Acer is leveraging AMD's affordable Ryzen 5 series to offer a new gaming desktop, the Aspire GX-281, that is capable of playing the latest games at a "modest price." The trade off is that users may have to reduce visual quality settings, depending on the game.
The Aspire GX-281 pairs a Rzyen 5 1400 processor with a GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card, 8GB of DDR4 memory, and a 1TB hard drive. It's not a powerhouse by any stretch of the imagination, but with a GTX 1050 underneath the hood, it should handle 1080p gaming at medium settings without too much trouble.
Acer's press release makes mention of VR gaming and support for up to a 4K resolution monitor, though don't have any expectations of gaming at 4K on this thing. As configured, there just is not enough horsepower to push that many pixels in a gaming environment, at least not without a few upgrades. To that end, the Aspire GX-281 supports up to 64GB of DDR4 memory, however there is no mention of the power supply, which would dictate what kind GPU can swapped in.
The front panel of the Aspire GX-281 has a USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-C port, two USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A ports, an SD card reader, and separate headphone and microphone ports. The system also provides four USB 2.0 ports, 802.11ac and Bluetooth LE connectivity, audio ports, a DVD burner, and HDMI and DisplayPort outputs.
Acer's Aspire GX-281 should start showing up in retail inventories soon for $800.
