th Gen Core i7 8700K processor is doing the heavy lifting, and it paired with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 GPU for good measure. There's a 3 TB HDD on offer and 512 GB drives available for additional storage.

Sticking with memory, Acer provides capacity for up to four dual-channel DDR4 RAM at 64 GB, with an Acer designed IceTunnel 2.0 to help keep things cold by separating the thermal zones. Other features include a dust filter near the front of the PC, along with 720-degree Sound BlasterX tech taking care of the audio.