Skip to main content

Acer is about to do something it’s never done before

CPU block on the Acer Predator Orion 7000.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
IFA 2024
This story is part of our coverage of IFA Berlin 2024

With IFA 2024 set to begin this week, the first announcements and teasers are already here, including a slew of new Intel Lunar Lake mobile processors — and those CPUs might appear in some unexpected devices. One of those devices might be a new gaming handheld, and this time, it’s from a manufacturer that hasn’t ventured into that market before: Acer. According to a teaser on X (formerly Twitter), Acer is working on some exciting new releases, and although the announcement is fairly cryptic, one of those products looks like a handheld.

Predator Gaming, an Acer account, dropped a little hint about its upcoming lineup, which will be unveiled on September 4. It’s nothing more than a couple of silhouettes, but that’s enough to get the speculation flowing. One of the silhouettes is clearly an Acer laptop, but there’s also a different product, half of which is obstructed.

Recommended Videos

More likely than not, it’s a gaming handheld. The shape is distinct and familiar, considering that many of Acer’s competitors have already launched their own handhelds. The craze started with the Steam Deck, but by now, we’ve seen many other versions, from the Lenovo Legion Go to the Asus ROG Ally X.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

Time to command the games, break the limits, and double the action with the newest gaming gear announcements from Predator. Mark you calendars 4.9.2024.#NextAtAcer #IFA2024 pic.twitter.com/dNFdA1z8hN

— Predator Gaming (@PredatorGaming) September 1, 2024

Is it guaranteed that Acer is releasing a gaming console? No, but it does seem very likely, as it’s high time that it joined that part of the market. Gaming handhelds are doing great, with new releases every few months. The majority of successful consoles run on AMD hardware, including chips like the Ryzen Z1 Extreme or the new Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. There are some Intel options, such as the MSI Claw (soon to get a successor), but AMD definitely dominates this space.

Acer might be going against the curve with this rumored new handheld, however. As noted by VideoCardz, all of Acer’s teasers so far have been related to Intel-based hardware. With Intel unveiling its next-gen Core Ultra 2 CPUs just a day before Acer’s announcements go live, it’s easy to connect the dots.

None of this is confirmed, but we’ll know more soon. We’re at IFA 2024 and will be keeping you posted with all the juiciest releases throughout the week.

Monica J. White
Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…
This is the most bizarre gaming laptop I’ve ever seen
The Acer Project DualPlay laptop.

Acer is cooking up something very interesting at IFA 2024. The company revealed Project DualPlay, which is a laptop concept with several interesting tricks up its sleeve. Closed, it's a relatively standard clamshell design, but once you open the lid, Project DualPlay pulls things off that I've never seen before, even from the best gaming laptops.

For starters, it includes a detachable controller. It doesn't look like some dinky afterthought, either. The controller is built into the touchpad of the laptop, and it's held in place with an electromagnetic lock. You can place two fingers on a release button on the keyboard to unlatch the controller, allowing you to kick back and play without lugging around an extra controller.

Read more
The Asus ROG Ally was just outdone
The Acer Nitro Blaze 7 sitting on a stand.

After teasing it yesterday, Acer formerly unveiled a new handheld gaming PC at IFA 2024. Called the Nitro Blaze 7, the handheld already looks like a unique entry among the best handheld gaming PCs with a much smaller design than we typically see. The interesting change is under the hood, though. Acer is debuting a chip we've never seen in a mainstream handheld, and it's not one of Intel's new Lunar Lake CPUs.

Acer is using the AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS instead, which is an eight-core chip packing the integrated Radeon 780M GPU. Handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally X using the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, which is basically a rebranded version of the Ryzen 7 7840U. The chip Acer is using has access to more power, but it's otherwise unchanged compared to the Z1 Extreme. According to Notebookcheck's database, this chip should be about 8% faster than the Z1 Extreme on average -- however, that includes all benchmarks, not just gaming.

Read more
Acer’s new 600Hz monitor sounds ridiculous, but I want one anyway
The corner of Acer's 600Hz gaming monitor.

Acer just unveiled a host of new gaming monitors at IFA 2024, and some of them sound downright ridiculous -- but in a good way. The best embodiment of that word is definitely the new Acer Nitro XV240 F6, which drives up the refresh rate to a whopping 600Hz.

That's a first, and considering the price, it's really not a bad deal. I find myself wanting to check it out. Whether or not anyone actually needs (or could observe the difference with) a display this fast is an entirely different question, of course.

Read more