It's no denying that Acer has moved up in the PC manufacturers' ranks in the last few years with the biggest jump being made with the acquisition of Gateway but that still isn't enough for the company. As a 'next step,' Acer is preparing to take the gaming PC market by storm, and the first recruit for the job is the Aspire Predator.

The Predator features an eye-catching enclosure design that has a mechanical front cover that looks like a shield over the black-painted mask equipped with an access door to the drive cage for super easy swapping. The hardware set to be used by the Predator includes an nForce 780i SLI motherboard (hopefully they'll also offer a 790i option), Core 2 Quad/Extreme CPUs, up to 8GB of DDR2 RAM, a maximum of four hard drives in RAID 0/1/5 or 0+1 setups and up to three GeForce 9800 GTX cards in tri-SLI or two 9800 GX2 cards in quad-SLI.

Pre-installed with either Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, the Aspire Predator has yet to receive a release date or a start-off price tag. But we have faith Acer will give out more details about its new gaming rig very soon.