In April, Acer announced its newest small form factor (SFF) gaming PC, the Predator Orion X. Despite the system's shoebox dimensions, the company stuffed both a liquid-cooled Core i9-13900K CPU and a hybrid-cooled RTX 4090 inside, theoretically delivering top-tier gaming performance in a very small package. The GPU features a novel cooling design with a water block embedded in the radiator, which made cooling enthusiasts' ears perk up. However, in the GPU's first real-world tests, it has been shown to deliver less-than-stellar cooling performance.
The Orion X was reviewed by KitGuru, which took the GPU out of the 15.4L Orion X chassis and put it into a full-sized ATX tower for testing. This should guarantee the card has ample airflow, theoretically allowing it to perform even better than it might inside the Orion case. However, the card ran hotter than air-cooled 4090s from Gigabyte, Asus, and others. The Acer version ran at 75.8C under load, compared with around 65C for the other cards. The GPU's hotspot was also about 10C hotter than similar GPUs, indicating the hybrid cooler isn't as effective as slapping three fans and a massive heatsink on the card and calling it a day.
To be fair to Acer, its innovative hybrid cooler on the RTX 4090 is relatively compact, so some compromises had to be made to fit it inside a tiny chassis. Although it is a three-slot card, it looks rather short compared with other RTX 4090s, so it's a bit of a tradeoff. Also, in actual gaming tests performed by KitGuru, they found its performance precisely in line with other 4090s. Also, 75C is hotter than other RTX 4090s but not hot enough for most people to be concerned about it. Overall, it seems like Acer's solution is a good compromise between cooling performance and size, allowing "big desktop" performance in a tiny package that can easily fit on top of a desk.
Acer's experiment with the RTX 4090 shows there are no free lunches when cooling a hot piece of silicon. It also shows that Nvidia's RTX 4090 cards are heavily over-engineered, as 75C used to be a good temperature for any GPU to hit during full load, much less a top-tier card like this one. The fact that most 4090s run at 65C under load while still being quiet is a testament to the engineering involved. It's also the result of their gargantuan size, as none of the compared cards would fit inside the Orion X chassis without losing a fan and about one-third of their heatsink. Although we hoped for better results from Acer's unique cooling solution, it's certainly good enough for most people, given the size constraints.
