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With a name like “Predator”, the Acer router is unsurprisingly dark and serious from the box onwards.
You only get a UK power supply (or the appropriate plug for your region) and an Ethernet cable in the box, other than the router itself of course.
Fans of the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” will enjoy the design of the Acer Predator Connect X7 5G CPE. From most angles, it's a sober black obelisk. There is a status light on the front at the bottom and some decorative lighting on the top. But otherwise this is a mean-looking black tower block of a router.
The rear of the router is not exactly awash with wired ports either. The yellow Ethernet connection is for your broadband router, which is 2.5Gbit speed, then there's another Ethernet port labelled “GAME” and another numbered 2, but in truth both are 1Gbit Ethernet LAN ports. We would have preferred a few more Ethernet ports, and some running at 2.5Gbit/sec for clients. This router is clearly aimed more at WiFi than wired devices. The USB C is unusual, and actually the first we've seen in this format on a router. But according to the manual, it only operates at USB 2 speeds, which is disappointing.
Hidden on the bottom is a small power switch and a port for a 5G SIM card, of which more later.
Acer Swift 14 AI WiFi 7 Laptop
For testing the latest WiFi 7 wireless networking, Acer sent us its Swift 14 AI notebook, based around a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus Oryon X1P-64-100 CPU. This is a ten-core processor running at up to 3.4GHz across all cores, although without a single-core boost frequency (you need the X1P-66-100 for that). Our sample was supplied with 16GB of LPDDR5x memory and a 1TB SSD. Although this is an ARM-based laptop, it can still run Windows 11 and our standard WiFi testing software, iPerf3. It's a solid choice for road warriors who need to spend days away from a reliable power source, thanks to a 26-hour battery life.
